The Christmas Bird Count

October 13, 2026

Before the Christmas Bird Count, the holiday had a hunt. Audubon's history of the count says that hunters chose sides and went out with guns, and that the side with the biggest pile of birds and fur won. Frank M. Chapman, an early officer of the young Audubon Society, asked for a different custom. Beginning on Christmas Day 1900, he proposed a Christmas bird census that would count birds instead of shooting them.

Rene Ebersole's account in Audubon magazine quotes the way Chapman described the old side hunt in Bird-Lore, the magazine that came before Audubon magazine. He called it a cheerful mission of killing practically everything in fur or feathers that crossed the hunters' path. He was not sure the hunt was finished. He was sure, he wrote, that no reputable sportsman's journal of his day would publish an account of one unless the account condemned it. He took that change of tone as a sign of the times.

His replacement was specific. He asked readers to mail a hunt report, meaning a list, to Bird-Lore's office in Englewood, New Jersey, by bedtime on Christmas. The report was supposed to name the place, say when the count started and stopped, give the air temperature, describe the weather, give the direction and force of the wind, and total the individuals of each species. He promised to publish the results in the February issue. Audubon's bibliography of count research lists the proposal as Chapman, F.M. 1900, A Christmas bird-census, Bird-Lore 2:192.

The people who answered were few, and the pages that tell the story do not quite agree on what they found. Audubon's history page says 27 birders held 25 counts that day, from Toronto, Ontario, to Pacific Grove, California, most of them in or near the cities of the Northeast, and that those counters tallied around 90 species on all the counts combined. Ebersole's magazine piece says the same 27 people and 25 places, and it says they tallied 89 species. Cooper Farr, writing the summary of the 125th count for Audubon, uses 89 species and adds a number the other two pages do not: about 18,500 individual birds. An older Audubon archive piece on the Henslow's Sparrow says the biggest list that first year was Pacific Grove, with 36 species, and that Chapman himself reported 18 species from Englewood, the second-largest list. I am not going to sand those figures into one tidy total. The history page says around 90 species. The magazine and Farr's summary say 89. Farr is the only one of these pages that gives the 18,500 birds.

Farr also records a walk Chapman took in Manhattan, counting hats. Chapman wrote that he saw 542 people wearing plumage, or entire birds, and that the hats represented 42 species. That walk sits in the same years as the census. The feathers on the hats and the birds on the Christmas piles were two versions of the same habit. The census was Chapman's answer to the piles. The societies that fought the hats are a separate story.

The count did not stay a one-day letter to a magazine. Farr writes that participation dipped in the First World War, the Depression, and the Second World War, and that during the First World War Bird-Lore printed counts from American soldiers in France that were not official, because the count is limited to the Western Hemisphere. He dates the first circles outside the United States and Canada to the 73rd count, in Belize, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The older archive piece describes the method that became standard: one day of searching inside a circle fifteen miles across. A California Audubon note on the count says the same thing in slightly different words, an established circle fifteen miles in diameter, with at least one experienced watcher in each field party.

The modern headcount depends on which Audubon page you have open. The history page says that from the 14th of December through the 5th of January, tens of thousands of volunteers take part. Ebersole, in the winter 2024 magazine, says some 80,000 volunteers, at more than 2,000 sites in the United States, nearly 500 in Canada, and 180-plus in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands. Farr's summary of the 125th count, the one that ran from December 14, 2024, through January 5, 2025, and that he published on November 18, 2025, is more exact and a little different. He reports 2,693 counts: 483 in Canada, 2,036 in the United States, and 174 in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands. He reports 83,109 participants, of whom 72,457 were in the field and 10,652 were at feeders. He also reports 2,503 species plus 426 identifiable forms and hybrids, and 44,259,423 birds. He notes that recent years have had over 80,000 participants, so the magazine's round number and his exact one are talking about the same era, not about two different programs. The history page's "tens of thousands" is the looser of the three.

What the scientists did with the lists is the reason the count outgrew a holiday stunt. Brooke Bateman, Audubon's senior director of climate and community science, told Ebersole that the count is one of the most valuable data sources for how birds have responded to global change in North America, because it goes back to 1900 and has been done consistently since. Terry L. Root, then using counts from the 1960s and 1970s, looked at winter ranges across the continent and found the Eastern Phoebe's winter range stopped where January stayed at 25 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. She said that in the late 1980s this was not obvious. People thought competition with other birds set the edges of a range, and small study areas could not show the climate. An Environmental Protection Agency report that Ebersole cites, using count data from 1966 to 2013, concluded that in that span more than 60 percent of 305 species moved their wintering grounds north, and that nearly 50 of those species shifted more than 200 miles.

Farr's summary is careful about what a raw total can and cannot say. He writes that the 73rd count had fewer than half as many observers and circles as the 125th and yet recorded more birds, 71,183,807 of them. He says the drop in the raw totals has been most noticeable since 2014, even while the number of circles and the recorded effort have gone up. That is an argument for keeping the method boring: the same places, the same season, the effort written down, so a change in the birds can be told from a change in who showed up.

The National Audubon Society's own timeline puts Chapman's proposal in 1900, in Bird-Lore, and puts the society that now runs the count in 1905, five years after the first census. Chapman was not inventing a club. He was giving an existing audience a job that could be repeated. The job is still a list, a clock, a temperature, and a wind, mailed in, more or less, to the people who publish it. The guns are the part that got dropped.