Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, December 27, 1993 TAG: 9312300044
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If they were wild, Mike Donahue, Bill Hunley and Guy Winterbotham would record them in the Roanoke Christmas Bird Count.
``If you wave your arm and they come toward you, then they aren't wild,'' said Hunley.
A wave of an arm sends the birds in the opposite direction. The mallards are counted.
The annual Christmas count is the premier birding event of the year, a time when avid bird watchers record every wild critter they confront that flies, chirps or floats.
There are thousands of organized counts held across the continent this time of the year, three of them the product of the Roanoke Valley Bird Club: the Roanoke count, the Fincastle count and the Peaks of Otter count. The first two have been completed, the Peaks count is set for Tuesday, after being rescheduled following snow.
Donahue and Hunley have been covering the Bennett Springs side of Carvins Cove for more than a dozen years. Joining them for the second season is Winterbotham, an Australian who came to the GE plant in Salem for contract work and decided to stay in the Roanoke Valley.
The Cove offers the kind of diversity that attracts a variety of birds. There are patches of mature pines marching in stately rows, there are the imprints of old home sites where tall, brown grasses finger into brushy boundaries, there is water for diving and puddle ducks, loons and shorebirds.
On the way to the site, Donahue recorded two barred owls, near his home in the Back Creek area. Now the trio of birders has paused at one of the Cove's grassy-brushy openings where juncos and chickadees are likely to be flitting in the woodland edge.
The stillness of the gray morning is broken by the deep hoots of a great horned owl coming from a nearby knoll.
``Is it one or two of them?'' Donahue asks.
``I wonder if we can get him to come closer,'' ponders Hunley, who cups his hands and offers a series of hoots born deep inside his throat.
The sounds of the owl become muffled, as if the big bird has turned on his perch to face the opposite direction.
``What ever he was looking for, you didn't have,'' Donahue tells Hunley.
The owl counts, anyway. Birds can be identified by sound, not just sight. ``I'd say half of what we get is by voice,'' said Hunley.
At an old graveyard, guarded by a gnarled oak, a golden-crowned kinglet is counted. A sycamore tree growing out of a marsh holds a flicker. There is a flock of chickadees penetrating the branches of native pines with quick, jerky movements.
Identifications are made from a brief glimpse or snippet of song. Real skill is involved when you must decipher the difference between, say, a black-capped chickadee and a Carolina chickadee.
The black-capped has a slightly larger head, a dingier cheek and more white on the wing.
``He has a much deeper, slower, more definitive voice,'' said Donahue. ``On the whole, it is a matter of experience, being out in the field and recognizing both birds and realizing that both birds will act differently and look differently.''
Donahue, who is the compiler of the Roanoke count, is a self-taught birder, a high-school dropout who at age 37 entered Virginia Western Community College last semester to pursue a degree in biology.
``I guess I am going about it backward,'' he said. ``I have the field knowledge, now I am trying to get some academic background to support it.''
Hunley grew up on a Botetourt County farm and majored in wildlife management at Dabney Lancaster Community College. He teaches at Community School.
``I had to take a bird course at Dabney,'' he said. ``I wasn't looking forward to it; they were going to make me go out and look at birds.''
That thought was a bit unsettling for somebody who grew up with a fishing rod and gun in his hands, but on a field trip to Eastern Shore in 1977 Hunley fell in love with birding.
``A lot of bird watchers would just die if they heard me me say this, but birding is a whole lot like hunting,'' he said.
The first Christmas Count, on Christmas Day in 1900, actually was a spinoff of a practice that lured gentlemen and their dogs to the fields to blast every wild thing with fur or feathers they could get their sights on. Frank Chapman, an ornithologist and early Audubon leader persuaded participants they should count live creatures rather than dead ones.
The annual count is part fun, part serious; part camaraderie, part scientific, said Mike Smith, president of the Roanoke Valley Bird Club.
``We are having fun and at the same time providing some research that the scientific community could not afford,'' he said.
At the edge of Carvins Cove, Donahue, Hunley and Winterbotham pause to glass the water.
``I get 36 black ducks and two mallards,'' Hunley says.
A young-of-the year wild turkey calls in the distance. In all, the three birders have counted 31 species.
The number is impressive, but there is nothing that Donahue would call a ``bold letter bird.''
That type bird showed up on the list of Mike Smith and Barry Kinzie, who spotted a Lincoln's sparrow along Tinker Creek, a species that normally would have migrated out of the area no later than mid-October.
The Roanoke count accounted for 76 birds; the Fincastle count 75. The figures are just a shade under average.
by CNB