ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 29, 1996 TAG: 9612310076
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C10 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: OUTDOORS
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
Mike Donahue and Bill Hunley started hiking in the Bennett Spring area of Roanoke County and penetrated deep into Carvins Cove Country, traveling 12 miles and counting 41 species of birds during the Roanoke Christmas Bird Count.
Clues such as a distant silhouette, a burst of song, a certain swoop or glide, the sound of bark being pounded with jackhammer speed, a speck of color gave the two experienced birders what they needed to compile a lengthy list of feathered creatures.
It was the 15th Christmas count at the cove for Donahue and Hunley, by their estimation.
The area offers a mixed bag for birders because of its diversity. There are patches of pines and ridges of hardwoods, and openings where tall grass fingers into brushy boundaries. And there are shoreline and water for diving and puddle ducks, loons and shorebirds - even eagles.
What the count lacked was an exotic, a rare find of any kind. The best birders in the Roanoke Valley failed to turn up anything really unusual during the Roanoke, Fincastle and Peaks of Otter counts.
``It was a good time for the beginning birder, because you didn't have to worry about any wild, exotic or hard to identify species,'' said Donahue, the compiler of the Roanoke count.
``We didn't find hardly anything unusual, but we got most of the birds that we expected,'' said Barry Kinzie, compiler of the Fincastle and Peaks of Otter counts
If there was a bold-letter bird, Donahue said, it was the bald eagle sighted at the Carvins Cove boat dock. While eagles have been enjoying a welcome comeback, spotting one still can send a birder home with a spring in his step.
The Roanoke count tabulated 75 species, the Fincastle count 73 and the Peaks of Otter count 40.
``That is just about normal,'' Kinzie said.
``It is a little discouraging in some eyes when you go out hoping to see all these glory or bold-letter birds and you get set back,'' Donahue said. ``But we have to look at this as a census, not a rare-bird chase.''
This was the 97th anniversary of the original Christmas Bird Count, taken in 1900 by an intrepid group of 21 strollers. Now more than 1,500 counts around the country attract at least 40,000 participants.
This year's local counts reflected a scarcity of Northern winter migrators in the region. People who have back-yard feeders already had noticed that birds often have been ignoring the hands that feed them. Feeders have been hanging from tree limbs more like decorations than dinner tables. This is in marked contrast to the winter of 1995-96, when feeders had to be filled so often they appeared to be bottomless.
``I would say that birds may not be in large numbers this year,'' Kinzie said. ``I don't know if the weather - so much rain - affected the breeding or what.''
Maybe there have not been as many doses of nasty weather up North to send the sparrows, pine siskins, finches, chickadees, titmouse and nuthatches flocking to our region, or maybe they are here but there is so much food they are scattered, Kinzie and Donahue speculated.
``It is going to pick up,'' Kinzie said. ``You wait until February. That is when they will have have eaten up the wild food and they become dependent on the feeders.''
A winter ago, Kinzie watched the seed and suet bills mount at his Woodpecker Ridge Nature Center near Troutville, when cold weather and deep snow caused a feeding frenzy.
For Donahue, this year's late-migration theory was fortified by the spotting of a pine warbler.
``That is a bird that for the most part that would be farther south by now,'' he said. ``Maybe the weather hasn't forced it out of here.''
If the early Southern migrators still remain, then you might speculate that the migrators from the far North just haven't arrived in impressive numbers.
``It is kind of fun, the way we second-guess,'' Donahue said.
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