(01/07/2009) The temperature hovered just above freezing, the wind chill in the low 20s. It was Saturday, three days into the new year and it was time for the annual Orient bird count. Roy Latham, perhaps Long Island’s greatest naturalist and a native potato farmer of Orient on the North Fork, started the count in 1904, a few years after Frank Chapman started the first one in New York City.
Latham’s count records are still in existence. He was often the only observer, and traveled from spot to spot on foot or by horse-drawn wagon. Field glasses (not binoculars) and telescopes (not spotting scopes) were primitive, there were no Roger Tory Peterson “Field Guides to the Birds,” no tape recorders with owl calls to play to get real owls to respond so they could be added to the day’s list.
Yet his counts yielded so many birds that professionals were suspicious, so much so that a chosen few came out to go with him on a count, one being the esteemed John Nichols, a regular at the William Floyd Estate in south Brookhaven Town. Mr. Nichols and the others were quite impressed with the young Mr. Latham’s bird spotting and identification prowess, and his observations were never suspected thereafter.
In 1967 Paul Stoutenburgh, who lived about 10 miles to the west of Mr. Latham, resurrected the count and drew the 15-mile-in-diameter circle that had become the official count area size. It included half of the North Fork, Shelter and Plum Islands, and part of the South Fork, Sag Harbor, and coastal areas east and west.
I started helping with the count, South Fork side, in 1974, having just moved back from the West Coast and started to teach at Southampton College. I was lucky to be partnered with a third great naturalist, Roy Wilcox, a duck farmer from Speonk. From then on I was a regular participant year after year. Mary Laura Lamont of Northville took over the count more than 10 years ago and has been the Orient count’s compiler ever since.
In the days of Latham’s counts, even in the days of the counts following World War II, they were more for enjoyment and getting a snapshot of how birds were getting on and moving about. They were never about who saw the most birds or the most different birds, although that might have been in the backs of some of the counters’ minds.
We were like Darwin and the other early naturalists, out to discover and wonder at what we saw. Since then the counts have become very competitive, with so-called experts challenging observations and observers over “outlandish” finds.
They have also become political, just as everything else has. A few years ago, the newest count, the so-called Sagaponack count, gerrymandered its borders into the South Fork’s Orient count territory, and the area was double-counted for at least two years.
Things got so bad that the New York office of the Audubon Society, which oversees the counts here and acts as the clearinghouse for all Long Island counts, had to send a letter of reprimand to the Sagaponack count’s compiler. Since then, things are back to normal, at least we hope they are.
On this count day, I had the pleasure of going out with two very good birders, John Gluth of Islip, who’s in the advertising business in New York City, and Vicki Bustamante of Montauk, an all-around naturalist who know plants as well as she knows birds and other animals.
John is a warrior, and this was his fourth such count since the middle of December. We started just past 7 a.m. at Cedar Point County Park and worked our way west, finishing on Barcelona at around 4 p.m.
If I had been by myself, and I have been at times, it would have been a bust. John and Vicki were just wonderful; they stood out in the brisk northwest wind, staring into their scopes and picking out this and that duck, this or that shorebird or, in the woods, used their fine ears to pick out this or that bird call note. I was particularly amazed when they both turned and pointed toward a high note that I couldn’t hear and blurted out, in a nearly simultaneous duet, “golden-crowned kinglet.”
Vickie and John found some wonderful birds, that, I’m sure, I would have overlooked. The four Lapland longspurs, three Ipswich sparrows, and single Savannah sparrow flushed from the grasses in Cedar Point are cases in point.
At the end of the day, just after we had decided to look at the west side of Barcelona, having combed the east side, a belted kingfisher, not particularly rare but missing all day, flew toward Sag Harbor, 50 feet offshore over Northwest Harbor, uttering its rattling call, which even I could hear.
By the time we had parted from one another, we had identified 56 species, even though we missed some of the more common ones, such as the house sparrow, house finch, junco, and three species of blackbirds.
By Monday evening, Mary Laura had received the preliminary numbers from all parties. The recorded species added up to 115 — 2 below last year’s total, in which 57 observers took part, and 4 fewer than the count’s all-time high.
For the first time in a long time, the count missed the bobwhite, normally seen in Greenport. Not a single meadowlark turned up. A spotted sandpiper, first recorded last year, showed up in the very same spot this year. Terry Sullivan and Al Daniels turned up a black-crowned night heron in the last rays of the setting sun at the edge of Otter Pond.
In addition to the longspurs and the one cock pheasant that we recorded, a bald eagle and peregrine falcon were seen on the North Fork, and a clapper rail was found on Shelter Island.
Maybe the most unusual find was made by Mary Laura herself, a red-tailed hawk feeding on a freshly done-in ring-billed gull on Plum Island. Red-tails normally take cottontails and squirrels. Perhaps it’s a sign of the tough economic times that lie ahead; we may even find ourselves eating crow.