Hi Tom, et al.,
Nice that you are really digging into this. Regarding item 1), I don't
remember any formal New Year's Day count prior
to the 1963 initiation of the Ithaca CBC. My impression of the "count" of
prior years was simply that Doc urged people
to report any and all "first" sightings within the Cayuga Basin, and that each
year the list would start anew on 1/1.
I am not aware of any organized outing on 1/1, nor do I recall Doc ever talking
about his own New Year's Day birding.
The turkey dinner is news to me.
May, however, was a different matter. In addition to the Saturday morning bird
walks in May at Stewart (Renwick) Park,
Doc was the focal point for the Big Day, which certainly did scour the entire
Cayuga Basin for 24 hours and included
a morning breakfast at the Allen home on Kline Road. Participants were mostly
academics. I was first invited to join
Doc's team in 1953, and considered that a great honor. We started at 3AM by
checking for Barn Owls at a church on
downtown Ithaca's South side. After breakfast we headed up the lake as far as
Howland's Island and checked
Montezuma thoroughly. Ed Seeber, a professor at Ithaca College, was the only
non-Cornellian that I recall being part
of the organized group.
Regarding item 3), in light of what I already said about not recalling any
formal group activity on 1/1, I don't think
there was really any "phasing out" by Doc or anyone else. The keeping of a
"first sighting" list for the entire Cayuga
Basin continued without interruption. The Ithaca CBC results simply got the
basin list off to a running start. If anything,
it may have relaxed any pressure that Doc may have felt to get the new birding
year off to a good start.
I hope others who were around then or in the later '60s can provide additional
recollections or correct my myopia.
Good birding,
Randy
----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Schulenberg
To: Charles R. Smith
Cc: r...@att.net ; Paul Anderson ; CAYUGABIRDS-L ; gregbutche...@hotmail.com
; Rick Bonney
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2019 8:09 PM
Subject: Re: history of the Ithaca Christmas Bird Count
bits and pieces of the story are coming out, which is great, but I have a few
more questions:
1) does anyone know when Allen's New Year's Day count was initiated? it takes
traditions a while to become, well, traditions, but I'm curious to know just
how early this became a focus of local birding.
2) the CBC had its (modest) origins in 1900, which is to say, before there
could have been much in the way of birding traditions in Ithaca. and it was the
brainchild of Frank Chapman, who was well known both to Allen and (especially)
to Louis Agassiz Fuertes. but I've found no evidence that either Allen or
Fuertes ever experimented with the CBC, even as others across upstate New York
began trying out the CBC from very early on. am I the only one who thinks
there's something odd about this? there's no record of Allen's or Fuertes's
thoughts on Chapman's CBC scheme?
3) I appreciate all the background on the phaseout of the Basin-wide New
Year's Day count in favor of the Ithaca CBC. but what's still not clear to me
is, was it Allen's initiative to make this change? and if so, what lead him to
the (late) embrace of the CBC? or was this a bottom up process, whereby local
birders began pushing to participate in an activity that they could see going
on all around them?
I'm probably decades too late in asking these questions, but I'm going to
throw them out there anyway, just to stir the pot.
Randy:
Good to hear from you, and thank you for including me in your
correspondence. I can contribute "the rest of the story," relating to the
Ithaca Christmas Bird Count. My information is based upon my chats with Paul
Kellogg and Sally Spofford, when I was Paul's teaching assistant for his Summer
CAU course in the early 1970s.
Having an Ithaca Christmas Bird Count, following Audubon criteria, was the
result of a compromise between Allen and National Audubon, facilitated by Roger
Tory Peterson. In its beginning, the Audubon Christmas Bird Count did not
include 1 Jan among the acceptable dates for conducting a count. Allen agreed
to initiate a Christmas Bird Count, following the Audubon criteria, if Audubon
would agree to including 1 Jan within its time period for conducting the
counts. Audubon modified its count period to include 1 Jan, and the Ithaca
Christmas Bird Count, following Audubon criteria, was initiated on 1 Jan 1963.
So far as I know, the center of the count still was the intersection of Mount
Pleasant and Turkey Hill Road for the 2017 count (actually conducted 1 Jan 2018
-see http://netapp.audubon.org/cbcobservation/ ).
I was pleased to learn of your role and Dorothy McIlroy's leadership in
helping to define the original Ithaca Christmas Bird Count circle.
Incidentally, Allen's earlier 1 Jan counts accepted the delineation of the
Cayuga Lake Basin, which was first published as a map in Wiegand and Eames,
Flora of the Cayuga Lake Basin, New York, in 1926.
Let me know the next time you're in Ithaca; maybe we could go birding. I
don't do much "bird-watching," but I've been fortunate to have had
opportunities to study and survey birds in the field for a bit more than 60
years, now, and am continuing to do so. Best wishes for the new year.
-- Charlie
***********************************************************************
Charles R. Smith, Ph.D., Naturalist and Professional Skeptic
Senior Research Associate, Retired
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3001
c...@cornell.edu
"The greatest impediment to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of
knowledge."
from The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.” -- Mark Twain
***********************************************************************
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Randolph Scott Little <r...@att.net>
Sent: Friday, January 4, 2019 9:32 PM
To: Tom Schulenberg; Paul Anderson
Cc: CAYUGABIRDS-L; gregbutche...@hotmail.com; Charles R. Smith;
CAYUGABIRDS-L; Rick Bonney
Subject: Re: history of the Ithaca Christmas Bird Count
Hi Tom & Paul,
You have done some good digging! A check of my birding log brought
disappointing results - it only goes back to 1968
after I had graduated from Cornell and gone on to Ohio. It may well be,
and that 1968 timing would have been about right,
that I included my earlier records in with the materials that I deposited
in the Cornell Library archives.
Yes, at least through the 1950's and early 1960's when I was in Ithaca, Doc
Allen always kicked off the new year with
a checklist of observations in the entire Cayuga Basin. That watershed
area served as the basis for the annual listing
of first sighting dates. After the Stuart Observatory was built, that
annual list was kept on a large bulletin board in
the observatory. A new list was started every January 1st. To this day I
keep my annual list on that old basin checklist,
which contains Passenger Pigeon but not House Finch, for example.
As for the first January 1st count that followed the National Audubon
Society CBC rules, I believe Paul is right that it
began on 1/1/1963. That was my last Spring in Ithaca, and after
considerable discussion with members of the informal
Cayuga Bird Club, Dorothy McIlroy convinced me to define a circle, divide
it into sectors, assign teams to each sector,
and compile the results. I assembled the several USGS topographic maps
covering Ithaca and surroundings on the
wall in the hallway of my parents' home, and tested various 15-mile circles
to try to encompass key places such as
Dryden Lake and Taughannock Point. Ultimately I settled on centering it at
the intersection of Mt. Pleasant Road and
Turkey Hill Road, although admittedly that didn't quite include Taughannock
Point.
For the following Ithaca CBC, I promised to return over the holidays to
participate in and compile the 1/1/1964 count
if other Cayuga Bird Club members would set up the teams and plan to take
over the whole CBC the next year. (By
that time I had become involved in several extant CBCs in central Ohio, and
soon started yet another called the
Kingston (OH) CBC in an area known for winter Rough-legged Hawks and
Short-eared Owls.)
I did not stay closely enough in touch with the Ithaca CBC over the
intervening years to know exactly when the official
center of the circle was shifted, but it is my impression that the shift
would not invalidate statistical inferences drawn
from both the original and the current counts.
Thank you and ...
Good birding,
Randy
Randolph Scott Little
111 Berkeley Circle
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920
Phone: (908)221-9173
r...@att.net or rs...@cornell.edu
----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Schulenberg
To: Paul Anderson
Cc: Randolph Scott Little ; Upstate NY Birding ;
gregbutche...@hotmail.com ; c...@cornell.edu ; Cayugabirds- L ; Rick Bonney
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2019 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: history of the Ithaca Christmas Bird Count
Yes 1963 was the earliest (or at least the earliest that was recorded).
All the data from all years can be seen here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19EWVe-v5fKI3s93ciNoNwy2Wpp-GpNg6/view.
There were 61 species observed in 1963. Of those, two have not shown up
on the count since: Dickcissel and Green-tailed Towhee!
-Paul
that answer may depend upon how you define a Christmas Bird Count. I
don't doubt that the modern Ithaca CBC dates from 1963. but - with the
important caveat that it took decades for the CBC to assume its current form,
and that early CBCs had few guidelines (and, typically, very few participants)
- there were a few earlier Christmas counts from the Ithaca area.
before 1963, there were several single observer CBCs from Ithaca that
were published in Bird-Lore and Audubon Magazine. the earliest I have found is
one by Francis Harper from December 1904, which was only the 5th year of the
Christmas Bird Count - a very early contribution.
the next one that I know of was in December 1914, by Ludlow Griscom (!),
who I believe at that time was a graduate student at Cornell. John P. Young
submitted an Ithaca CBC for December 1922. and J. Kenneth Terres submitted four
consecutive single observer CBCs from Ithaca, from December 1938 to December
1941.
there also was a count submitted from Trumansburg in December 1915, which
as far as I know never was repeated.
I've long been surprised by the fact that Ithaca did not develop its CBC
until relatively late in the game. a possible clue comes from this tidbit in
Greg Butcher's and Kevin McGowan's 1995 paper (History of ornithology at
Cornell University):
"[Arthur A.] Allen started a number of birding traditions in the Cayuga
Lake basin, including a New Year's Day Count (split in 1963 to become three
Christmas Bird Counts) and a May Big Day count. On New Year's Day, the Allens
hosted a turkey dinner for all participants; on the May Big Day, the Allens
provided a breakfast at their home and a picnic dinner at Montezuma National
Wildlife Refuge".
does anyone know when this New Year's Day Count was established, and
why?aside from the handful of CBCs mentioned above, by the 1950s the Christmas
Bird Count really was catching on. Ithaca was surrounded by communities that
already were doing CBCs, such as Cortland, Watkins Glen, Elmira, Binghamton,
and Syracuse what was the allure of the New Year's Day Count? for me, of course
with the benefit of hindsight, the Ithaca birding community of the 1950s (and
earlier?) seems to have been uncharacteristically out of step with trending
approaches to birding and ornithology when it comes to their delayed adoption
of the Christmas Bird Count. I'd very interested to know if anyone has more
information on this period of Ithaca birding history.
tss
On 12/29/2018 10:16 AM, Randolph Scott Little wrote:
> When was the first Ithaca Christmas Bird Count? It may have been
> 1/1/63, as that is the earliest NYIT CBC that I could find in the
> National Audubon Society web archive. Perhaps I could find it
> somewhere in my old files, as I recall working
> with Dorothy McIlroy to establish the first circle, whose center has
> since been moved slightly. Good birding! --Randy
>
> --
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