ShawneeDispatch.com

Photo by Kevin Anderson

Making sure they have all the birds recorded, Alexis Powell (left) and Stan Roth compare their notes together before heading back out for another round of bird counting.

Christmastime isn't generally known as bird-watching weather.

But it's a tradition with Stan Roth. He's been counting the birds at Theodore Naish Boy Scout Reservation since 1960, when he and his friend Jack Krause instituted the counts.

The counts are in the winter in part, Roth said, because it's easier to spot birds when the trees are bare, and fewer species - he estimates a third fewer of all local species stay at Naish through the winter - make it easier to count them.

This year Roth and five volunteers counted 985 individuals of 44 different species, which compares to 1,025 of 47 species.

The high species number was in 2005, with 50 species counted, and over the past 12 years, the per-year average is 41 species. The species with the largest representation this year was mallards, with 291 tallied.

"We had a fairly good count," Roth said, "except we didn't do very well on owls."

The counting of owls begins the annual survey, at 6 a.m. before the sun rises, by "owling": playing a recording of owl hoots and tallying the number of replies in kind.

No horned owls were noticed, Roth said, but they did find screech owls.

The horned owls' absence owed to the same reason as that of the wild turkeys, Roth said: the installation of a new water main on 121st Street near the camp.

The turkey roost is adjacent to where the large pipe is being laid, and there are usually a good number of the birds there, Roth said - between 10 and 40.

"Last year we saw a 'herd' of them tromping around the reservations," Roth said.

Also, he said, "lots of geese Canada geese were flying over," and there were more geese overall this year, he said.

They count in the count, he said, because "anything we can see or hear from the property we consider fair game."

Though he stressed that the evidence was anecdotal, Roth said "there does seem to be an increase in the bird life in and around" the camp since the counts began. "In and around the Naish Reservation, I kind of wonder if isn't some sort to sanctuary for Wyandotte County, because it's kind of concreted in : and this place kind of got to be a preserve for wildlife in general and especially birds, because they're not harassed."