York County CBC results
Bill Grabin
The 53rd MEYC CBC was held on Monday, December 15th. The official name is the York County CBC, though it really should be the Southern York County CBC, as it only extends from Kittery to Moody.
It was cold, windy and relatively quiet, but our overall totals were OK. The species total was 84, only a little lower than our 20 year average of 87. (2023 was a crazy exception with 101.) The bird count was 9005, a little lower than our 20 year average of 10,416.
We did manage to have one new high count: 7 Brant. We had our first Killdeer in 16 years, our first Glaucous Gull in 12 years, and a relatively high count for Sharp-shinned Hawks with 5. Two Rough-legged Hawks tied our record. 37 Horned Larks was our highest tally since we had 52 in 1983. We had 21 Evening Grosbeaks, our highest total since 87 in 1991, and we haven’t had any in 29 of the 33 years since then.
On the down side, it was the first time we haven’t had any Razorbills since 1998, breaking our streak of 26 years. (Our average count over those 26 years was 56, but zero this year!) And we had only 12 Robins, compared to 494 last year.
If you have any questions, or might be
interested in more details, including a spreadsheet that shows the
count #'s per species since 1981, please send me an email.