November County Challenge: Final Results

[Pam Hunt]

Greetings all,

The dust has settled, I finally took a look at the eBird review queue, and am hereby presenting the final standings for the 2025 NCC (sorry about the extra columns).

County	MAX	2025 end	end %	rank
Belknap	138	87	63.0	3
Carroll	152	73	48.0	10
Cheshire	165	96	58.2	8
Coos	139	94	67.6	2
Grafton	166	101	60.8	6
Hillsborough	169	106	62.7	4
Merrimack	191	104	54.5	9
Rockingham	273	171	62.6	5
Strafford	188	112	59.6	7
Sullivan	137	95	69.3	1

Perennial contender Sullivan started off strong, dropped to third at the first turn, but came back in fine form to win the contest for the third year (we've done this six times). Both Belknap and Coos started slow but ended up medalling, Coos for only the second time. The middle of the pack consistently consisted of Grafton, Hillsborough, and Rockingham, with Hillsborough barely eeking out an edge over Rockingham at the wire (62.7% vs. 62.6%!). Merrimack choked, as usual, after a good start (#2 to #9), and was joined this year in this regard by Cheshire (#3 to #8). Poor Carroll, a champion as recently as 2023, trailed throughout. The final standings for all six years are presented below.

County	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	Ave Rank
Belknap	9	3	2	1	2	3	3.33	1
Carroll	3	4	1	2	10	10	5.00	4
Cheshire	2	8	6	9	8	8	6.83	9
Coos	7	6	7	3	7	2	5.33	5
Grafton	10	5	5	5	4	6	5.83	6
Hillsborough	4	2	3	8	5	4	4.33	3
Merrimack	5	10	9	10	9	9	8.67	10
Rockingham	8	7	4	7	6	5	6.17	7
Strafford	6	9	10	6	1	7	6.50	8
Sullivan	1	1	8	4	3	1	3.00	1

Several folks have asked this year about scoring, so I'll summarize briefly. A county is ranked by the percentage of its ALL TIME species list (in eBird) that is seen in the month. for example, Cheshire County has 165 species listed for November and birders reported 96 species in November 2025 - or 58.2%. I did this to give counties with fewer species and/or birders a fighting chance, since we all know that if total species was the metric Rockingham would win hands down every year without even trying. It turns out that this handicapping system flips the bias completely towards counties with lower overall species lists (typically those that are small, farther north, and/or with fewer birders). If one of the more populated and diverse southern counties does well it's usually because someone (e.g., Robyn in Strafford in 2024) goes absolutely bonkers trying to find new species, and even then a similar effort in a county like Belknap can still result in a strong showing. As Steve said, it's probably simply not possible for Rockingham to win this thing using the current system..

Over the years, I've experimented with different ways to score this game, including but not limited to:

1) only looking at the species lists over the last 5-10 years (this would theoretically weed out some of the list-building rarities in heavily-birded counties like Rockingham and Merrimack)

2) not counting species found fewer than 5 times in a county (same rationale as above)

3) using as the denominator a number based only on the duration of the NCC. I tried this in 2024 using the average, max, and cumulative November counts for each county from 2020-2023. 

In the end, NONE of these worked any better, and all of them took a lot of time on my part to update. This year I saved myself a lot of time by not updating as frequently, not checking the eBird review queue until the end, and not trying any new scoring systems. I also spent most of the month moving and settling into a new house, and dealing with the minutiae of the NCC was not high on my priority list.

As others have noted, the NCC is a great way to get people out birding during the "shoulder season" between fall migration and the Christmas Bird Counts. It's been great to see folks showing their county pride (or bemoaning their dismal showing), but I'm wearing thin on coordinating it unless a couple of things happen:

1) Someone figures out a different way to score the contest

2) Other people step up to help - perhaps something like a county point-person who can wrangle the data. The latter would ideally include eBird review, although that's not the way this happens in NH at present so might be hard to implement.

Any statisticians or county team leaders out there willing to lend a hand?

Good birding to all,

Pam Hunt

Concord

[Lori Charron]

First Thank you Pam! The November challenge is so much fun! It gets us all out and searching! It seems every year new birds are found. 

As for must of us the common cuckoo was the missed bird of not only the month but for the yr! For myself missing on the trumpeter swan in Coos that was only about 4 miles from my home was my missed bird! I searched for days hoping the bird was still around.. 

A big shout out to all Coos County birders! We nailed it! 2nd place!! What a fantastic group of birders that live way up in the northern part of the state and call Coos County our home! And thank you to all that traveled to help Coos County come in 2nd! I personally cant wait for next November! 

Happy Birding!

    Lori

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 7, 2025, at 1:38 PM, Pam Hunt <biod...@gmail.com> wrote:



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