The Christmas Bird Count for the Vancouver Circle is happening on December 20th, 2025. In preparation for the big event, co-coordinators Michelle Baudais and Kelvin Yip decided to hold a practice session at Jericho Beach Park. We had two purposes in mind: one was to introduce the Christmas Bird Count to people who are new to the CBC. The second was to give more experienced birders who aren’t familiar with eBird a chance to practise using the app in the field.

In order to make sure that we had plenty of hands available to help out, we invited trip leaders Neill Vanhinsberg and Harvey Dueck to join us.

Unfortunately, the weather on Saturday was perfectly seasonal — when we arrived at the park at 9am the clouds were low, but by the time Michelle had given a brief introduction to the Christmas Bird Count and Neill had introduced us to the art of counting birds in groups, a steady drizzle had set in. Fortunately we didn’t have far to go to find our first group of birds to count. We could see and count a mixed flock of Canada Geese and Cackling Geese right at our meeting location.

We then proceeded to the beach, where a group of mostly ring-billed gulls were sitting on the sand. We compared counts, and decided there were about 70 gulls in total. Out on the water there was a double-crested cormorant sitting on a distant buoy, with a few horned grebes and a red-breasted merganser nearby. Identifying the merganser gave Neill a chance to explain how to distinguish immature/female red-breasted mergansers from immature/female common mergansers (there is a more distinct line between the head and the body of a common merganser. On a red-breasted merganser, the head colour and breast colour blend into one another.)

The sand was wet and heavy, so instead of continuing on the beach itself we walked along the path bordering the sand. Here we spotted several song sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, and golden-crowned sparrows, along with no fewer than 11 Northern Flickers foraging in the grass. Unhappily for me, I was discussing Flickers with one of the participants while the most dramatic event of the walk happened behind me — a Bald Eagle swooped down and scooped up one of the American Wigeons swimming along the water’s edge. Poor wigeon! But everyone has to eat, and our conscientious eBirders learned that dead birds do not count towards your totals and removed one wigeon from their lists.

After leaving the beach we looped around to the ponds to count Mallards and more American Wigeon, then entered the forest where a few lucky counters found a Brown Creeper, and others spotted Bushtits, Black-capped Chickadees, Towhees, and Song Sparrows. As we left the forest and crossed the bridge on our way back to our starting point we startled a Great Blue Heron that had been sitting on a clump of reeds nearby. We also had to remind ourselves to to count the crows that had been flying overhead by ones and threes the entire time we’d been observing. It’s too easy to overlook the ‘normal’ birds!

Thanks to all thirteen birders who joined us for a wet but rewarding circuit of the park this morning. We hope that the newer birders will now feel comfortable joining us for the count next month, and that the new eBirders feel more comfortable keeping electronic lists.