ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 1, 1996 TAG: 9601020099
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: HOLIDAY
DATELINE: CENTREVILLE
SOURCE: Associated Press
Northern Virginia bird-watchers braved a brisk dawn start to take part in a 95-year-old annual ritual: the Christmas Bird Count.
The avian census, conducted Saturday morning by the Fairfax Audubon Society, is both recreation and a serious attempt to track population and distribution trends of hundreds of bird species.
More than 43,000 bird-watchers, from the novice to the pro, participate in the annual event across the Western Hemisphere. For 21/2 weeks surrounding Christmas, they don duck boots and sneakers, bird scopes and binoculars, and scour woods, fields, roads and parking lots for most anything with feathers.
The count began on Christmas Day 1900, when 27 ornithologists decided to protest the annual holiday slaughter of birds and suggested instead that people count them.
More than 40 people took part in the Manassas-Bull Run count sponsored by the Audubon Society, which covered a circle 15 miles in diameter with Centreville as the center point. Some people who live within the circle but couldn't make the event counted birds at their bird feeders.
``There he goes!'' exclaimed Peter Monroe, 56, of Reston, as his binoculars tracked a hermit thrush from a pine tree to a tangle of brush at Lake Royal at the start of Saturday's count.
Forty-five tufted titmice were tallied by late afternoon. Also counted were 32 yellow-rumped warblers, three American tree sparrows, two Cooper's hawks and one great blue heron at Lake Royal.
Sometimes they counted birds that they could only hear - the Carolina wren, for example, whose song makes a distinctive ``teakettle, teakettle'' sound.
Next fall, the National Audubon Society will release a full tally of the number of species and birds counted. The data helps conservationists track trends, such as the fact that, in the last decade or so, the house finch population in the eastern United States has exploded. Purple finches, however, have declined.
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Bird-watchers were up at the crack of dawn Saturdayby CNBat Lake Royal near Centreville for the Christmas Bird Count.