OUT FOR THE COUNT Western Pa. birders fan out for annual avian census
Passions can spring from the most unlikely surroundings, and so it was for Mike Fialkovich, who grew up loving birds in the shadow of Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Works.
His father was a steelworker at the plant; Mom worked at a cleaners in the neighborhood. And from the time he was 8 or 9 years old, Mr. Fialkovich said his interest was birds. He doesn’t know why.
“A lot of people have that ‘wow’ moment,” said Mr. Fialkovich, 54, of Churchill, but he doesn’t remember such a moment. Still, his passion has flourished for nearly 40 years, which led him to Schenley Park Saturday for the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania’s annual Christmas Bird Count, a 120-year-old tradition.
Volunteers fanned out across Western Pennsylvania for the day to record the number and species they saw in predetermined areas. The task was as much about listening as seeing, equal parts bird sightings and identifying bird sounds.
“That’s a robin calling,” Mr. Fialkovich said softly, walking along a dirt trail. And later, a more uncommon discovery: “That’s a brown creeper,” he said. “That’s something.”
He stopped to text news of the the sighting to a friend who lives out of state.
“Jays squawk and so do chickadees,” added Mary Jo Rodgers, 55, a first-time birder who joined Mr. Fialkovich on Saturday after growing curious about the visitors to her backyard feeder in Stowe.
Results of the count will be tallied at a potluck dinner Sunday at the Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve in Fox Chapel and eventually find their way into a national
database that is used to track bird habits and populations.
“How do you know if you’re counting the same bird twice?” asked Ms. Rodgers.
“Good question,” said Mr. Fialkovich, a quality engineer for a commercial printer. “Do the best you can.”
Mr. Fialkovich, the immediate past president of the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithology and member of a number of similar groups, has been coming to Schenley Park for annual bird counts since the early 1990s — snow, rain, cold, doesn’t matter. He also leads bird-watching groups, a role that he seems naturally suited to, according to Kate St. John, 66, who writes the birding blog “Outside My Window” and spent Saturday counting birds in another part of the city.
“He’s doing this because he loves to do it,” Ms. St. John, who lives in Greenfield, said about Mr. Fialkovich.
“He’s super. He’s a real gentle person.”
Despite environmental calamities around the world, such as the clearing of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, Mr. Fialkovich said he has seen nothing to suggest an impending collapse of bird populations. Sightings of ravens, fish crows and black vultures have risen in recent years in Pennsylvania, while other bird populations have fallen.
But a study in October caused alarm among birders by citing an overall population decline of 3 billion birds, or 29%, since 1970.
“This loss of bird abundance signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function and services,” concluded the study, which appeared in the journal Science.
Moreover, the disappearance of the passenger pigeon remains a stark environmental warning among birders: The pigeons, which were so abundant one day in Columbus, Ohio, in 1855 that they blotted out the sun, according to one account, were hunted into extinction by the early 1900s.
“Woodpecker calling,” Mr. Fialkovich said, pointing into a tree cluster along the trail, and pulling out his smartphone to record the sighting. Then pointing to a branch in another tree, “See how cardinals flip their tails?”
The Schenley Park bird count, a walking meditation on ornithology and awareness, was drawing to a close.
“I’m almost all over the place,” Mr. Fialkovich said of his passion for birds and the birding field trips he’s taken. “It just relaxes me.”