BYE, BYE BIRDER
Ed Barrell marks last year as compiler for Bernville Christmas Bird Count
Over his 30 years as compiler of the Bernville Christmas Bird Count, Ed Barrell has not only watched birds but also the weather.
He doesn’t remember unusual birds in 1999, but he remembers the cold.
“That was the low, 6 degrees; the high that day was 18, and windy,” he shuddered with a laugh. “Bitter. Your eyes would water, and it was hard to be out for long periods of time. Just the cold.”
The Bernville count is the youngest of the three centered in Berks County — Reading began in 1911 and Hamburg in 1966 — and therefore has always been the count scheduled last in the official Audubon count period that runs from Dec. 14 until Jan. 5, always falling in the first weekend in January.
This year’s count was held Jan. 1, in the rain and the fog.
And although he has participated in every Bernville count and plans to keep participating in future counts, this year marks his last as compiler.
“I enjoyed doing it, especially comparing the numbers and looking at the species, but I just thought it’s time to pass it on,” he said. “I don’t find it very difficult to do, and I was never a numbers person. I just thought 30 years was a good number to round it off.”
Barrell, 70, has participated in area Christmas bird counts every year since 1977, and like many Berks birders got his start at Hawk Mountain.
“What got me into birding was a 1975 article in the Pennsylvania Game News about Hawk Mountain,” the Bern Township resident said. “I decided to go up one day, and there were lots of hawks flying low and close.
“I was hooked.”
A little while later, he attended a program on Hawk Mountain at the Reading Public Museum presented by the Baird Ornithological Club, which celebrated its centennial last year.
“I went and met people like Bob Cook, Rudy Keller, Joan Silagy and Jack Holcomb and started go
ing on field trips with the club,” he said.
In 1977, Cook asked him to help out on the Reading count, and he has been doing counts every year since then, often working on four counts — the three centered in Berks and the Elverson count, which overlaps southern Berks County.
His birding hasn’t been confined only to the counts or to Berks County.
“My birding interests have taken my wife Sarah and me to other states and countries like Belize, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Tanzania,” he said.
He has also been active in the local Baird club as a former vice president, president, board member and field trip leader.
But he relishes the memories of the many birds seen and the birders who have participated in the Bernville count.
Because the count circle includes Blue Marsh Lake, the Bernville count has been noted for its gulls, nine species of which have been recorded throughout the count’s history.
In fact, the Bernville count recorded the highest number of ring-billed gulls in North America during the 2006 count: 35,682.
“The reason there were so many gulls is that there was a pig farm up near Shartlesville that was dumping waste in the fields, and the gulls would leave here and go up there and then come back here and roost for the night,” he said.
A rare gull that showed up in 1992, a European mew gull, created a stir that attracted birders from throughout the East.
“Another unusual one that same year was the laughing gull,” he said. “We don’t get laughing gulls around here too much. They’re around the Jersey coast but not too much inland. We’ve had glaucous gull — a bird of the Far North — over a number of years, too, and an Iceland gull a couple times.”
The pig farm was subsequently shut down, but Blue Marsh still attracts a number of gulls.
A total of 148 bird species have been found on the Bernville counts.
Another rarity on the count was a green-tailed towhee, a Western species, that was first found near the Blue Marsh stilling basin in late November 2011 and remained until the following April. It was the first Berks record for that species.
The Bernville count circle also encompasses the many farms and fields in western Berks, and in the second year of the count during another exceptionally cold winter an unprecedented number of roughlegged hawks irrupted into the count circle.
Rudy Keller, an original Bernville count participant, recalled finding the birds in his Marion Township territory.
“Rough-legs are birds of the arctic tundra that come this far south only in winters when heavy snow that hides their vole prey covers the regions to our north,” he said. “Conditions must have been just right in the winter of 1986-87, when the BCBC recorded 28 rough-legged hawks, an unsurpassed number, on Jan. 4.
“Twenty of those birds were seen by Joan and Bob Silagy and me. As we drove along the roads through the farmland, we found new birds around every bend and over every hill, perched on treetops or hovering over the snowy, tundra-like fields.”
Although a conspicuous feature of those early counts, the last rough-leg was recorded in 2008.
“Warmer, less snowy winters due to climate change that have kept the birds north, and a change in farming practices to ever more row crops like corn and soybeans, which do not support the meadow voles on which rough-legs prey, account for the decline,” Keller said.
It’s this type of long-term record keeping that makes the Christmas counts and the job of compiler so important.
But after 30 years as compiler, Barrell will hand the duties over to Mike Slater, another long-time participant in the count.
“It’s all good,” Barrell said. “I just enjoyed doing it, no matter the weather.”