Marsh Madness

Like most Christmas Bird Counts, the 2012 Mad Island count doesn’t actually occur on its namesake holiday; instead it begins December 17, at the crack of midnight. Birders rise from cots, bunks and couches in buildings peppered across the Conservancy’s 7,063-acre Mad Island preserve. A few hours ago, these people were sharing a lasagna dinner and divvying up search zones within the preserve and surrounding area. Now, they’re wandering the darkness, cocking ears for owl hoots in some of the last remaining original tallgrass coastal prairie along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast.

The Clive Runnells Family Mad Island Marsh Preserve, as it’s formally known, lies within the Central Flyway, one of the four main migratory bird routes in North America. Since 1990, the Conservancy has worked here with Ducks Unlimited and the state of Texas to restore the wetlands and coastal prairies. Resident birds and migrating flocks use this as a resting spot or come here seeking a meal. The salt marshes—full of insects, reptiles, fish and crustaceans—are complemented by rice fields that work like wetlands.

“This is a habitat where a lot of ecoregions come together,” says Brent Ortego, a diversity biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife and the man who has been running the count here since its inception, in 1993. He knew the Mad Island count had the potential to be good, in terms of the number of species, but he never imagined it would be the best in the country.

“It’s become much better than we expected,” he says. At one point, beating the count in Freeport, Texas, was a major goal. Today, says Ortego, competition from Freeport “is no longer a concern.”

By 4 a.m., the count is in full swing, with a dozen or more enthusiasts loading into vehicles carrying well-thumbed bird books and hand-held spotlights that stab into the dark.

Others take turns splashing around rice fields on all-terrain vehicles, seeking secretive yellow rails, a notable item on any birder’s life list. Jim Harrison, a retired Conservancy staffer, plunges a four-wheeler into the rice field, carving a luminescent wake through the water, while standing on the machine’s foot pegs and fixing his eyes along the beam of its headlights and his own headlamp. Birds fly up all over the place: a barn owl now and then, but mostly snipe and willets. He drives with a steady and tender slosh punctuated with a pounce-and-halt combination of gas and brakes.

He finds his treasure—a yellow rail, not much bigger than a sparrow and huddled in the water. Its eye gleams as it holds a position just long enough for Jim to make a firm identification: the dark cap, the yellow eyebrow, the dark brown mask. Maybe 17,500 of them remain in the wild, according to the National Audubon Society, and they’re skittish, scampering into cover when approached, preferring a ground escape to an aerial one. Few people ever see them on the wing. Even fewer can claim a ground sighting. Nobody else will spot one this day, though the team of 119 people collectively spends 358 hours and traverses 832 miles, scanning sky, brush, ponds and shorelines.

Bird counts “give you an annual snapshot of what’s here,” explains Rich Kostecke, associate director of conservation for the Conservancy’s Texas chapter and one of that state’s top bird experts. When combined with the other concurrent bird counts, the data allow scientists to identify threats to birds. For example, are some species choosing to winter farther north as the climate changes? Does a dearth of fresh water during drought increase salinity in the bay, which would alter blue crab habitat, which would make great blue herons work harder for a meal? How does a major wildfire displace birds? Those snapshots can build an album with a story to tell.

Over the past century, Audubon has collected invaluable ecological information through this type of citizen science. And people have a lot of fun gathering it. “One thing that gets people fired up is the competitive aspect,” Kostecke says. “But it’s a seriously friendly competition.”

Some birders put in a few hours during the count, but others, like Schwebel and the Harrisons, get serious and spend most of the night and all day in the field. At dawn, they park the ATVs and launch canoes. By lunchtime, having survived the portages, swamp carnivores and tidal currents, they gather at the preserve’s headquarters, a lodge on stilts, with a couple dozen other birders who spent the morning on foot or in cars, counting birds. Lunch hour is time to ladle soup and lick pencils, to fi nd out who has found which birds.

Many people in the room, which is on the southern end of the 15-mile-diameter bird-counting circle, bear evidence of their morning, with mud splotched to the waist. Others sink into chairs, sore of foot, and exchange stories. Some are bug bitten. But everybody pays attention as Kostecke runs through the checklist.

“Anybody get a purple gallinule?” he asks. “A purple gallinule would be good.”

Nobody raises a hand. But the day isn’t over. Empty spots in the list of birds sighted in previous years mean an afternoon of trying to fill in the blanks and hang on to the team’s championship. For Bea Harrison and her companions, it also means an afternoon on foot, carrying a stout stick to fend off rattlesnakes and rousting a wild hog from his daybed. Other volunteers continue to search nearby farm fields, lands around a chemical plant, the cooling ponds of a nuclear power facility, the intracoastal waterway and the forested banks of the Colorado River.

A successful count relies on access, Ortego stresses, and landowners in the area have been remarkably cooperative, opening gates to strangers and even chipping in to fund the barbecue that feeds the hungry birders after a long day in the field. The Conservancy supplies vehicles and boats, expertise, and bunk space in the lodge, an old farmhouse and even a barn. And local boat owners haul people to barrier islands, where they might just spot something rare, like a magnificent frigatebird stealing scraps from gulls that are stealing scraps from shrimp fishermen.

The birders gladly accept the hospitality.