A record crowd spotted an all-new species last month during St. Albert’s annual Christmas Bird Count: the Eurasian collared-dove.
Bird count co-ordinator Alan Hingston released the results of the 21st annual St. Albert Christmas bird count earlier this month. The count, held Dec. 27, had a record-setting 168 participants watching the skies, trees and feeders around town in search of feathered friends. (The count usually gets about 120 participants.)
Mild temperatures may have helped draw out more people, Hingston said, but may also have helped birds stay away from the city. “Birds will tend to come to feeders in larger numbers when it’s cold,” he explained, and it was near zero degrees all day.
Counters spotted just 5,400 birds during this year’s event, down from 7,600 last year and well below the average of 6,500. Bohemian waxwings also have a huge influence on count numbers, and they were in relatively short supply this year — just 839 showed up, compared to the average of 2,200. (Waxwing populations vary wildly from year to year, according to count records.)
New to the count was the Eurasian collared-dove — a beige, pigeon-like bird known for the collar-like black crescent around the back of its neck and its incessant “koo-KOO-kook” call.
Birder Norman Bishop, who was also new to the count, spotted a pair of them in his backyard near the Sturgeon Valley Golf & Country Club.
“They’ve been here since the middle of summer,” he said, and have been gobbling up the seed he sets out in his feeders. “I’m sure with this fine weather they’ll be around all spring.”
Bishop said he initially mistook them for mourning doves, which have a black spot under their eyes instead of a collar, but a friend told them that they could be Eurasian. A quick Google search confirmed their identity.
These doves have been moving up from southern Alberta for several years now, Hingston said, and were spotted in St. Albert prior to the 2010 count.
“It seems to like upscale neighbourhoods,” he noted, as well as the big trees, yards and feeders of old, established regions. The doves tend to be very docile, and will hang around once they find a yard they like.
Spotted for the second time in count history was the red crossbill — a red finch known for its peculiar beak. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this bird uses its beak, which resembles two crossed hooks, to pry open the scales of pinecones to eat the seeds.
Just four snowy owls were spotted during the count, Hingston said, which is about half of what the city usually gets this time of year.
“We don’t seem to be getting the number of snowy owls we used to,” he said, which could be the result of habitat reduction.
A city environment grant backed this year’s count. Count results have been sent to city council and the National Audubon Society.
A tiny bug has caused city crews to raise the alarm about the risk of Dutch elm disease in Campbell Park.
City officials issued a notice this month that crews had discovered a smaller European elm beetle in a monitoring trap in the Campbell Business Park. The beetle, last spotted in the city in 2009, is a potential carrier of Dutch elm disease.
That disease is not currently in St. Albert, said Jacqueline von Platen, the city’s representative with the Society to Prevent Dutch Elm Disease, and this bug has shown up in town before.
“There was only one,” she added, and it was actually trapped in September — they only got the lab results back this month. “If the weather is going to stay [warm] like this, we will have a big chance of having more beetles.”
According to Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, the European elm beetle is a black bug that’s about four millimetres long and breeds in dead elms. It carries a fungus that clogs the veins of elm trees, causing them to wither and die in as little as three months. The last confirmed case of Dutch elm disease in Alberta was in 1998.
City law requires anyone who owns an elm tree to prune it of dead wood between Oct. 1 and March 31 in order to stop the beetle’s spread. Elm pruning is banned the rest of the year as the beetles are active then, von Platen said, and can invade a tree through pruning wounds.
St. Albert has roughly 3,600 elm trees on city land, says city arborist Kevin Veenstra, and prunes them each year to stop the spread of this disease.
You can spot an elm by its bark, he noted, which tends to be grey and deeply furrowed. Dead branches will have peeling bark and lack buds.
von Platen asked residents to trim any dead branches from their elms before March 31 in order to stop the bug’s spread. Dead wood should go into the diseased branches pile at the city’s compost depot, and should not be kept as firewood.
Any questions should go to von Platen at 780-459-1592.
