Counting birds at Novato’s Mount Burdell

A few weeks ago, I participated in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, a yearly ritual of one-day bird counts that take place throughout December and into early January. My count area was at Novato’s Mount Burdell, with my small team just one of a few dozen groups that spread out across a 15-mile diameter circle to identify and count as many birds as possible. And although this year’s count is over, a concentrated dose of birding like this offers a reminder of what’s available right nearby, even during the most wintry time of the year.

We started out walking the neighborhoods near one of the trailheads to the open space preserve. Here we saw many of the common backyard birds of Marin, such as sparrows, finches and hummingbirds. But as in many Marin neighborhoods, the open spaces and natural areas are not far off, and many birds typical of Mount Burdell’s open oak woodlands readily entered in amongst the houses. Western bluebirds, a much-beloved birdhouse occupant, and white-breasted nuthatches, a devotee of our native oaks, took their place among the feeder-visiting towhees and finches.

And neighborhood birding shouldn’t be neglected: This was unquestionably our period of maximum bird species per hour. You may tromp through all the woodlands of Novato without ever encountering, say, a single pygmy nuthatch, but a few planted pines may be enough to give this conifer-loving species a toehold right among our homes. And many species — mockingbirds, hummingbirds and cedar waxwings among them — are encountered with greater frequency among our densely planted landscapes full of fruits and flowers even in the heart of winter.

Departing the neighborhood, we entered one of Mount Burdell’s main habitats: oak savanna, in which scattered groves of trees are dotted across a grassland landscape. These open fields provide foraging areas for wintering Say’s phoebes, a less familiar relative of our year-round black phoebes clad in gray with peachy bellies. Flocks of meadowlarks descend heavily to disappear among the grasses, their backs a camouflaging pattern of cryptic brown, but emerge in sudden flight to reveal their brilliant yellow fronts. Such open grasslands are also favored by a number of raptors, with colorful American kestrels one of the most common — nine sightings across our three Mount Burdell teams — but also including red-tailed hawks, white-tailed kites and even golden eagles.

These grasslands are also prime viewing areas for a less-frequently mentioned highlight: pigeons. We have four members of the pigeon and dove family represented in Marin, and all four were observed by our teams. But the star pigeon of Mount Burdell is undoubtedly the native band-tailed pigeon, a flocking forest pigeon that roams broadly across the woodlands of the West in search of acorns and berries. While they often feed in quite dense woods, the more open habitats we passed through here allowed us to see these band-tails rocketing by overhead in flock after flock. We saw well over 300 of these birds across the mountain that day — a beautiful, powerful, swift-flying native bird that most people never stop to think about.

Eventually, we made it in among the trees. Great spreading valley oaks and bays reached their massive limbs out benignantly, sheltering us with arms laden with birds. In spring and summer, the groves of Mount Burdell are popular birding sites that draw visitors from throughout the county in search of Bullock’s orioles, lark and chipping sparrows, and colorful kingbirds and flycatchers. The pleasures of winter are somewhat more subdued, but so many of California’s birds don’t leave and are waiting to be found here in every month of the year.

Oak titmice, “the soul of the oaks,” speak in their rough and raspy voices. White-breasted nuthatches, known by the folk name of “big quank,” trumpet between the trees with nasal honks. Towhees and wrens retreat into the underbrush. Wintering northern flickers join the resident downy and hairy woodpeckers. And one bird above all stands out to me in these groves of ancient oaks: acorn woodpeckers, the uniquely social and appropriately clown-faced hoarders of acorns. Month after month and year after year, these birds collect the hard nuts of the oaks and store them in their massive granary trees, collecting the food that will enable their continued presence here, even in the coldest months.

Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of “The Birds in the Oaks: Secret Voices of the Western Woods.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.