It was a windy winter day on Amaknak Island for the Great Backyard Bird Count on Feb. 15. Megan Dean, local birder and store manager for the Museum of the Aleutians, led a group of Unalaskans along Iliuliuk Harbor in front of the museum.
Looking out to the water, Dean said, “between the wind and the sun, my eyes are like watering.”
She spotted a group of black and white ducks bobbing up and down on the waves. The birds weren't that easy to identify, so Dean grabbed her binoculars.
There are a lot of different black and white ducks in the Aleutian region, so knowing the fine details to separate them all becomes crucial. Dean jokingly said that when it comes to identifying birds, she enjoys deciphering odd-shaped, large birds.
“I'm kind of more like a pelican and flamingo girl,” she said.
Dean brought ID books and brochures to help participants in the group know what species the birds are.
This one-day global bird count event helps scientists track bird populations just before their spring migrations begin. It’s a program run by Cornell Lab, Audubon Society and Birds Studies Canada.
In this year’s Great Backyard Bird Count, Unalaska birders identified at least 16 bird species — including four common ravens — which was exciting to see as their population has drastically decreased in the last couple of years for unknown reasons.
But Dean was on the hunt for another bird. She was looking for a canvasback duck, a species a fellow birder found earlier that day.
She described them as an oreo duck.
“But it’s a little more white than the scops, and it’s got a brown head,” she said. “It’s got a different color beak and kind of a different shape beak ... more of like a Roman nose.”
Once the birds were counted, Dean recorded the sightings in the eBird app, so birders and scientists around the world could see what birds were hanging out in Unalaska on Feb. 15.
For some places in the world, the event was competitive.
“Colombia, we learned, is currently in the count of the most birds,” Dean said.
The results of Unalaska's Great Backyard Bird Count can be found online.
