LAFAYETTE — They began their trek at the Lafayette Reservoir in the predawn darkness, the sun still far enough below the hemisphere to keep any rays of sunlight at bay. Stars lit up the sky, and small clouds of breath filled the clear 39-degree air. The binoculars and the scopes stayed behind, at least for the moment.
“You can’t see anything in the dark,” George Griffeth, of Kensington said. “You listen for the owls.”
Owls, geese, herrings, you name it. Birders were on the lookout for anything they could find Sunday as they gathered for the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count.
The gathering drew more than 300 volunteers, spread out at different sites in Alameda and Contra Costa counties for a count that has gone on for more than a century nationally and in the Oakland area since 1941.
The volunteers spent Sunday looking for species and individual birds in a designated 15-mile circle that begins in Oakland and spans out to sites in Alameda, Berkeley, Emeryville, Orinda, Moraga and Lafayette.
“You’re out in nature, and it’s rewarding,” Orinda’s Bill Hudson said as he walked with a group of five others at the Reservoir after the sun came up. “It’s connecting. It connects you to the people and to the environment.”
A year ago, more than 75,000 people volunteered throughout the Western Hemisphere, and they counted 56,139,812 birds. In Oakland 302 volunteers counted 116,055 individual birds and 179 species of them.
The official count this year won’t be released for at least two weeks from Sunday, but unofficial tallies at each sight were to be revealed Sunday night at a dinner in Berkeley.
At the Reservoir, the group Griffeth led hoped to see only one kind of bird — the snow goose, an extreme rarity for this area but also strongly possible to be seen Sunday.
“There are thousands of them in the Central Valley,” he said. “But there’s been a big one hanging out here down by the corner (of a loading dock near the start of a walking trail), so we’re very hopeful.”
The Oakland area is the leader in sightings for species such as Greater Scaup and California Towhees, as well as for American Crows, Common Ravens and Wild Turkeys, and the official count expected late Sunday night was expected to indicate whether that distinction still remains.
Another in the group, Susan Mills, 72, of St. Petersburg, Florida, seemed grateful just to be able to see any of them at all. She said she slowly began to lose her sight after a bike crash in 2000 and by 2014 had just 10 percent of her vision left. Surgery to repair cataracts and other issues caused by the crash restored it, Mills said. A 50-year resident of Berkeley before moving, she had returned to catch up with her bird-spying friends.
“The level of stuff that I can see now makes it very meaningful for me to be able to do this,” Mills said.
She also said the gathering brings into sharp focus the idea of community.
“People need to remember this is all volunteers. It’s apolitical. We’re just gathering the true facts,” she said. “It’s important because there is no agenda. We go out there, and we find what we find.”