We had 'Little Big Day' last week on May 28th. Congratulations to the the team 'Dipperette’s' for seeing the most species seen ever recorded by a single team: 130 species! The Dipperette’s consisted of Gretchen W, Helga K, Jo Ellen F. and Wendy H. Well done! The closest year to them was in 2007, when a single team saw 128 species (seen by team ‘Stalkers 4’ which consisted of Cathy, Al, Art and Lois).
 
Together, all the teams this year saw 148 species, the 4th highest year recorded. There were 3 teams in total. The other 2 teams were the Three-toed Muskateers (Greg R, Jim H and Katrin P) and the Ruthless Birders (Ruth G, Lyle G, Dianne C, Emma B).
 
Little Big Day is a fun birding competition to see which team (up to 4 people) see the most birds (teams need to stay together and at least 2 people from each team need to see each species). Birding takes place between 6am and 6pm, although you can bird less if you want and you don't really need to 'compete'. It's all for fun. Teams contribute $25, which goes to a worthy nature related cause.

This year, the money is being donated to the 'Elizabeth Lake Shoreline Restoration Project’, being done by the Rocky Mountain Naturalists.
 
A combined list of what we saw:
Canada Goose
Trumpeter Swan
Wood Duck
Blue-winged Teal
Cinnamon Teal
Northern Shoveler
Gadwall
Eurasian Wigeon
American Wigeon
Mallard
Green-winged Teal
Canvasback
Redhead
Ring-necked Duck
Greater Scaup
Lesser Scaup
Bufflehead
Common Goldeneye
Barrow's Goldeneye
Hooded Merganser
Common Merganser
Ruddy Duck
Wild Turkey
Ruffed Grouse
Pied-billed, Horned, Red-necked, and Eared Grebes
Rock Pigeon
Eurasian Collared-Dove
Mourning Dove
Vaux's Swift
Black-chinned, Calliope, and Rufous Hummingbirds
Virginia Rail
Sora
American Coot
Black-necked Stilt
American Avocet
Killdeer
Long-billed Curlew
Wilson's Snipe
Wilson's Phalarope
Spotted and Solitary Sandpipers
Bonaparte's and California Gulls
Black Tern
Common Loon
Great Blue Heron
Turkey Vulture
Osprey
Northern Harrier
Sharp-shinned Hawk
Bald Eagle
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-naped Sapsucker
Lewis', American Three-toed, Downy, Hairy, and Pileated Woodpeckers
Northern Flicker
American Kestrel
Merlin
Peregrine Falcon
Western Wood-pewee
Willow, Least, Hammonds, Dusky, and Pacific-slope Flycatchers
Say's Phoebe
Western Kingbird
Eastern Kingbird
Cassin's Vireo
Warbling Vireo
Stellar's Jay
Blue Jay
Black-billed Magpie
Clark's Nutcracker
American Crow
Common Raven
Black-capped and Mountain Chickadees
Northern Rough-winged, Tree, Violet-green, Bank, Barn, and Cliff Swallows Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets
Red-breasted, White-breasted and Pygmy Nuthatches
House, Pacific and Marsh Wrens
American Dipper
European Starling
Gray Catbird
Western and Mountain Bluebirds
Townsend's Solitaire
Swainson's and Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
House Sparrow
American Pipit
Evening Grosbeak
House Finch
Cassin's Finch
Red and White-winged Crossbills
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
Dark-eyed Junco
Chipping, Clay-coloured, White-crowned, White-throated, Vesper, Savannah, Song and Lincoln's Sparrows
Spotted Towhee
Yellow-headed Blackbird
Bobolink
Western Meadowlark
Bullock's Oriole
Red-winged Blackbird
Brown-headed Cowbird
Brewer's Blackbird
Northern Waterthrush
Orange-crowned, Nashville, and MacGillivray's Warblers
Common Yellowthroat
American Redstart
Yellow, Yellow-rumped, Townsend's, and Wilson's Warblers
Western Tanager
Lazuli Bunting

by Dianne Cooper

Here is a brief biography about founding Rocky Mountain Naturalists member Mildred White (1916 – 2001), her birding sightings and their journey into the public archive on the occasion of the last of her birding data finally getting entered into eBird.
 
Mrs. White recorded her bird sightings between April 1964 and December 2001.  She wrote them down in 6 Blueline brand record books, which are in journal-style, and 5 black ringed binders, in list-style.

She began recording her natural history observations on 05-Apr-1964 when she was 48 years old.  At first, she re-used loose sheets of letter-size paper to record her "home" sightings of birds and animals.  The paper was rescued from the trash at the gift shop in the Kimberley Hospital where Mrs. White was a volunteer with the Hospital Auxiliary.  Every once in a while she would copy these notes into Blueline-brand bound record books, in a narrative journal-style with wonderfully legible cursive handwriting.  For field trips, she used little pocket notebooks, also transferring these notes to the Bluelines.  After doing it this way for about 25 to 30 years, she switched to list-style for her "final copy" in medium-sized black ringed-binders.  She also re-copied some of her journal-style sightings as lists in the black binders.
 
In December of 1974, Mildred and her husband, King, moved from a modest house on a small city lot in Kimberley to a newly built one on several acres south of Ta Ta Creek.  The acreage was on the western edge of the vast grassy benchlands bordering the Kootenay River.  They built a river-rock birdbath, standing over one meter tall.  It attracted many birds, deer, coyote, and small mammals.  They also put up several nest boxes and feeders for the birds and squirrels.  A shelf-type feeder below the utility room window was easily accessed from indoors during the winter.  In especially cold weather Mrs. White stocked it with her homemade shortbread, a special treat for the birds.
 
A variety of bird habitats were within walking and listening distance of their property.  There was a creek with beaver ponds — Waite Creek, which flows into Bartholomew Lake, and Sun Marsh, named after Joe Sun, a resident of the acreage adjacent to the Whites'.  The Suns operated a market garden with home delivery service of vegetables.
 
Mrs. White enjoyed traipsing around Wasa Sloughs.  The lack of city services gave her an excuse to make the trip across the Kootenay River Valley to the refuse station south of the Sloughs.  From there she would head for the Sloughs, taking a dirt track north through the pine forest to a clearing we now call "Mildred's Meadow".  It was her tradition to check this field for the first of the spring buttercup blooms peeking up between the thick litter of pine needles.  This signaled spring was in full flight, the ice would soon be off Wasa Sloughs, so it was time to start looking for the spring arrival of birds.  Mr. White built a small boardwalk and viewing blind at the end of a spit on the east side of the Sloughs where they photographed waterfowl.  It was still functional in 1979 and I used it several times myself when I first started birding; I didn't know the White's then but had heard about them, everybody had.  They also had a portable blind they set up at Sun or Bartholomew Marshes.
 
She recorded sightings for Project Feederwatch, the Breeding Bird Survey, American Birds / Northwest Field Notes and the BC Sight Record and Nest Record Schemes, the latter two provided data for the four-volume work "The Birds of British Columbia", by R. W. Campbell and others.  Other activities and projects she worked on were for the Rocky Mountain Naturalists, the Federation of BC Naturalists, and the Rocky Mountain Trench Natural Resources Society.  She helped start two of the local Christmas Bird Counts.
 
Mildred was also a guest speaker at Wasa Lake Provincial Park, using her own and King's slides in her presentations.  She wrote a nature column in the Kimberley Bulletin for many years.  In 1996, she and other members of the Rocky Mountain Naturalists composed the "Rocky Mountain Naturalists Wildflower Checklist" commemorating the tenth anniversary of the RMN.  And they also made a "Birding Tour" brochure.
 
In 2000, at the age of 84, she took a computer class at Kimberley Campus of the College of the Rockies to learn Microsoft Excel.  Because of her experiences with other data banks, she was determined to get her data digitized and distributed.  She would contribute records to many organizations and people but then would never hear of how the data were used or what help it had been.  In some cases, reports and publications were unpublished and difficult to access.  In other cases, the cost of obtaining published copies was prohibitive.  If she'd been around when cell phones and the eBird app came out, I have no doubt she would have embraced them both whole-heartedly.  Also, Mrs. White wanted to acknowledge the hundreds of fellow bird watchers who told her of the birds they'd seen, accompanied her on field trips, sharing their enjoyment of birds.

I met Mrs. White in July of 2001 and because of my interest and background with the beginnings of the digitization of bird records, I agreed to digitize hers.  We got a grant from Columbia Basin Trust for tuition for a course in MS Access and the software program; then a grant from BC Nature to publish the database and pay me for some of my time (which worked out well because with my "wages" I was able to replace my stolen spotting scope - but that's another, shorter story).  In the autumn of 2001, we photocopied her 5 black binders at the Kimberley Hospital—they allowed us to use their machine because of all her work with the hospital auxiliary.  She passed away in December.
 
I continued with the project and five years later, in 2006, "published" a database containing data from her black ringed binder notebooks: almost 24,000 bird, animal, and plant sightings of Mrs. White's and over 200 other contributors over 27 plus years.   The database was disseminated to anyone who requested a copy.  The Species Inventory Project, Government of British Columbia uploaded the sightings to their online database, making it available to everyone.  Dr. Mike Panian of the Species Inventory Project said the database was the “largest one-time contribution by a single person in the history of the provincial databank!”

Also in 2006, Dick Cannings, an ornithologist with Bird Studies Canada at the time, and current MP for South Okanagan—West Kootenay, uploaded approx. 17,500 of the bird sightings to eBird.  eBird is an online database of bird sightings contributed by citizen scientist launched in 2002 and operated by Cornell University, New York.  Mrs. White's sightings jump-started eBird in the region.  Twenty years later, birders, researchers, and naturephiles find eBird almost indispensable for its data and an inspiring and invaluable resource for their birding activities.
 
Now, thanks in part to the pandemic which allowed me to focus my undivided attention on the onerous task of going through her narrative journals, I was able to glean another 6,900 or so bird sightings from her Blueline books.  Between the interesting antics of chipmunks, what plants were in bloom, what subjects were deemed promising enough to use up costly photographic film and maybe good enough to pay for printing, where King went fishing and with whom, who dropped by for a visit - friends, family and fellow birders, and what birds and animals they reported, were records of her first time seeing many East Kootenay species.
 
eBird now houses over 24,000 of Mrs. White's bird sightings.  Perusing the East Kootenay checklist on eBird, looking at the date of "first seen": Mrs. White recorded the first sightings of 160 species in the region (we have 348 species but only 306 are on eBird).  This is eight times more than the contributor with the next "most firsts", Ian McTaggart-Cowan.  Dr. McTaggart-Cowan visited the Newgate area in May of 1930 and recorded the first sightings of 20 of our species.  Mrs. White's first "first" was two Killdeer flying down Mark Creek on 5 Apr 1964, and her last East Kootenay "first" was 19 Black-necked Stilt at Elizabeth Lake on 26 Apr 2001.
 
Her journals will be digitized and housed at the Royal British Columbia Museum for anyone to read.  It has been over twenty years since Mrs. White's passing yet her 37 years-worth of fauna and flora sightings remain as an inspiration and a valuable source of information about nature in the East Kootenay.

The End

Many of us enjoy the avian activity around bird feeders at this time of year.  It's a great way to get wonderful views of our local winter birds, see what they're up to - so entertaining and educational.
 
I was chatting with Top Crop Two in Kimberley last month as they were getting their bird feeding supplies ready.  They were saying the popularity of bird feeders skyrocketed last winter - it was a fun pandemic activity - and I expect it will be the same this winter.
 
The latest episode of the podcast "The Warblers" by Birds Canada, titled "Feeding birds the right way", has some great tips for bird feeding, especially about bird feeder hygiene.  Andrés and Andrea interviewed Kerrie Wilcox, co-ordinator of Project Feederwatch for Birds Canada.
 
You can read about the podcast here:
https://www.birdscanada.org/coming-soon-the-warblers-podcast/
 
You should be able to find the podcast on whichever podcast app you use (I use Overcast) or by searching the internet.
 
About cleaning your feeders: Project Feederwatch says: "Birds can become ill from leftover bits of seeds and hulls that have become moldy or from droppings that have accumulated on feeder trays. Therefore, you should clean your seed feeders about once every two weeks, more often during times of heavy use or during warm and damp conditions. Research has found that scrubbing debris off feeders and then soaking them for 10 minutes in a diluted bleach solution is more effective at removing bacteria than using soap and water alone."
 
So, in choosing which type of feeder to use, consider ease of cleaning as well as what food for the birds in your area.
 
Project Feederwatch is a great resource for all things about feeders:  feeder types, bird identification guides and photos.  If you join for a minimum of $25 a year, you can contribute sightings at your feeder (there's an app for that) to help keep track of populations and interactions and whatever else science can tell us about birds.  Consider giving a membership as a gift.
 
They have lots of info about all aspects of bird feeders at:
https://feederwatch.org/learn/feeding-birds/#feeder-types-2

Some bird feeding tips:
- keep your cats indoors; don't have birdfeeders if there are lots of free-roaming cats in your area
 
- clean your feeders by soaking in a diluted bleach solution
- use tube-type or small hopper-type feeders rather than the tray-type so birds can't sit and poop on the seeds they're going to eat - spreading disease
- also, rake and clear out fallen seeds on the ground OR
- place a table under the feeder to catch fallen seeds, then clean it regularly - again with a diluted bleach solution
- if you see any sick birds or hear reports of bird diseases going around, clean up your feeder area; you may have to bring in your feeders for a couple of weeks
 
- place feeders close to windows so birds startled off the feeder don't develop enough steam to hurt themselves if they fly into the window OR
- put your window screens on the OUTSIDE of the window OR
- install reflective decals, streamers, or a commercially available window film designed for this purpose - I save foil seals from yoghurt and coffee cans and tape them randomly on the inside of my windows but this should only be done on windows that don't get a lot of sun; you can trim them to look like snowflakes, if you wish.
 
- try the "ecological" approach for dealing with avian predators:
- the little hawks have to eat too but enough is enough around your feeder sometimes
- encourage species like Blue Jays who act as sentinels, calling the alarm when a Sharp-shinned Hawk or Merlin sneaks up
- situate your feeders and garden plantings to provide quick cover for the little birds.
 
- other mammals can be a problem too, even moose, apparently.
- around here, don't put up your feeders until the bears are asleep
- for squirrels, well, one of my favorite long-winter-night pastimes is watching videos of clever squirrels foiling bird feeder protections or going through backyard mazes to get their nuts.  Our squirrels are usually asleep in the coldest times, which are also best for bird feeding, so good luck on warm days.

And don't forget, your feeder sightings are also important for our local Christmas Bird Counts - more on that soon!  Happy Birding!
 
Dianne Cooper, Kimberley, BC

On the morning of Sunday, February 8, the rain was falling as it had been for the past few days. However, as the morning began to fade and the afternoon steadily approached, the sun decided to grace us with its presence, which I was immensely grateful for as I was to help assist the RMNats in putting up duck boxes around Elizabeth Lake. We lucked out with this experience as the afternoon turned out to be beautiful. The sun was warm and the installation of the boxes allowed us to navigate across and enjoy the conservation area.

In addition to myself, the installation team consisted of Greg, Daryl, Paula, George, Lloyd, Audrey, Ed, and Tom. Eight boxes had been crafted by Tom to install along the shoreline. Based on insight and the research done by Daryl we identified locations for each box. The boxes were placed on a tree approximately 3 to 5 m above ground and with a slight forward slant to prevent the accumulation of rainwater and allow easy escape for the ducklings. They were also located a minimum of 30m apart and were visually isolated from one another to prevent dump nesting and predation. Paula and Greg recorded the GPS coordinates so that we may return to the locations to monitor and maintain the boxes in the future. The boxes were filled with approximately 10cm of wood shavings and a piece of wood placed over the entrance to prevent starlings from becoming established, which will later be removed upon arrival of the cavity nesting ducks.

Six of the eight boxes were placed on the east side of the lake and the remaining two were placed on the west side. To get to the west side we walked across the lake. A few of us were a bit tentative to journey on the ice as the warm weather made us skeptical of its strength. Nonetheless, we came away unscathed and we even managed to pull Audrey across on a wagon.

When we reached the west side we discovered two nest boxes had previously been installed. In one of them we were welcomed by a couple of flying squirrels. In another we uncovered a nest which contained 17 unhatched eggs. It was decided to replace that box with a new one which was the final installation. Initially our crew was unsure as to how many boxes we were going to install; however, as the afternoon progressed we became determined to install them all, which we successfully achieved. With the successful installation of the duck boxes we now patiently await the arrival of the ducks to nest within these fresh, new spaces. 

Article submitted by Myra Juckers, new member of RMN
Photos courtesy of Greg Ross