Record number of species spotted during Staten Island’s annual bird count

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The holidays may be all but forgotten, but about 50 of the borough’s bird aficionados didn’t forget to participate in Staten Island’s annual Christmas Bird Count, held as part of a nationwide effort to identify and count the species in their area.

Cliff Hagen, president of Protectors of Pine Oak Woods and the present compiler of the Christmas Bird Count, told the Advance/SILive that this year’s Staten Island count yielded a total of 24,694 birds throughout 13 different territories in the borough, while 120 different species were spotted.

Hagen said that this year’s count was remarkable in that several different species of birds broke count number records.

“We’ve been doing this for over 100 years so it’s pretty extraordinary to still get high count totals for a lot of these birds,” Hagen said.

Hagen theorized that the record-setting numbers were due to the unseasonably warmer weather which led a lot of the smaller birds that usually fly south to stick around the area a little longer.

More commonly known birds like ravens set a record, while birds known more formally by enthusiasts such as the Virginia rail, the northern pintail, the surf scoter, the greater scaup, the winter wren, the marsh wren and the golden crowned kinglet also outnumbered previous years.

Another such example is the yellow warbler, which is a bird that has never been spotted during an annual count, although it can be found nesting throughout the borough from Great Kills to as far as Mount Loretto in Pleasant Plains and the vicinity of the Amazon warehouse in Bloomfield, Hagen said.

“The yellow warbler is fairly common for the summer on Staten Island, but we’ve never had one in the winter before. So, it was a treat,” Hagen said.

Hagen also thought that residents may be interested in knowing that there was a particularly high count of wild turkeys, with 160. And, that pigeons are well represented with a new record of 1,584.