BOOTHBAY REGISTER • December X, 2020
The annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count started as a protest to a practice known as the Christmas hunt, when hunters would go out around the holidays and see how many birds (and presumably other creatures as well) they could shoot. Frank Chapman--a prominent ornithologist, conservationist, and writer/editor who published an early wildlife conservation magazine—invited his readers in 1900 to begin a tradition of counting rather than hunting birds around the holiday season. Twenty-seven people participated in 25 counts that first year. The idea caught on. ~ Jeff and Allison Wells