Christmas Bird Count

This Saturday I will be going on my first Christmas Bird Count in many years. Except for the Christmas part, it’s just what it sounds like: a count of birds over a 24-hour period within a 15-mile-diameter area. The National Audubon Society has been sponsoring Christmas Bird Counts nationwide since 1900. In spite of the vagaries of weather and variation in observers, CBCs have actually provided useful long-term data about changes in bird populations.

I last participated in a count when I was in graduate school at Duke. For a while I was the compiler for the Durham CBC – organizing groups of birders, collecting the numbers, investigating unusual sightings, sending it all on to the Audubon Society. I was young enough to get up in the middle of the night to listen for owls and then wander around the North Carolina woods all day with my birding buddies. Fortunately for me (and for R, who still remembers the alarm clock going off at 3 a.m.), Saturday’s meeting time is a more civilized 7:00.

Do Christmas Bird Counts have any theological significance? Probably not. Yet I do enjoy spending hours outdoors in the midst of creation, searching distant shores for eagles perched in tall trees, listening for the high pitch of chickadees or cedar waxwings. Our first assignment upon gathering will be to find the peregrine falcon that frequents a Mississippi River bridge. Birding is like that: you look for things where you have seen them in the past while keeping your eyes and ears open for the unusual.

That kind of expectant anticipation makes birding a bit like Advent. Like Advent, we think we know what or who is coming. But do we really? Jesus never seemed to do what was expected, even before he was born. Joseph certainly didn’t know what he was getting into when he decided to quietly divorce his suddenly pregnant fiancée. The only assurance he had was from dreams, and how can one be sure that a dream has come from God? Righteous and faithful, Joseph did believe, and accepted this Child that was not really his, naming him as his own, naming him Jesus, for he would be one who saves.

Names are important. Even bird names. There’s actually an organization that gives birds their official English names, changing them from time to time for various reasons. I expect that I will show my birding rustiness by not calling something its new name – saying marsh hawk instead of northern harrier, for instance. I hope I am amused when I’m corrected. Now that I no longer teach, I don’t have to be right any more, at least about names. One thing I am still sure about, however. Thanks to that baby of Mary and Joseph, that Immanu-el, God is with us and will remain with us now and always. It doesn’t take a pair of binoculars to see that.

Advent 4: Matthew 1:18-25.