Counting crows (and wrens and …): Bird tally proceeds amid frigid winds

While the rest of the world was making New Year’s resolutions, Peter Alden and David Swain were compiling a different list.

Theirs is a census of every golden-eye and starling in the Acton area. This season’s avian tally marks the 66th anniversary of the count that Alden initiated as a teenager.

This year, the woods were uncharacteristically “slow,” Swain said. Preliminary numbers suggest some species have plummeted to half of their totals from the previous year. It isn’t that the birds are gone forever, but that a “brutal December” has pushed them away.

“A lot of the birds that sometimes winter here in small numbers all said ‘to hell with it’ and went down south this winter,” Alden said. 

The lack of activity wasn’t due solely to the frost. A hot summer left local trees with less fruit, leaving fruit-eating birds like American robins and cedar waxwings with little reason to stay.

A striking contrast

Swain said these “wild swings” in numbers are a symptom of a larger instability. Last season, it was mild during the count; 2025 ended with a deep freeze that iced over local ponds. 

“Long gone are the days of regular snow cover and consistent temperatures,” Swain said in an email to The Acton Bridge. 

The December 28, 2025, count turned up a rare pied-billed grebe, far fewer wild turkeys than expected, and only one sighting of the evening grosbeak, a bird once common at feeders.

Alden said this season’s visual census had 50 bird-watchers in the field and 30 more reporting activity at their houses’ bird feeders. It was a slightly lower number than the year prior. 

“It’s been such a cold winter, and so a few people that normally would help us said ‘screw it,’ or they have the flu or some other thing, so we’re down a little bit on coverage,” Alden said, adding that the tallying team still had “enough to get a good feel for what’s around.”

This is because the volunteers don’t set out to count every bird in Acton, but to gauge the population by counting what can be seen in a given day.

Swain said another factor contributes to shrinking volunteer numbers: Not enough young people are getting into bird-watching. 

“We need a new generation of young birders with new ideas about bird observation and younger eyes and ears,” he said. 

For Swain, the stakes go beyond a hobby. Centered in a town defined by naturalists like Henry David Thoreau, the count is a “health check” for a shifting environment. As the veteran generation of birders begins to retire, Swain and Alden hope new birders will take up the mantle. 

“This is not some quaint tradition,” Swain said, “but an important event in citizen science.”