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CBC and Audubon Mission



Dear Carolinabirders,
As I've been reading the many comments about Audubon losing its mission and
the comments about the CBCs and the recent issue, I decided to contact the
national CBC office to get clarification on some issues.  I'll share them
with you:
" Checking out the CBC home page would be helpful.  When
reading the 102nd CBC issue you will find two peer-reviewed scientific
articles (Kelly McKay's raptor work was presented at the North American
Ornithological Conference in St. Louis in 1998, and there was an entire
symposium on the use of CBC data in scientific research...).  Also, John
Sauer's piece in the 102nd CBC issue was specifically written to address the
need of helping researchers with pointers on the best ways of using CBC data
in meaningful statistical analyses.

In addition, there is now (and has been since last year) a CBC Bibliography
on the website, which lists many, many published papers that are based on
analyses of CBC data.  In fact, that Biblio needs to be updated--it's only
current through about 1996, and the 'industry' of mining the CBC for
conservation and ornithological research has accelerated since then.

As far as reducing a CBC to becoming an 'unofficial' count that isn't sent
to Audubon (and by the way, Chapters ARE Audubon...), if that happens the
data are not included in the cumulative database, and are lost for any value
to research.  The efforts of the census participants become relegated to
just a nice day of social birding, instead of having a nice day of social
birding that actually helps the birds.  As far as the five bucks, I would
hope that most observers think their time for a day's effort is worth at
least five bucks 'insurance' to make sure that their efforts
really do mean something."

As for Audubon's mission--  Under the leadership of Peter Berle, the mission
did veer far away from birds and became so watered down that Audubon seemed
to be losing its identity.  Under John Flicker's leadership the mission is
centered around education and protecting habitat for birds and other
wildlife.  Audubon feels the awesome responsibility of educating the general
public about our fragile environment by teaching people in nature, exposing
them to positive experiences and moving them along the continuum to being
conservationists.  The IBA(Important Bird Area) program is one of the
driving forces in Audubon today.  For those interested, you may want to
check it out at Audubon's home page.  Many states (not SC or NC) have
full-time bird conservation co-ordinators.  SC is working on finding funding
for one in the near future.

Audubon's website is www.audubon.org

Ann Shahid, Education Director
Audubon Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler Forest
Harleyville, SC