Bill Uhrich: Eurasian collared dove a surprise during Hamburg bird count

[Donna]

Reading, PA -  Every year, the local Christmas Bird Counts can be relied on to come up with a surprise or two.

Sometimes mild weather will keep some summer birds from migrating; other times invasion years bring us unusual birds from the far north.

For the 2009 count, Hamburg comes up the winner on the surprise front - with a vagrant bird from the South.

Arlene Koch and her crew discovered a Eurasian collared dove at a backyard feeder in Krumsville Dec. 27 for the first Hamburg count record of that species and the second Berks record.

Local bird watchers have been on the lookout for this dove for a number of years, as sightings and nestings have tracked steadily northward since the early 1980s.

The spread of this species follows the same pattern as many other exotic species, such as the European starling, that have escaped and populated wide areas of the United States.

According to "The Birds of Pennsylvania," Eurasian collared doves were brought in the early 1970s from the Netherlands to a pet shop in Nassau, Bahamas, and later to a bird propagator. Around 50 escaped and established themselves in the wild before arriving in Florida, nesting there in the early 1980s.

Since then, they have spread north, with the first Pennsylvania record in 1996 in Crawford County.

Hamburg also had a good variety of species compared to the other local counts, essentially because Bernville and Reading's counts were the blustery and cold weekend of Jan. 2 and 3, which kept the overall totals and numbers of species down.

Hamburg also had high counts of four merlins, six red-shouldered hawks, five wood ducks and four grey catbirds - a summer resident that occasionally will linger during mild winters.

The Reading Christmas Bird Count had five bald eagles, which I believe is a record. The breeding pair at Lake Ontelaunee resides here year-round.

Caption: Hawk Mountain Sanctuary announced the annual Hamburg Area Christmas Bird Count tallied 19,145 birds representing 87 species, including a Eurasian collared dove, the first spotted during 45 years of counts.