Saint John CBC Results

The Christmas Bird Count – A “New” Long-term Environmental Dataset for the Saint John Area

600,000 Birds Tell Their Stories

The Saint John Christmas Bird Count has been monitoring both resident and winter visitor populations of birds for 70+ years – continuously since 1957 and in 1945 and 1946.

The Saint John Naturalists Club is, for the first time anywhere, making this data publicly available in digital format, suitable for analysis.

The Data
The data is presented in a single spreadsheet, arranged by species and year. Up to 2000, the data is as compiled by David Christie. David’s enormous piece of work was done as part of his volunteer role as provincial compiler of the CBC in New Brunswick. (David did the same with every one of the 70-odd CBC count circles that have existed in New Brunswick over time.)

David’s spreadsheet for Saint John was used as the basis for the full 70-year spreadsheet, preserving both the taxonomic order and the data, including weather and participant information as input by David. The only modifications were to update and fully spell out rather than abbreviate some of the species’ names.

The spreadsheet data from 2001 onward has been assembled by Donald MacPhail, generally by importing and rearranging multi-year tables, as prepared by the Saint John CBC compilers of the time. In a few instances, missing data was sourced from the provincial CBC compilations as published in the NB Naturalist.

All standard CBC data is included on the spreadsheet – number of observers, observing hours, kilometres covered, weather, back up data sources and compiler’s name for each year and, of course, the birds seen.

More than 600,000 birds from 180 species have been tallied over all the years of the Saint John CBC – up to 2023. Two dozen species have been observed in only a single year; six species have been observed every year. And, no, the Black-capped Chickadee does not have perfect attendance.

The links at the bottom of this page connect to the Excel data file and a PowerPoint file which provides further background information and some initial analysis of the data.

Data Sources
The spreadsheet has been rigorously reviewed for errors, but errors are almost inevitable in large data sets. Every year’s data can be verified online though by going to at least one other source:

The spreadsheet indicates, near the top, which back up sources are available for each year.

Data Acknowledgment
Christmas Bird Count data is freely available to the public, but any use of the data should recognize the thousands of observers who have acquired the data and the organizations that have made the data available.