A Half-Century of Winter Bird Surveys at Lincoln and Scottsbluff, Nebraska

Since 1900, the National Audubon Society has sponsored annual Christmas bird counts during the two-week period encompassing Christmas; and as a result, long-term data on winter bird populations have accumulated, especially for some locations. The first two such counts in Nebraska were made in 1909 and in 1912 in Lincoln. Beginning in 1947 and continuing to the present, an unbroken series of counts were made in Lincoln, usually by members of the Uni¬versity Place Bird Club, the Audubon Naturalist\u27s Club, or the Wachiska chapter of the National Audubon Society. For Scottsbluff, an unbroken set of counts extends from 1949 to the present. Few efforts have been made to summarize this great mass of potentially valuable information. Because of the potential value of these counts in tracking Nebraska bird populations, I decided to analyze the data for the Lincoln and Scottsbluff areas