VENICE, Fla. (WWSB) – The Christmas bird count, a 125-year-old tradition that began as an alternative to shooting birds for sport, continues on the Suncoast with teams of volunteers tracking local bird populations.
Bob Clark leads the Christmas bird count in Venice. The tradition started in 1900 when Frank Chapman and the National Audubon Society created an alternative to the previous Christmas tradition of shooting birds and awarding prizes for the largest pile of dead birds.
“They said, why don’t we count the birds instead of shoot them? And that’s how it started in the year 1990s,” Clark said. “They didn’t do what the tradition was, which was shooting birds and giving a prize to the person that had the biggest pile of them.”…