THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Sharon Irwin of Fort Smith has been a birdwatcher on and off since her early teenage years.
Sharon Irwin is a birdwatcher in Fort Smith. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
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"My dad was a birdwatcher, so he got me interested," said Irwin. "I've been doing it since I was a kid. We had a cottage on the St. Lawrence River in Ontario and there were lots of opportunities there to bird watch."
As an adult, she took a more active interest in bird watching while working in Kananaskis Country for the Alberta parks service.
Irwin describes Fort Smith, where she has lived since 2001 while working with Parks Canada, as a good place to be a birdwatcher.
"There are great opportunities to see lots of different birds," she said, noting the town is surrounded by boreal forest.
Plus, she noted there are pelicans and even a chance to see whooping cranes.
In fact, she recalled once showing a new Parks Canada employee around Wood Buffalo National Park and stopping at the wetlands roadside turnout, about 70 km west of Fort Smith. There, they saw three whooping cranes fly overhead.
The 51-year-old Irwin, who works as a resource management officer with Wood Buffalo, describes herself as a naturalist.
"I really enjoy looking for wildlife tracks in the winter in the snow," she said. "In the summer, I like identifying flowers."
Irwin said birds are great because they're so visible.
"They're easy to see," she added. "They're easier to see than a lot of wildlife, and they're winter and summer. It's kind of a challenge to see new birds."
This past holiday season, Irwin organized the annual Christmas Bird Count in Fort Smith.
"It's a North American-wide survey," she explained, noting it gathers information that can be used to develop policies for species at risk and even climate change. "What we get just in Fort Smith may not seem very important. It's when they put everything together all over North America and look at the changes over the years then you get those patterns and see what's changing."
The Fort Smith count, which was held on Dec. 28, attracted 10 adults and three children. Altogether, they spotted 317 birds from 12 species.
There were ravens, two kinds of redpolls, a gray jay, three kinds of woodpeckers (pileated, hairy and three-toed), evening and pine grosbeaks, boreal and black-capped chickadees, grouse and a red-breasted nuthatch.
"We really didn't get anything that was unusual this year," Irwin said.
She has participated in every Christmas Bird Count in Fort Smith since she arrived in the community.
This year, Fort Smith held one of more than 2,200 counts in the Western Hemisphere between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5.
"We usually do ours in the Christmas holiday period because it's something to do and it's kind of fun to go out with your family," said Irwin, explaining the Christmas period is also chosen to determine what birds are in an area all year long.
The Christmas Bird Count was launched in 1900 by Frank Chapman, an American scientist and writer. Chapman proposed an alternative to the so-called side hunt on Christmas Day when teams competed to see who could shoot the most birds and small mammals.
