December 18, 2007 -- It's quite a feather in our cap - 7,765 birds were at home in Central Park over the weekend, the largest number counted there in the last five years.
"The news looks good for birds in Central Park," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe about the annual Christmas Bird Count held Sunday when teams of volunteer birdwatchers fanned out and identified 57 species.
The most abundant species was the common grackle, with 1,491 sightings - and there was just one sighting of a bird seen rarely this time of year in the park, the brown-headed cowbird.
There were also 799 European starlings - a bird brought to Central Park from Europe in the 1890s by a group "trying to introduce all the birds in Shakespeare's plays or poems into North America," said Glenn Phillips, executive director of New York City Audubon.
They are "fierce nest competitors" who have spread across the country and forced out some yellow-bellied sapsuckers from Central Park and other parks, he said. There were also eight yellow-bellied sapsuckers, a species of woodpecker, spotted Sunday.
The annual peek at the peeps is due to the National Audubon Society, which launched the count in 1900 to counter the then-tradition of Christmas Day "side hunts" - where birds were killed for sport.
Bird counts in other city parks were not immediately available.
Experts can't say exactly why more birds were seen around Central Park Sunday than in the last five years of the survey.
"It probably only has to do with re gional weather conditions," Phillips suggested. "The weather up until the day of the event has been relatively mild."
And maybe Sunday's windy, wet weather emboldened them.
"In the summer, they are much shyer," Phillips said. "On Sunday, the park was quiet and the birds were hungry and . . . and not particularly concerned about people, so you got some close-up sightings."
The Parks Department bird watchers also spotted cedar waxwings, small fruit- eating beauties who "were all over the crabapple trees and completely fearless," Phillips said.
As for the northern harrier, a hawk that is "never very abundant in Central Park" to begin with, "it's the first time we recorded one at the Christmas Bird Count," he said.
Central Park is an oasis. Just ask the white-throated sparrows.
"This is south for them," said Phillips. "They spend the summers in Canada and the winters in Central Park."
