A red-bellied woodpecker is hanging upside down on my sunflower-seed feeder. It may appear that he is simply helping himself to a late afternoon snack, but I know better. He is taunting me. He knows that I spent eight hours last Saturday (Jan. 1) and drove 30-plus miles crisscrossing Balsam Mountain Preserve and never found a single red-bellied woodpecker.

Last Saturday was the third annual Carolina Field Birders-sponsored Christmas Bird Count. For the first time in three years we had mild weather and more than a puddle of water in Lake Junaluska. We also had approximately 25 dedicated volunteers scouring the 15-mile diameter count circle listening and looking for any sign of avian activity.

The diligence, mild weather and water paid off. Counters tallied a record-breaking (unofficial) total of 75 species. We had been stuck on 69 – the total for each of the two previous counts. Seventy-five may be a tough number to top. For the habitat and normal late December, early January weather conditions, I feel like 75 species is a really good mountain CBC.

If someone had asked me around 3 p.m. on Jan. 1 if I thought we would break the count record, I would have probably laughed, or maybe cried. My portion of the count circle is Balsam Mountain Preserve. While the species count for the Preserve in the dead of winter is never really high, count day was excruciatingly slow. My thanks to Ed Kelley, Len and Esther Perdue, and Dan Pitillio for sticking it out.

This is not to say the day in the preserve was a total loss. We got really good looks at one group of about a dozen wild turkeys and one ruffed grouse. Brown creepers appear to have taken up residency on the Preserve for the winter. I believe we recorded five. And despite the fact that the red-bellied woodpecker eluded us, we did get pileated, northern flicker, yellow-bellied sapsucker, downy and, by the hair of our chinny chin chins, a hairy. Just minutes and yards from exiting the preserve a beautiful male hairy woodpecker flew across the road in front of us and stopped, giving us great views.

We also had close encounters of the mammalian kind. We got good looks at three deer, one being a large eight-point buck.

While the day seemed interminably slow, we wound up with 23 species for the day, just slightly below average for the preserve. A lone turkey vulture cruising above us at the end of the day turned out to be a fortuitous find. It was the only turkey vulture seen in the count circle the entire day.

From a record-keeping perspective the bird of the day was no doubt the cackling goose on Lake Junaluska. The cackling goose might be thought of as a “political” species. In 2004 the American Ornithologist’s Union finally split the large unwieldy Canada goose group into two species with a total of 11 subspecies. The split is based mostly (in the field) on size. The seven larger subspecies are all varieties of Branta canadensis and called Canada geese. The second group of four subspecies is lumped under Branta hutchinsii and is known as cackling geese. The size difference ranges from the 11-pound Branta c. maxima (giant Canada goose) to the three-pound Branta h. minima (cackling goose).

In my opinion, the bird at Lake Junaluska is Branta h. hutchinsii, or Richardson’s. While it would have been a great find last year, it would have simply been a tiny Canada goose. Because of the split it is now considered a separate species. It is the first Richardson’s I have ever seen at the lake. It was still present on Jan. 3.

Next week I will talk about the Canada split

(Don Hendershot can be reached at ddihen@juno.com)