It’s going to be a warm Christmas. Go count birds.

Yellowknife’s annual Christmas bird count is back, offering a chance to perform manual labour early on a holiday Saturday in December.

The good news is it’s forecast to be a reasonable -15C and they provide the coffee. You bring the binoculars.

Nationwide winter bird enumeration has been a thing for more than a century. Yellowknife’s bird count has taken place annually since 1984.

Operated by Ecology North and Reid Hildebrandt, it involves combing various neighbourhoods to record everything from your standard-issue ptarmigan to your hairiest of woodpeckers.

And when we say manual labour, it could be worse. You do a bunch of walking or driving but beyond that, the aim is simply to identify and count birds and write them down as you go.

By the annual count’s numbers, bird populations are in decline worldwide. In the 1980s, around 1,500 groups collectively counted 100 million birds. In 2022, a leading bird conservation society said 2,600 groups found only 42 million birds.

So what should you expect if you show up at Ecology North’s office on Saturday, December 23 at 8:30am?

Records available online show around a dozen people normally take part in each Yellowknife bird count. Collectively, no Yellowknife Christmas count has ever found more than 17 different species of bird. An average count finds 15 species.

Unsurprisingly, most counts come back with a couple of thousand ravens on their list. (This is not an exaggeration. Last year there were 1,841 ravens recorded, and that was the lowest number in almost a decade.)

But each count tends to turn up something unusual, too.

Last year, it was a shrike, which is a small-ish bird that festively goes around impaling its prey on plant spines (and not a shriek, which is an exclamation of glee on finding a shrike).

The year before that, someone saw a northern goshawk, which only crops up in the data every few years at best.

A good prize this year might be a common grackle, which nobody has reported seeing in a Yellowknife Christmas bird count since the absurdly warm Christmas of 1999.

The results of the count are usually released a few days after it takes place, so we’ll soon know if any unlikely guests turned up.