Join us for some birding fun at Holiday Beach Conservation Area. This outing will be focused on Christmas Bird Counts (CBCs). If you have always been interested in participating in a CBC or if you want to brush up on how CBCs work, this pop-up is for you! We will be counting all the birds we see during the pop-up and talk about what how to sign up for the CBCs in Essex County, as well as how to collect and submit data.

We will meet at 8 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 4, at the entrance parking lot to Holiday Beach Conservation Area and make our way through the park including the main road, hawk tower and other trails. The outing will be from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. (noon), but you can leave at any time. The parking area and main road are paved and trails are dirt paths on flat terrain. We will station someone both on the hawk tower and at the base of the hawk tower to observe birds on the marsh. Public washrooms are closed during the off-season in the park.

Provincial COVID-19 guidelines will be followed during the outing and a written safety plan is available upon request. It is expected that those in attendance at pop-up outings are fully vaccinated.

Pop-ups are intended to be informal, casual and social, and will take place at various locations around Essex County and Windsor. We will continue to provide an array of days and times to accommodate members with different availabilities. They will usually be announced a week before the date of the pop-up. They will not have an official leader but rather we hope those in attendance will share their own knowledge since there is such a wide range of experiences and interests within the club membership. One or more members of the Membership Committee will be in attendance to meet at the start of the pop-up. We will also spend some time using the iNaturalist app and the ECFNC iNaturalist Project, so if you have a smart device, we encourage you to bring it along to help identify anything interesting we find and contribute to the project.

If there is light rain, we will go ahead with the outing but if it is storming, the outing will be cancelled.