The retirement this year of Bob Domagalski as Christmas Bird Count Compiler for the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, a position to which he had devoted 14 years, is cause not only to stop and say thanks to Bob, but also to reflect on the role the Society has played in this oldest of all large-scale citizen science endeavors.

From its formation in 1939, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology has sponsored Christmas Bird Counts and had the results published in the society's magazine The Passenger Pigeon. That first count year (1939) there were 12 count circles with 42 field birders reporting 91 species. Over the span of 74 years the WSO has published data on 4,901 count circles with 57,152 contributing field birders. The number of species found over this period on count days was 236 with an additional 3 species found during count weeks.

Although there have been Wisconsin- centered circles reporting to what today is the National Audubon Society database since 1900, the majority of counts conducted by WSO were never shared with Audubon. This lack of sharing was due mainly to the fee that NAS charged birders to participate.

Starting with the 2012 CBC, Audubon ended this practice. Since then, WSO has shared all its count information with Audubon. With fees eliminated, NAS in 2012 had 107 new circles that had never before been reported - 43 from Wisconsin alone.

For 2012, Wisconsin contributed information from 113 circles. In 2013 it was 110 circles. Of all the U.S. states, the provinces and territories of Canada, plus all other contributing countries in the Western Hemisphere, the only entity to enter more count circles than Wisconsin was the much larger and more populous state of California.

Neighboring states such as Illinois (with 62), Minnesota (68), and Michigan (68) had barely half the number in Wisconsin. Such large and well-birded states as Florida (with 70 counts), New York (72), Pennsylvania (74), and Texas (109) had fewer circles.

A number of WSO members also pushed to have entered into Audubon's CBC database the more than half of all Wisconsin CBCs that were maintained only as paper copies in WSO's Archives and not previously shared. This effort was spearheaded by former WSO President Noel Cutright, who saw it coming to fruition when he died last November.

Working with Domagalski, Bill Mueller, who succeeded Cutright as director of the Western Great Lakes Bird and Bat Observatory, secured grant funding this year to scan all that paper data and forward it to NAS. This information is now or will soon be entered into the Audubon database. The result? Wisconsin will have the richest and most in-depth Audubon data of any place in the world.

Domagalski succeeded William L. Hilsenhoff as WSO's CBC compiler in 2000; Hilsenhoff had compiled the counts from 1965 through 1999. In 2000, the number of state counts was 92; in 2001 the number increased to 96 and in 2002 WSO reached the 100 count mark. Since then, there have been 100 or more counts reported each year (except for 96 in 2004 and 99 in 2005). The record high for counts was set in 2012 with 113.

Since 1997 the number of species found in a single year has never dropped below 140, the low being 142 in the cold count of 2010. The high total was 160 in 2012.

Domagalski's account of the 2013 Wisconsin CBCs appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of The Passenger Pigeon.