Photo by Glynn Wilson

A cold male cardinal sitting in a redbud tree

The Great Backyard Bird Count of 2006 is over. In Birmingham, Alabama, the cold, wet weather no doubt made the event less fun for the people counting and the birds. But early results show a lot of people counted a lot of birds anyway.

As of late Monday afternoon, 30,553 checklists had been submitted with a total of 549 species observed and a grand total of 3,898,098 birds counted, according to the official birdsource Web site sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society.

I turned in my reports online Monday night and e-mailed myself the results. Here's a summary of the species in these parts.

I reported 18 different species, mostly the usual suspects that hang around all winter. These include an average over the four days of two Cooper's hawks, five mourning doves each day, two red-headed woodpeckers, two downy woodpeckers, two northern flicker woodpeckers (the Alabama yellow-hammer), two blue jays, 40 crows, two Carolina chickadees, two house wrens, two Eastern bluebirds, two American robins, seven Northern cardinals, two Northern mockingbirds, two field sparrows, seven house finches and two house sparrows.

The only surprises were the four American goldfinches that showed up this weekend and about 75 red-winged blackbirds that filled the trees in the backyard on Monday and tried to sneak down and empty the big birdfeeder.