High Counts for Birds Occurring in the Upper Cumberland Region of Kentucky and Tennessee

High counts for nearly all of the species recorded in the Upper Cumberland Region are included in the table that follows.  If you have personal records from the UCR for higher counts of any of the species listed below, please send details to this e-mail address:

• birdbfly7101@gmail.com [Stephen J. Stedman]

    Most high counts reflect results from field effort expended in a single day in a single county. The high count may result from the effort of one party or a collection of parties; indeed, more than 120 of the high counts listed below result from collective effort on organized bird counts.  Some exceptions to the "single day, single county" rule follow: some high counts result from effort expended during organized or semi-organized bird counts conducted over a two-day period (most of these derive from work conducted during the late 20th Century); some high counts, especially those deriving from Christmas Bird Counts (CBC), involve data that were collected in more than one county because the CBC circle in which they were collected overlapped two counties; and some high counts were obtained by counting along trails and rivers that run through two counties, the most outstanding example of the latter case being Barren River Lake, an impoundment of the Barren River that includes parts of eastern Allen and western Barren counties, Kentucky,

    High counts are useful in determining the abundance of many species; the higher the high count, usually the more abundant a species may be presumed to be within the Region. It must be recognized, however, that the various groups of species into which the avifauna is categorized do not all share the same abundances.  Raptors, for instance, may be considered common when as few as ten of one species are tallied during a one-day organized bird count with 5 to 10 parties in the field, while many passerines would be considered uncommon if only ten of a species were to be tallied during such a count.  Of course, many species differ in abundance from one season to another, further complicating the task of assigning their overall abundance.  Becoming familiar with the relative abundance of groups of species, as well as with each species within a group during the various seasons of the year, is one of the tasks of the apprentice birder.

    Determining the abundance of each species across the seasons of its occurrence is a task whose fulfillment depends primarily on the existence of data collected during each season of the year; the more data about each species for each season, the better the estimate of its abundance will usually be. Consequently, it is hard to overstate the importance of the organized bird counts that have taken place in the Region since the 1930s, at first in just a few places, but later and especially during the 2000s in many of the little-birded counties of the Region.  By looking at the high count data for Spring Bird Counts and BirdBlitzes, Fall Bird Counts and BirdBlitzes, and Christmas Bird Counts and BirdBlitzes, observers interested in the seasonal abundance of most Regional species are offered information that can be roughly translated into the general abundance of many of those species during the relevant seasons of the year.

    Species accounts for the birds occurring in the Region, discussing, among other matters, the abundance, status, and seasonal occurrence of each, as well as high counts during most seasons, may be accessed via the following page:

• Species Accounts for Birds of the UCR

    Acknowledgment: Some of the high counts listed below are indebted to two sources, as follows:

• High Counts for Birds Identified in Putnam County, Tennessee (Stedman 2006–2020)
• High Counts for for All Species Occurring in Pulaski County, Kentucky [courtesy Roseanna M. Denton]

Table 1. High Counts for birds documented as occurring within the Upper Cumberland Region.

* Rare in UCR; ** Very Rare in UCR.

Key to Sources:

Literature Cited