Bibliographic record
Abstract
The countsThe total of 71 counts conducted this past winter was down by a shocking 12 compared to the previous two winters.Although difficult to explain, there are probably several reasons for this.These include the loss of observers due to an aging demographic and ongoing population movement to larger urban centres.In addition, the 2024-25 weather was especially nasty.Hopefully the number of counts rebounds next year. The weatherAverage minimum and maximum temperatures for the count period (with 2023-24 records in brackets) were -14 to -10 C (-7 to -1 C), wind speeds 6 to 16 km/h (7 to 14 km/h), and snow depths 16 to 37 cm (1 to 5 cm).Weather conditions were thus on average much colder compared to the previous winter.Snow depths were also way up.These conditions had a significant impact on the numbers of birds and mammals recorded. The birdsThe 167,612 birds counted this past winter was almost identical to last year's 167,411.The total number of species at 91, and number of species per count at 18.8, were both lower than last year with respective numbers of 106 and 19.3.Gardiner Dam had the most species on count day with 43; Regina came in second with 42 species. Population trendsWaterfowl were found in the usual variety and overall numbers.There were, however, some population shifts: Canada Goose decreased from last year's 82,882 to 56,881, Cackling Goose from 2,577 to only 28.Mallards, however, increased from 8,016 to 23,382 birds.Gray Partridge rebounded convincingly from 2,014 in winter of 2023-24 to 16,992 this last winter, and Sharp-tailed Grouse from 1,600 to 4,051.These changes are likely due high reproduction which combined with the heavy snow cover to force birds to roadsides, farmsteads and towns where they were more visible.Boreal forest owls, which were nearly absent from the forest fringe last year, staged an incursion into the fringe and beyond.Great Gray Owls led with 24 birds on 14 counts, followed by Northern Hawk Owls with five birds on five counts, and Boreal Owls with four birds on four counts (all including count period).Great Gray and Boreal owls occurred for the first time ever in the extreme southeast on the Estevan count.Results for the finches were mixed.Numbers of the Redpoll decreased from 6,576 to 1,210.White-winged Crossbills were widespread with 886 birds on 29 counts.In contrast, Red Crossbills were very scarce with only 17 birds in two localities (Table 4). New speciesOne new species, a Sage Thrasher, was recorded on the Regina count.This brings the all-time number of species recorded on the Christmas Bird Count to a remarkable 198.Note that we lost a species as the Common and Hoary Redpolls are now considered one species: the Redpoll.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".