The count today: what the checklists say lives here

1938 — the present lists

The baseline count: Fort Wayne's bird record has a starting line with a date on it. The Fort Wayne Christmas Bird Count of 24 December 1938, printed in Bird-Lore and recovered by the Stockbridge Audubon Society — itself founded in 1899 — recorded 23 species and 897 individual birds in about ten miles on foot: 250 house sparrows, 126 slate-colored juncos, 76 cardinals, one duck hawk (a peregrine, thirty years before the species' collapse), one herring gull. It is the oldest systematic animal count for this ground that, and everything since is an argument with it.

The modern counts: The counts now run in the same season on bigger circles. The Southwest Allen count — Fox Island, the Little River properties, three ACRES preserves — found 49 species on 29 December 2018, against a circle best of 52 on 2 January 2017; the Fort Wayne count circle, fifteen miles across northern Allen and southern DeKalb counties, found 47 species and 3,773 individuals on 1 January 2018, including a snowy owl. The site lists are the deeper record: at least 219 bird species sighted at Fox Island County Park, in the Indiana Audubon's assessment the best migrant-songbird site in northeast Indiana; at Eagle Marsh, 250 species in the compiler's list, at least 243 in eBird's count, and over 255 in the Little River Wetlands Project's current statement — three counts, three dates and compilers, printed as a series rather than averaged. Fort Wayne was designated a Bird Town Indiana by the Indiana Audubon Society in 2014.

The official lists: Beneath the bird counts stand the rosters. The Indiana Natural Heritage Data Center lists over 50 species as endangered, threatened, or rare within Allen County — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, mollusks, insects, fish, and plants together — including the four federally endangered mussels of The mussel beds, above. The DNR's Indiana lists, revised and republished (the mussel list in February 2025, the rare-animal roster in its periodic amendments), are the state's standing answer to the question this section asks. The county's deer harvest — over 1,600 in a recent season on the DNR's data — is the same kind of document from the other direction: a count of the common, kept as carefully as the count of the rare.

The sum: Read whole, the Fort Wayne animal record describes a single long curve drawn twice. First the subtraction: a trade that took the beaver and otter, a bounty system that took the wolf, market hunting and the axe that took the pigeon, the turkey, the deer, and the sturgeon, all of it essentially complete by about 1910. Then, from 1934 forward, the managed return: deer, beaver, turkey, otter, eagle, falcon, sturgeon — every one of them back by a dated human decision, a release, a law, or a nest box, and the coyote and bobcat back on their own by the river corridors. What has not returned is also a matter of record: the wolf, the bear, the panther, and the pigeon, for reasons this section has stated species by species. The ground's first accounts describe a country where the animals outnumbered the people past counting. The checklists describe a city that counts them now, carefully, and finds the list still growing — from the other direction.

Sources:

1. Bird-Lore, Thirty-eighth Christmas Bird Count (the Fort Wayne count, 24 December 1938), as republished in the Stockbridge Audubon Society Update, November 2018; Stockbridge Audubon Society Updates, February 2018 and the Fox Island Alliance Fox Tale, Winter 2018 (the 2017–18 counts).
2. Visit Fort Wayne / Indiana Audubon Society (Fox Island's 219 species; the 2014 Bird Town designation), visitfortwayne.com; Little River Wetlands Project and eBird (the Eagle Marsh totals, as dated in the text).
3. Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council, Allen County comprehensive plan (the Natural Heritage Data Center's 50-plus rare species in Allen County), in.gov; Indiana DNR species lists (mussels, revised February 2025; the rare-animal roster).