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Counted every December · Run B #223
The ongoing census exists, it is older than the town's festival, and this ground sits in the frame between its two nearest circles: the Audubon Christmas Bird Count — begun Christmas Day 1900 by Frank Chapman (the ornithologist, no relation to this county's Chapman) and 26 other conservationists as a count instead of a hunt — is the standing institution, and the South Bend–Elkhart Bird Alliance (the South Bend-Elkhart Audubon Society) runs the two circles that bracket Penn Township. The South Bend Christmas Bird Count, compiled in the Alliance's December 2024 newsletter by Lindsay Grossmann, counts a circle of 7.5-mile radius centered on downtown South Bend, on a Saturday in the count window (14 December in 2024), with feeder counters and field parties tabulating on count evening. Osceola, some nine miles east of downtown South Bend, lies outside that radius — the town is not inside the South Bend circle, and this section does not borrow the circle's birds as the town's. The Elkhart County Christmas Bird Count, the county's 29th annual in the 2024 season and 30th in the season opening January 2026, compiled by Elkhart County Parks director Ronda DeCaire, counts its own circle from the state line to Waterford Mills through Bristol, Middlebury, Goshen and eastern Elkhart, meeting at Ox Bow County Park in Dunlap — east of this ground again. What the two circles establish for this section is the institution and its published yield at the frame where the yield exists: the state summaries credit the South Bend count with genuine rarities — the state's tenth CBC Swainson's Thrush and its first White-winged Crossbill in seven years (120th count), a CBC-first Tennessee Warbler and the state's second Nashville Warbler, 47 years after the first (122nd count) — and the Elkhart circle with heavy waterfowl and gull numbers from its river and landfill parties. The counts are the region's bird census; the township's own birds enter them, if at all, at the circles' edges, unseparated in any published record reached.
The rookery half of the item is a searched negative, printed as such. Chapman lists the herons as visitors in 1880 — great blue, green, night heron, least and American bittern — and no great blue heron rookery seated in Osceola or Penn Township appears in the Indiana DNR record, the county parks record, or the searches run for this section. A rookery is a conspicuous, returning, colonial nesting site, the kind of feature the county's natural-area literature names where it exists; its absence here is therefore printed as a finding at search strength, not as a silence: there is no rookery on this ground in the record reached. The herons themselves stand on Chapman's list and on the Baugo bottoms' present habitat in the county park — as visitors and foragers, not as a nesting colony of record.
Sources: National Audubon Society, Christmas Bird Count record (origin, Christmas Day 1900, Frank Chapman and 26 others; 15-mile-diameter circles; count window 14 Dec.–5 Jan.). South Bend–Elkhart Bird Alliance newsletter, December 2024–January 2025 (South Bend CBC: compiler Lindsay Grossmann; 7.5-mile radius centered on downtown South Bend; count day Saturday 14 Dec. 2024; Elkhart County CBC: compiler Ronda DeCaire; 29th annual; count day 4 Jan. 2025; Ox Bow County Park meeting point). Audubon Indiana CBC summaries — 120th (South Bend Swainson's Thrush; White-winged Crossbill), 122nd (South Bend Tennessee Warbler, a CBC first; Nashville Warbler), 123rd (Elkhart and Bremen circle figures). South Bend Tribune, December 2025 (Elkhart County count's 30th year; 2024 yield of 87 species and 28,031 individual birds by 70 volunteers). Distance statement: the town's position east of the South Bend circle's radius is stated from the circle's published center and radius against the town's mapped position.