The counted birds: the South Bend Christmas Bird Count

The circle INSB, to the present

The instrument: The systematic bird record of this county is kept by volunteers with tally sheets. South Bend's circle in the National Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count carries the code INSB, and its geography is fixed by the count's own feeder-watch guide: the circle's center stands at the intersection of Washington and Michigan Streets in downtown South Bend, and the count covers the standard fifteen-mile-diameter circle around it — the river from the state line to below the city, Potato Creek's woods and waters on its southwest rim, the lakes and fields of the whole urban county in one winter day. The South Bend-Elkhart Audubon Society, which produces the count — its tally sheet, revised September 2019, survives as the count's working form — has served the Michiana area since 1944, on the society's own statement. Audubon's compiler lists for the 115th and 116th national counts (2014–2016) name the South Bend compiler as Victor Riemenschneider, the count's compiler of long standing in the record reached.

The gap, named: The year of the first South Bend count was not established in the sources reached. Audubon's Christmas Bird Count database holds the circle's year-by-year results back to its founding, and the count's early history sits in that database and in the society's own archives rather than in the open record consulted here; the file prints the circle at its documented size — code, center, compiler, the society's 1944 origin, the standing tally — and names the missing year rather than guessing it. The neighboring count gives the instrument's local scale: the Elkhart County count, run by the same society with the county parks, held its thirtieth annual count in January 2026, and its previous year's teams — seventy volunteers — recorded a record eighty-seven species and 28,031 individual birds. What the South Bend circle's counters find each December — the winter ducks on the open river, the eagles that now belong on the tally as a matter of routine, the falcons downtown — is this section's living appendix, renewed every year.

Sources:

1. National Audubon Society, Christmas Bird Count compiler lists for the 115th and 116th counts — circle INSB, South Bend; compiler Victor Riemenschneider.
2. South Bend-Elkhart Audubon Society — the South Bend CBC feeder-watch guide (2020) and the South Bend count tally sheet (revised September 2019), sbeaudubon.org: the circle center at Washington and Michigan Streets; the society serving Michiana since 1944.
3. South Bend Tribune, 28 December 2025 — the Elkhart County count's thirtieth year and prior-year record (87 species, 28,031 birds, 70 volunteers), printed as the neighboring circle's scale.