The Lancaster County Bird Club (LCBC) has posted an upcoming special program and meeting.

The program will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 10, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area Visitor Center, 100 Museum Road, Stevens.

Ted Nichols, LCBC president, will present "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Christmas Bird Count Season!"

The Christmas Bird Count (CBC), the world's longest-running citizen science survey, began in 1900 as a new tradition to replace Christmas "side hunts," where participants competed to see how many birds they could kill. The Lititz Christmas Bird Count, which covers Middle Creek and the surrounding area, dates to 1905, even before Middle Creek existed.

Nichols, who has been the compiler for the Lititz CBC since 2017, will share how the CBC brings bird enthusiasts together to celebrate conservation and community. He will also tell about the CBC's origins, its influence on birding in Lancaster County and beyond, and how bird occurrences in this area have evolved since the first count was conducted.

The program is free and open to the public. For information, call Nichols at 717-856-3851.

The club will meet on Thursday, Dec. 11, at 7 p.m. at the North Museum of Nature and Science, 400 College Ave., Lancaster. Jeff Larkin and graduate students from Indiana University of Pennsylvania will present "Ornithology Research Update: Forest Birds."

Larkin will introduce two of his graduate students, who will report on their master's level research on ovenbirds and whip-poor-wills. Colin Lynch will present on his studies of the effects of forest structure on ovenbird abundance using LiDAR data. Nick Logan will discuss his use of autonomous recording units and a machine learning classifier to study the relationship between whip-poor-will abundance and time since prescribed fire. These research findings are part of a long-term ongoing effort to better understand the factors that affect the occupancy and abundance of at-risk species and diverse eastern forest bird communities.

Larkin is a biology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an American Bird Conservancy forest bird adviser.

The meeting is free and open to the public. For more information, call 717-856-3851 or 717-725-2717.

For more information about the LCBC, visit http://www.lancasterbirdclub.org, http://www.facebook.com/lancasterbirdclub, or http://www.instagram.com/lancasterbirdclub.