Grand Isle's annual Christmas bird count has begun - early, as always.
This year the National Audubon Society's bird count on the Gulf Coast is especially important: It comes eight months after the BP oil spill set off panic in the hearts of ornithologists and bird lovers across the nation. The counts will be used by scientists tracking the health of the Gulf's bird populations.
Holbrook and Brantley are among 60,000 bird watchers across the Western Hemisphere who count birds during the winter holidays and submit checklists for the Audubon Society's Christmastime bird tally. The society began doing the annual count 110 years ago. Bird count records go back to 1949 for Grand Isle.
The two birders pitch their tripods in the sand and start looking. They start early so they can do as much birding possible while the birds are active.
"A black-bellied plover," Holbrook, a birder since age 8, says, leaning into his telescope.
"I got a herring gull down here and there were some other gulls, which could have been ring-billeds, I think," says Brantley, the Grand Isle count's group leader.
"Yeah, I saw a few ring-billed gulls, a few herring gulls go by, a Caspian tern, a Forster's tern; I saw three black skimmers out there."
"I had a dozen brown pelicans go by."
Brantley, who has been counting birds on Grand Isle for 15 years, is upbeat about what he saw Wednesday. It's his first time down here since the oil spill.
"It looks about the same to me," he says.
Louisiana is one of the nation's richest and most important bird habitats and the oil spill jeopardized this national treasure.
The Audubon Society plans to study this winter's 65 bird counts along the Gulf of Mexico for clues about the oil spill and its effects on bird populations. Ten Gulf Coast bird count locations were oiled, said Greg Butcher, the society's conservation director.
In the wooded back side of Grand Isle, surrounded by bird sounds, another group of birders is scouting the bushes, tree tops and underbrush.
"Louisiana is a place that is right in the middle of bird migration," explains Phil Stouffer, a bird expert and professor at Louisiana State University.
In a patch of live oaks and palmetto, his group finds an array of chirping migrants staying for the winter.
"It would be really complicated for these birds to be directly affected (by the spill)," Stouffer says. "They would have to be eating something out of the marsh that was contaminated."
He quickly adds: "But I don't think we really know to what extent birds are getting exposure at sub-lethal levels. I don't think you should say we dodged a bullet just because you don't see dead birds laying all over the place."
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that about 3,000 birds were found visibly oiled and about 2,000 of those died during the spill. Some 4,000 other birds not visibly oiled were found dead. Still, the spill appears to have killed a lot fewer birds than first feared.
But Stouffer says it's far too early to know whether birds, especially marsh dwellers, are being harmed by the oil. Perhaps, they will have a hard time breeding in the spring. Or they could become more vulnerable to parasites and pathogens, he says.
"It's just the superficial look that we're getting with this count, but it is useful," he said.
There's some excitement in the woods: They've just found a bird spotted only once before on the island during a Christmas count.
"That's a Nashville warbler," birder Erik Johnson, an LSU bird specialist, says excitedly.
