We lost a life bird today. That happens though. Things change. Sometimes what was once one bird is split into two or three separate species. Sometimes separate species are combined back into one bird. I don’t know who the great minds of birding are; but they promulgate these rules and we birders, we’re an orderly lot, we follow them.
Today we lost a bird off our life list. It wasn’t for a classification reason like I just described though. It was due to an arithmetic error. An arithmetic error in our birding software. I just upgraded to the next version. To make sure all the sightings we’ve recorded over all these years migrated properly to the new program, I called up the life list. To my surprise, it wasn’t 505, it was 504. One bird gone. No problem. I compared the new life-list to the old life-list, bird by bird. At ten birds they were even. At twenty birds they were one off. I checked off the individual birds one by one between ten and twenty. They all matched. The difference turned out to be that the old bird list skipped the number 16. It jumped from 15 to 17; right there between cattle egrets and reddish egrets. A computer program that can’t count? Didn’t expect that!
Tonight we’re getting the rainstorm we’ve been waiting for since last November. Nice powerful thunderstorm. Now the electricity is out and the rain has settled down to slow and steady. Here’s hoping the electricity starts up and the rain keeps up.
