Birding

 

Mostly it’s about sitting and watching birds; or walking and watching birds.  Sometimes though, it’s about numbers.

 

We have a 600 bird milestone coming up.  Now we have to figure out how to define it.  We have 599 birds on our World life list.  One more bird and we’re there.  That’s not much of a big deal though.  There are over 10,000 species to see worldwide.  We will have seen 6% of them.

 

Most of our birding has been in North America, so we should pick a different measure.  We have 595 birds on our North American life list.  That‘s no big deal either though.  The North American bird list includes Mexico.  There are over 2,000 possible species.  We could probably take one trip through Mexico and double our count.

 

There are about 1,000 species possible in the ABA area; North America excluding Mexico.  There are about 925 species possible in the lower 48.  We should either go to Canada and Alaska, or use the lower 48 count as our measure.  We have 587 species on our lower 48 list.

 

We’ll get to 600.  We just have to figure out when to declare it.  Then we can move on to our next milestone.