Happy New Year

 

We get to start a new year-bird list.

 

Last year we birded a lot in January.  This year we’re being more careful, so we only birded a little.  Mostly we drove around and birded where I could just look out straight ahead.  A fun day.  We started our year with about 60 species.  The best birds were:

 

Fulvous whistling ducks (some years these can be hard to get).

 

Solitary sandpiper (harder to find than spotted sandpipers).

 

Ringed kingfisher (One of the three kingfishers to get.  A South Texas specialty.  We always get it, but now we don’t have to look for it.)

 

Northern bobwhite (just because I like quail so much).

 

Wilson’s snipe (these can be hard to find too).

 

 

Citizen Science - We use ebird, a global database to track our sightings.  They make the program free, easy to use, and useful; and in return, they have thousands of birders all over the planet providing free data on what birds are where when.  I love what they do and am an enthusiastic participant.

 

We finished 2015 with 403 species.  That was enough to rank us number 365 in the country.  Ebird is such a success and has grown so much in the last five years.  In 2010 our sightings of 397 birds ranked us 109 in the country; just outside the top 100.  We’re reporting about the same number of birds, but falling way back in the standings.  That’s a pretty good indicator of the growth of their data.

 

(I don’t mean to suggest that we are really good birders.  I would better describe us as enthusiastic and persistent.  Our fairly high ranking, in the top few hundred birders in the country, is not a reflection of how good we are as birders.  There are a lot of people that are way better at finding and identifying birds than we are.  Our success is more a matter of us living in one of the best place in the nation to see a large number of year-round and migrant birds, plus we travel.)

 

With our slow start in the first couple months of 2016 as we continue to be careful and not turn my head, it may be difficult to match our 400 bird standard.  The pace should pick up after we spend the month of May in Colorado though.  We’ll spend the month of June in Arizona and they’ve got a lot of birds there we don’t get in South Texas.  We may get our 400 birds again in 2016 anyway.

 

I’ll report back.