I thought it would be easy

 

We set a goal of seeing 500 bird species for 2019.  With all that territory we were going to cover, how hard could it be?  We returned home with 447 birds counted.  Since then we’ve added three more: spragues pipit, lilac crowned parrot, and white fronted parrot.  There are a few more birds in Texas we could chase, but there is no way to get another 50 birds from here.

 

The ABA (American Birding Association) lists all the 900+ species of birds (now that they’ve added Hawaii to their area it’s over 1,000) that have been recorded in North America.  Some birds, like house sparrows or pigeons, are everywhere.  They’re really easy to find.  Other birds, like Black-vented Oriole, or Red-legged Honeycreeper, only occur sporadically and are much harder to add to the list.  To help us sort through the difficulty, the ABA classifies all the birds in their area into six different categories: 1 and 2 being the easiest to find, 4 and 5 way less likely, and level 6 impossible, level 6 birds are probably all extinct.  If we just see all the category 1 birds in North America though, all the easy birds, that almost gets us to 500.  All we have to do is drive around and see all the easy birds everywhere, and a few of the ones that are slightly more difficult to find.  Simple!

 

So what happened?  What went wrong?  Why are we only at 450 species for the year?

 

We missed a couple important habitats.  Birding wasn’t really the focus for a lot of the year.  We just drove where we wanted to go to do what we wanted to do.  We didn’t drive down the West Coast south of Seattle to Southern California.  We didn’t visit the east coast north or south of Long Island.  If we really wanted a big year count, we’d have to plan our trips more around birding.

 

And so it comes to this:  Admit defeat or make an heroic effort.  Well, desperate times call for desperate measures!  I’m in South Florida tonight, spending frequent flyer miles, hoping to do some damage to the year-bird list.  Time to knock off a habitat we haven’t been to yet and see where that puts us!