Mostly, I was thinking about infosec projects, data analysis projects, how soon I needed to get firewood delivered, and the huge goodness of that cinnamon roll. Then the birds began to trickle in. I didn't end up with a particularly long checklist, though 30 species counts as good, this time of year, and it took a long time to get there. Hence my expectation of a late night.
Since May, I have been wondering if I were having a Big Year. Not in the sense of the 2011 film of the same title, and certainly not in the sense of what fellow Oregonian Noah Strycker is up to. Which is to see 5000 birds in a year, and he has already beaten the previous record of 4341, with a bird named the Sri Lanka Frogmouth, of all things.
The only thing we have in common is having something like a quarter of the year left.
What is my current idea of a Big Year? 111 species. Seriously. A lot of birders are all about lists and counts. There's certainly a place for that. I use it as a rough-and-ready metric for how much I am learning. My goal is to better understand this very cool place that I inhabit. More species, if careful records are kept, means a better understanding of the flow of seasonal change, etc. All very Thoreau.
But I don't know how many birds might be on my life list, and that's an important thing for many birders. I know it is at least 250, and suspect that it is more like 275 or something. That may seem like a lot of birds, but it is well under half of the species recorded just in Oregon, which I think is around 600. There are probably counties with higher numbers.
As a birder, I pretty much suck. I'm fine with that, as I can still use counts as motivator. Something to get me off my ass, outdoors, and learning about something other than infosec. Previous to this year, there was no month in which I had found 70 species in the yard. This year:
- April: 72
- May: 76
- August: 73
- September 71 (so far)
Today, I picked up on something called a Warbling Vireo amongst a tree full of Bushtit. Neither of these species is spectacular -- far from it. Being able to do it means, to me, that I am slowly getting a clue as to the subtle things that are happening all around me. I'm learning, I can more fully appreciate bird migration, etc.
I mostly use eBird for record-keeping these days. Imperfect as hell, for reasons that I will probably get into in subsequent posts. But they do supply another powerful motivator: bar charts. Seriously. Read eBird: Engaging Birders in Science and Conservation. It worked on me, in that I am constantly looking at bar charts, and targeting birds that I either know or suspect should be here, but have not been able to find. Filling in that last blank spot, turning Belted Kingfisher into a year-round bird, motivates me. Then it might get deeper, as you start to think about the shape of the graph. Does a bar chart begin to show activity in March, gradually, or explode into being in April? How about that unexplained absence in Q3 of July? How did it vary in 2013, 14, and 15? Might weather have affected it? If so, how?
This is a bottomless pit of learning, the scope of which is best appreciated with a cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll, and a complete absence of IT security stuff. Well, except for the data analysis bits, which is common to both. And much else, these days.
So how is my yard Big Year going? Second-best, so far. At 109 species, I've beaten my 2014 record of 107 species, but I am still one shy of my all-time 2013 record of 110. Even with a full quarter of the year to go, it isn't (quite) a certainty. If you are just looking at your yard, travel is out. And it gets progressively harder to find anything new for the year. Today I added a new bird for the first time since August, and that was the first since probably May. That said, I suspect that I am going to stonk my previous best, and finish the year at 114 or so. Unless life intrudes, which it often does.
