Desk-bound Nature Lover

My Blog: Occasional postings about the joys of birding, hiking, camping, and sightseeing.

My life: I spend most of my days in offices, looking at a computer screen, and waiting for those few weekends when I can get out and enjoy some remnant of our precious natural heritage. But, boy, do I live on those weekends!

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Little Big Year

For any readers of this who are not familiar with birding, among birders a “big year” refers to the practices of putting almost every other aspect of your life on hold and dedicating an entire year to trying to see as many species of birds as possible, usually within some defined area such as the United States and Canada. Some people get really competitive with their big years, and some try to set some sort of record, like seeing the most birds ever in one year in the United States and Canada while spending less than $10,000.

Owing to my wife’s total lack of interest in birding, and her understandable insistence on having a stable income for our family, it is certain that I will never do a big year. But 2004 was probably the closest I will ever come to doing a big year, so, borrowing from the name of one of my favorite novels (see profile), I am calling 2004 my Little Big Year.

I started birding in 1982 and gave it up in the early nineties after my first child was born. Well, I didn’t give it up completely. I still did it once or twice a year, or sometimes three or four times a year.

Then, in September, 2003, in need of a work, I took a temporary position in the San Francisco area and was spending nearly all my time away from my family. For about a year I was in California almost all the time except for about one weekend a month. Even since then I have been spending quite a bit of time in California, being there about one weekend a month. Since I’m an hourly consultant, I only have to work forty hours a week. Hence, when I am out in California I have a lot of free time on my hands. Even with all this free time, I didn’t really start birding in earnest until about March of 2004. Before then I was doing a lot of California sightseeing, but only a little casual birding. But once I got started birding again, I really got started.

2004 was probably my biggest year of birding since before I got married. In fact, I have probably done more birding then in all the other fourteen and a half years since getting married, all put together. In 2004, I estimate, I went birding on somewhere between 60 and 70 occasions, including stops on the way home from work. In addition to birding in my home state of Illinois and my favorite state of California, I birded during family vacations in Alberta and South Carolina. During 2004 I got sixty life-list birds: two in Alberta, one in South Carolina, and fifty-seven in California. This is in addition to twelve others I got in California in 2003. Only in 1983, the year I first started birding, did I get more life-list birds.

I counted up how many species I saw in 2004 and came up with 217. (This is a retrospective count, and therefore I probably missed a few.) To put this in perspective, it took to 1990 for me to get that many birds on my life-list. In other words, I found more birds in 2004 than in the first 30 years of my life all put together. On the other hand, a real big year is considered a success if you see at least 650 species.

At the end of 2004, my life-list had 393 bird species in total. Since then, in 2005, I have added eight more species to my life-list. My 400th life-list bird was the Canyon Wren, seen in Pinnacles National Monument in February of this year.

In 2004 my single best day in terms of life-list birds was April 10, when I got six life-list birds along the bay shore in Haywood, California. These were the Black-necked Stilt, the American Avocet, the Long-billed Curlew, the Marbled Godwit, the Short-billed Dowitcher, and the Rufus-crowned Sparrow. Two days of birding which got me five life-list birds were July 10 at Mines Road and Del Valle Recreation Area near Livermore, California, and August 14 at Pillar Point, along the Pacific cost of the San Francisco Peninsula.

The most productive places for me in terms of life-list birds were Yosemite National Park where I got seven life-list birds on two trips: the Mountain Quail, California Gull, Williamsons Sapsucker, White-headed Woodpecker, Cassin’s Vireo, Townsend’s Solitaire, and Black-headed Grosbeak; and Half Moon Bay, where I also got seven on several trips: the White-tailed Kite, Eared Grebe, Peregrine Falcon, Western Sandpiper, Red-necked Phalarope, and Common Murre.