Welcome 2019!!

Happy New Year!! 🎉  We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and had a chance to get out and look for some birds.

We spent the last  6 nights glamping in the New Year at the Pedder Bay RV Resort & Marina. Glamping is an annual thing for us to do and a great way to unwind after our hectic Christmas volunteering schedule with CFAX Santas Anonymous. January 1st is also our 3rd birding anniversary although we really didn't kick birding into high gear until the fall of 2018.  

I don't believe in New Year's resolutions because a) why wait until January 1st each year to make a change in your life and b) most resolutions are unreachable because the change is too drastic or unrealistic. If I said "I'm going to learn how to identify seagulls in 2019" I have already created a problem .... because there are no seagulls to identify!

Goals are much better because they can be adjusted due to a number of factors like procrastination, laziness, not liking the goal after really thinking about it or if the goal involves great financial hardship which would require getting a second job and that is not going to happen because we are trying to retire! 

For the past couple of months we have been thinking of what birding activity goals (adjustable whenever we like) that we would like to accomplish in 2019 so here are a few:

The first one starts January 1st and we're calling it our "First 200 Big Year", which simply is to record 200 species which on paper sounds easy but can we do it? We finished 2018 with 148 species observed (over 3 years) which means that we'll have to find at least 52 new "lifers" throughout the new year and all the ones we've seen before again. At this time we have no plans to bird outside British Columbia so we'll have to find approximately 38% of the 524 species typically found in the province to reach 200. We have no idea if we can reach this goal but we have a couple of trips planned that might help in the count. In any case, we'll have fun during the year trying.

We are planning on attending a 3-day Introductory Bird Monitoring and Banding workshop coordinated by the Rocky Point Bird Observatory and held at the Royal Roads University in early spring if the course is being offered again for 2019. Completion of this course would be an asset to some of our long term birding goals and increase our bird "nerd" factor.

In late spring we're planning a birding / car camping trip into the Okanagan region of the province for about 10 days which will definitely help in our big year count and of course allow us to visit many wineries along the way!

Starting in late July we'll be volunteering at the Rocky Point Bird Observatory with their Fall Migration Program which runs through the end of October. We've done this the past two years primarily focusing on the Northern Saw-whet Owl program but this year we'd also like to help more with the daylight hours passerine migration monitoring program.

Sometime in August we hope to be heading to the beautiful Tatlayoko Valley in BC's West Chilcotin to volunteer at the  Tatlayoko Lake Bird Observatory for a couple of weeks. Not only are we excited about the possibility of working at the site to see and handle the species (some new to us ... keeping the 200 in mind) that are studied there but maybe also the opportunity to see other amazing creatures such as grizzly bears and other mammals that we don't have on Vancouver Island. Sidebar, Robyn works for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation which has numerous amazing conservation programs including protecting grizzly bears in the Great Bear Rainforest. This is a trip that we really are excited about for so many reasons.

At some point in 2019 we also will start planning our first out of the country birding trip to Central America in 2020 or early 2021. We've heard (podcasts) and read about so many amazing birding destinations in Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama that we definitely want to include a big trip in the near future.

Okay 🙄..... one New Year's resolution that both of us are going to attempt. We are going to see how long into 2019 that each of us can complete the eBird “Checklist a Day” challenge. Sounds simple enough - submit an average of at least one complete eBird checklist per day in 2019. Or to push ourselves we can also try the eBird “Checklist Streak” for 365 consecutive days. 

Bad Weather, We Still Found Birds!

Storm after storm after storm! That’s been the trend for the past couple of weeks on the south coast of British Columbia after a relatively mild and dry fall. Not only is it raining cats and dogs but the near hurricane force winds offshore and the fact that we work full time has dampened our birding opportunities. We really should just quit our jobs and go on a global big year!!

We did manage to spend most of last Saturday on a big birding walk (20 km) around the Victoria, BC inner harbour and waterfront even though the winds were blowing pretty good. Our expectations weren’t very high but to our surprise we managed to see 25 species including a Common Murre which was our #146 lifer in the lee of the wind behind the Ogden Point breakwater. Several species like small flocks of Buffleheads, Harlequin Ducks and Double-crested Cormorants were seen several hundred feet offshore bobbing up and down in the cresting waves.

Say Cheese!!

Of course, there were lots of gulls trying to just stay airborne in the turbulent wind currents and many were just hanging out for tourists like us to take their pictures.

Glaucous-winged Gull? What do you think?

Speaking of gulls …. They make our minds hurt with so many species, juvenile, 1st winter, 2nd winter, adult nonbreeding, adult breeding etc. etc. We might just start calling them BWGJ’s (Big White Grey Job’s) from now on. Or maybe it's time that we invested in a copy of the book Gulls Simplified by Pete Dunne and Kevin Karlson? At least we’ve stopped calling them seagulls!

The 2018 Bird Studies Canada Christmas Bird Count for Kids took place on the weekend at our “patch” which is just over the backyard fence. We made sure our feeders were well stocked for the usual “crew” of birds that visit our yard many times a day and completed an eBird checklist of the patch earlier in the morning seeing or hearing 22 species including a Merlin which was our lifer #145! Having only used eBird for the past month our species total in our patch (Beckwith Park) is now at 34 with the top eBirder having recorded 68 species. The bar is set high but it sure would be nice to get that top spot in our local patch.

I finished reading Noah Strycker's Birding Without Borders last week and found it truly inspiring. Noah's account of birding for 365 days straight in 2015 with the sole purpose of breaking the birding "Big Year" world record was amazing. All the planning, the miles upon miles of travel, the never ending getting up before dark only after a few hours of sleep and not knowing what the day would bring made for an exciting adventure that I couldn't stop reading. If you haven't read this book, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Christmas Day is now less than a week away which also means that we're getting closer to spending Boxing Day through to New Year's Day at the Pedder Bay RV Resort & Marina. Pedder Bay is also one of the sites that the Rocky Point Bird Observatory uses for its migration program which we volunteer at during the summer and fall months. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we'll get some great birding days while we're there.

Merry Christmas and happy birding!!

Mark & Robyn

How Many Birds Is That? - eBird

Until about a month ago we never kept track of the birds that we have seen or heard. We knew that we had seen and photographed a lot of birds but there was never a reason or desire to keep a list, and then we watched a movie called “The Big Year” starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson .

Curious, I wondered exactly how many birds we had seen since becoming official bird nerds on January 1, 2016 so I went about spending numerous hours creating an Excel spreadsheet with sighting dates from my photographs metadata and included the 4-letter alpha code for every bird using an Institute for Bird Populations publication by Peter Pye and David F. DeSante. Further tweaking of our list included the location of many of the birds first sighting and gave them “lifer” designations for the ones that we could confirm by date. I then started to amend the list by adding future sighting dates so that we could track species migration patterns of “our crew” that visit the feeders in the yard. I was so proud of what we had accomplished thinking that we were on to something by keeping a list of birds like this. This must be what being a true birder was all about!

On our recent birding excursion to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Delta, BC we used Rite in the Rain notebooks to record the species including the number seen and I updated the Excel spreadsheet (that I had pre-loaded into the cloud) on my iPhone while on the ferry back home. After finishing our third excursion to the buffet and while Googling for bird checklists we happened to stumble on a free app called eBird. Quickly we downloaded the app and fumbled through the mobile interface trying to understand how to use it and even more, why we would want to use it! 

Over the next couple of days, we both completed the free on-line Cornell Lab eBird Essentials course, but I still had one concern. Would we spend more time looking at our iPhone's in the field than looking for birds? The eBird app looked great but would it be practical in the field?

Our first field testing of eBird included using notepads to record our sightings and then we entered the data into eBird once back in the car or leaving a habitat. I timed this process and found on average it took less than 3 minutes to complete a checklist, but could the whole process be streamlined further? The last few weeks we have recorded our sightings in eBird as they were discovered, and we noticed that we are now seeing more species than we normally would have because how we bird has also changed. Now we find ourselves stopping in a habitat for a few minutes to observe the “what’s that?” and are seeing other species that in the past we would have missed.

Not only have we found that the mobile eBird app is very easy to use after completing the eBird Essentials course, but the free Merlin Bird ID app can also be directly accessed while using eBird, eliminating the need to carry printed field guides. It gets even better because the app checklists sync with the eBird website and this is where the data is shared with other eBird users all around the world. There are so many great features and reasons to use eBird and if you haven’t it might be worth looking at for yourself.

Not that we are interested birding by numbers however currently there are 10,417 species worldwide in the eBird database and Robyn and I have 142 and 143 lifers respectively (I’ve seen a Barn Owl) which works out that we have seen 1.37% of all worldwide species. This only means one thing …. Time to get birding!!!

eBIrd Rare Bird Alert!!

We are new users of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird which has a ton of great features for birders including the ability to receive daily Rare Bird Alerts by email which I also subscribed to. I'm not a big fan of subscription email notifications in general but for rare bird sighting opportunities close to home I actually look forward to receiving my daily update. I'll touch base about eBird a bit more in another post but if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it if you want to take your birding experience to the next level, and it's totally free!!

Harris's Sparrow Migration Route

Last week, the daily alerts noted a particularly rare Harris’s Sparrow had been seen several times at the Nanaimo River Estuary. What made this rare bird kind of special is that it is several hundreds of miles off course from its normal migration route through central North America.

Robyn and I have visited the estuary several times before on foot and by kayak and being only an hour and a half from home we decided to do an early morning trip to see if we might get lucky finding this rare traveler and possibly even a Short-eared Owl. In any case it would give us the opportunity to see what other species were there at this time of year.




Robyn’s mom decided to join us for the day to see what this birding stuff that we have been doing so much of was all about. The forecast was for rain starting around noon but we figured we might be able to squeeze in a couple hours of birding so we were on the road at 06:00 am with the goal to arrive at the estuary just after sunrise.

As predicted (ya right!) rain drops started to fall as we arrived at the estuary so I grabbed my camera gear and headed out of the car quickly leaving Robyn to give her mom a crash course on birding while walking around the trails. For the first hour, as the rain showers came and went, I spotted several of the expected LBJ's which we added to our eBird checklist but I didn't see anything resembling the Harris's Sparrow.

Just about the time that my camera gear was getting soaked and I was going to call it a day the rain eased up and I decided to take one last circuit around some low marsh grasses and that's when I saw it!! As it flew past me and into a hawthorn bush I realized it wasn't anything like any of the other LBJ's that I had seen so far that day.

Robyn and her mom had caught up to me and to our delight the little sparrow came into clear head-on view displaying its white breast and the key field marks of a black throat, chin and crown. Lifer #141 - the Harris's Sparrow confirmed and entered into our eBird checklist along with 17 other species.

Since we were in the area and the rain had stopped we decided to visit the popular Buttertubs Marsh and had an unexpected Lifer #142 sighting of a small flock of Cackling Geese within a very large flock of Canada Geese. Several raptors were spotted hunting the migrants that were inhabiting the marsh but thankfully we didn't get to see any successful sorties. Our checklist total of 24 species for the marsh was what I considered to be a pretty good day considering the weather. 

It wasn't quite lunchtime yet so we decided to go check out Neck Point Park to see what shorebirds might be around. Arriving in the parking lot we spotted a specie that seemed to be very popular with some of the park users. Santa Claus had flown in for the day for photo opportunities for the kids. I wonder if the folks at eBird would have seen it humorous if I had added him to our checklist with a confirmation photo? LOL

As predicted, the rain started just near the end of our walk around the park but one of the highlights was spotting a soggy looking Barred Owl which I think might be the first one that Robyn's mom had ever seen. We finished off with 8 species of mostly shorebirds and headed off to celebrate a great day of birding (40 species) at the Firehouse Grill which by the way, if you are ever in Nanaimo, BC has the best sushi on the planet!! 

Bird Nerds!

Welcome to the “What’s That?” Birders blog!! Over the past 3 years birding has gradually evolved for us to the point that I think it is fair to say we are now "Bird Nerds"! 

How we qualified ourselves as bird nerds is pretty easy to answer. It's simple ... we think about birds most of the day, look for birds as we go about our daily activities, record our sightings and have established a Lifer List (140 to date), use several birding apps including eBird, Merlin Bird ID and Audubon as well as others, are subscribed to Rare Bird email alerts, listen to birding podcasts like Out There With the Birds and Birdchick Podcast, have several bird books on our desks plus a Northern Saw-whet Owl coffee mug on mine, have and maintain several feeders in the yard for "our crew", participate in the Project FeederWatch program, Robyn wants a bird cam for the back yard so she can watch "the crew" on line while she's at work, we volunteer in the migration monitoring program with the Rocky Point Bird Observatory, have dedicated birding gear such as Vortex binoculars, really good rain gear and in my case use telephoto camera gear to capture images of our sightings, typically walk around 25 kilometers or 15 miles during the week birding, are planning trips to go birding/volunteer in other parts of Canada and other countries and now I'm writing a blog to journal our adventures! Ya ...... I think we are BIRD NERDS!! 

Seriously though, we are just a couple of amateur birders who love this amazing pastime so if you have any "must do's" or "must see" suggestions please feel free to comment or send us an email at markbyrnephotography@gmail.com