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.