At the beginning of the year we set a couple of personal goals for 2019. 1) participate in the eBird "Checklist a Day" challenge and 2) try to complete a personal goal of an eBird Checklist for 365 consecutive days. Goal number 1 is not going to be a problem because it is an average of one checklist a day (not consecutive) and we are well on our way to completing this challenge in a couple of months.
Goal number 2 however had to come to an end because we found that juggling full time work, short daylight times and other life factors that get in the way have started to effect our love for birding and the quality of the birding experience was decreasing rapidly. Birding just to keep the daily checklist streak going shouldn't be about that, the birds and the experience should be reason why we go birding and not vise versa. For me, January was a grind especially through the week when I visited a few of the hotspots around work and day after day saw the same species of birds in a very short amount of time and never got to really appreciate what I was looking at. Yes, I did complete 31 consecutive days of birding in January (38 if you include days from December) but unless we win the lottery, retire or go on a really long birding vacation 38 days will be our longest consecutive streak for now. WOW!! I already feel the pressure to go birding just to complete a checklist has gone writing this!
January was a great month of birding for us with all of the new lifers and most of the birds counting towards our goal of seeing 200 species for 2019 happening on the weekends. Here's our totals.
2019 eBird Stats (January)
Mark - 98 species, 10 lifers, 81 checklists, 38 day streak
Robyn - 96 species, 9 lifers, 74 checklists, 29 day streak
For the most part we did find many of the birds that we specifically searched for on our weekend travels. eBird's Year Need Alerts and Rare Bird Alerts were invaluable to the numbers that we have recorded to date. There was only one bird that we didn't locate and it was a rarity that would have been nice to add to our lifer lists, a Dusky Thrush.
It seems that we were just a day or two late to see the Dusky Thrush that was seen for several days located just outside of Nanaimo, BC. We did get to meet several birders from different parts of Canada and the U.S. who had traveled long distances just to get a glimpse of the rare Dusky Thrush. Our 1.5 hour car drive seemed pale in comparison to what lengths some of the other birders went to just to see special rarity.
Although we didn't locate the thrush we did manage to see 5 rare Palm Warblers that in the same area.
Great news!! We have been accepted into the Rocky Point Bird Observatory Bird Banding Workshop taking place in March. We are really excited about participating in this workshop because it will really expand our identification skills which will help in some of our birding goals that we have planned for this year and in years to come.
Until next time ..... Happy birding!!
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