Two boats on the same body of water. Well, those clever devils at eBird. They figured out how to make a boat-race out of birding! The bird scientists there want to get all the data they can about bird populations, so they built this tracking program for people to use online. Enter all your sightings in eBird and it tracks them for you. You can keep track of your life list, year list, and see where other people have reported birds you want to see. There are all sorts of benefits to using it. The cleverest innovation though, is the “Top 100” feature. At any time, you can click the top 100 and get it by country, state, or county. You can see exactly how your sightings stack up against everyone else’s. And the more we try to beat each other, the more data they get! I’m not going to end up as the top birder in anything. I’m not devoted enough for that. I did decide to see if I could break into the top 100 nationally though. The best time to do that might be at the start of the year before everyone else gets too far ahead, so we’ve declared the first week of the year to be a Big Week. We’re going to bird everything within reach the first week. There are plenty of crazies out there who’ll go out and get the biggest count they can the first day of the year. We got a slow start and ended up number 381 for the day. We’re doing a casual Big Week. We don’t get up and leave before dawn. We sit and have coffee together every morning before we start out. We kept after it though and ended up number 206 after the second day. Yesterday we drove out to completely different habitat and it paid off. Number 128 after 3 days. I did pretty well today. (Judy stayed home to rest up. Still has that darn flu.) The Top 100 sightings update overnight, so tomorrow morning I’ll get to look and see where today’s effort put us. Tomorrow we’re headed for South Padre Island. That will be our first trip to the coast and that should add a lot of saltwater birds. I definitely feel a place on the leader board coming up! 107 species so far for the year. We’re down into the 200s to go!
A nice long day-trip
In the minivan. Falcon State Park. Two hour drive. A picnic. Took the dogs. It started out cold and ended up warm. Finished the day making use of the rear-end stadium seats along the Rio Grande.
Picked up a few more birds along the way, including golden-fronted woodpecker, hooded oriole, and greater roadrunner.
98 birds for the year. Only 302 to go!
Picked up a few more birds along the way, including golden-fronted woodpecker, hooded oriole, and greater roadrunner. 98 birds for the year. Only 302 to go! Poor Judy
She just figured out she has the H1N1 Swine Flu. Wow. Who ever knew I’d end up living with someone who has the Swine Flu!
Got a few more birds today
Now we’re at 82 for the year, including snowy egret, loggerhead shrike, American kestrel, osprey, couch’s kingbird, inca dove, green jay, and altimira oriole. 
Only 318 to go!
Only 318 to go! A new year of birding begins
The life-list is slow to grow. We still keep the life list, but every January we start a new year-list. It’s a lot easier to get year-birds than it is life-birds. Every bird we see today is a new bird! We expect to see about 400 species each year. The count often falls a little below that, as it did again this year. We finished with 380. Our North American life list is at 587. Our friend Jon did a Big Texas year. He got all the birds he could without leaving the state. His goal was 500 species, and he finished at 500 exactly! That’s quite an accomplishment. With all the traveling we do, we get 400 or so each year. He got 500 in one state! So here we go again. It was a cold drizzly day today. Judy and I birded mostly from the car. We got 57 birds, including a vermilion flycatcher looking like a Christmas ornament, a perfectly camouflaged common pauraque, a pack of preening plain chachalacas, a ring-necked duck, wilson’s snipe, anhinga the snake-bird, and sandhill cranes in a cow pasture. 
Only 343 birds to go!
Only 343 birds to go!