About this time. The Big Day. That’s the day Jon and I go out to see how many species of birds we can identify in 24 hours. Jon maps out the trip and we cover four hundred miles, plus or minus, hitting all the best spots, starting at midnight.
Well, this year is different. We’re sheltering in place. Social distancing. So we decided this year’s big day challenge would be for each of us to sit on their own deck or balcony and see how many species we could each spot from our own house. Two yard-counts. Between the two of us, we wondered if we could see a total of 50 unique species of birds, without either of us leaving home. A Lockdown Big Day.
Jon is in Corpus Christi, north of here, on the coast in the migration zone. I’m down south in The Rio Grande Valley, the more sub-tropical zone. There are birds in common between the two places, like blackbirds and doves, but there are also lots of birds that are unique to one place or the other. Jon started at midnight, listening to migrants flying overhead in the dark and identifying what he could by their flight calls. I don’t have the night migrants here, so I started at 6am, on the deck, listening in the dark to the pauraque’s call.
How did we do? We blew away our best guess of 50 species in a day. Judy and I found 39 from our yard. Judy was there with me most of the day. Jon found 81! He had a great migrant day. Together, the total of 120 birds seen, winnowed down to 99 after we eliminated duplicates. 99 birds. Never would have guessed we could get that many.
A fun day today. We’ll call it a tradition preserved. Glad we did it.
Photos to follow tomorrow.