It’s that time of year again. The time when the leisurely pursuit of bird-watching turns into a competitive sport. The Big Day! How many species can we record in 24 hours? We start tonight at midnight. This hasn’t been an intense year of birding. Judy and I are only at 277 species for the year. We haven’t birded up here at Corpus Christi at all. It’ll be interesting to see how many species we have after I bird with Jon for an entire day tomorrow.
We don’t usually get to see white-throated sparrows
We’re always on the lookout, but most years we don’t see them at all; they just don’t come this far south in The Valley. But while we were in San Antonio a couple weeks ago. 
We got lucky.
We got lucky. I was trying to figure out if this was a brown-crested or great-crested flycatcher
I was thinking brown-crested, because great-crested flycatchers have more rufous on the tail. Then it flew. 
Great-crested flycatcher! I’ve been thinking about role models
We’re all role models whether we mean to be or not. We don’t get to choose who we influence; it’s unavoidable. As kids, younger kids are watching and maybe modeling. As young adults it’s our kids watching what we say and do, even as we’re finding our own way about what we think and feel. Not only our children were watching, but their friends that were around the house were watching as well. Maybe we even influence our contemporaries and co-workers. We may help those in our orbit decide what and how they want to be, or even sometimes what they want not to be. Even in our elder years we must be demonstrating approaches to ageing. The point though, is that nobody gets to choose who they influence and who they don’t. You can’t declare that you’re not a role model and make it so. It doesn’t work that way. We all own how we behave and the influence we leave.
Hey
Want to see something cool? Check out the animated bird migration maps from Cornell Labs! https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/bird-migration-interactive-maps/?platform=hootsuite&utm_source=Cornell+Lab+eNews&utm_campaign=0567c16a9f-Cornell-Lab-eNews-2018-03-08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_47588b5758-0567c16a9f-278124621 As you scroll down you can see the densities of several different kinds of birds flowing north and south on their annual migrations.