Prodded into action by a variety of factors, the most recent being finishing Noah Stryker's Birding without Borders, in 2023 I plan to either, or maybe both:
- Add six species to my Life List
- See __ % birds on the Virginia Ornithological Society's checklist for the Commonwealth
The first could be done easily with a trip to the U.S. west coast, to Texas, to Florida ("easy" if I were more at ease with solo travel and/or inviting myself to stay with old friends). I could probably even pick up species by cleaning up the document I consider my actual life list, the checklist at the front of a 1980 Peterson's that starts in January of 1988, when I took an ornithology class at Mount Holyoke. Counting my life list from then means that all the birds we saw in Alaska and the loons I saw in Maine with my Girl Scout troop would be new again. Being a book of eastern birds only, though, the dipper and its other Alaska friends don't appear, anyway. Missing, too, are the birds I identified in Palm Springs, Cal. in 2016. Perhaps my real life list now is in Cornell's eBird? Do people who have been birding since before its 2005 (?) launch go back and enter a lifetime's worth of birds into it? Because eBird thinks my life list is only 109 right now. As Stryker ends his Big Year, he thinks that 6,000 is reachable, 1,000 beyond his initial goal. To decide where to go to hit that mark, he uses eBird to show what's not on his list for various countries. I figured out where that feature is and I see lots of things I've never recorded that I know I've seen: the woodcock at the farm, cedar waxwings -- oh, bother: gadwall. Mom and I saw upwards of 50 on January 2 at Dutch Gap, but I didn't log anything from that outing because I don't love counting and it feels amateurish not to log numbers of individuals.
It looks like a percent of the Virginia list, in one year, might be more fun, more doable; and could be the mechanism to catch up my eBird list. It does mean that instead of staying in my head all morning, I've got to get dressed and go out on the cold, gray mornings that I work "night" shift. I've got actually to log the birds, either on the paper checklist or online.
