Tuesday, January 02, 2007

New Year's Day Birding

For the past I-can't-even-remember-how-many-years, I have spent at least part of my New Year's Day birding and starting my new year bird list. 2007 was, fortunately, no exception.

Part of the reason I enjoy New Year's Day birding so much is that I get to start a new list. For a few minutes at least, even the lowly starling is a "new" bird. After you've been a birder as long as I have, seeing new birds is a rare occurrence, especially when constant travel to new places isn't an option. So we birders find our own ways of making the old seem new, and one of my ways is starting a new birding list each year. A new year list also allows us to compare our lists from year to year and see the differences.

January birding, as a rule, isn't particularly exciting, but it does offer the chance to find all the resident birds in my area before migration starts. Migration seasons are always the best chance I have to see uncommon species. When I've already seen all the local birds, I can concentrate then in looking for the unusual.

So here's my list for 2007, so far, in order of appearance:
American Crow
Eastern bluebird--not always an easy one to find on January 1, but the warm weather here helped.
Black-capped Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Cardinal
White-breasted Nuthatch
Mourning Dove
Turkey Vulture
Red-tailed Hawk
House Sparrow
Feral Chicken--I just wanted to see if you were still awake.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are those feral chickens good eating?

Anonymous said...

Cute feral chicken. I spent yesterday taking down my christmas tree and dealing with an all day headache. Ugh!

I decide to sorta close down the blogger account. With the new changes they made with blogger beta. I can no longer use Blogjet to send my posts to blogger. Thats how I prefer to do post with blogger. So now all my posting will be at the www.thequietone.net. Plus it will be a little less stressful too.