It’s the season of Christmas counts. I did the one that I do, but I still feel birdy-ish. I want an excuse to do some more without the pressure/commitment of something major like another Christmas count or a conventional big day.

So I thought: What about a little big day?

The normal way an obsessive birder does a big day is to devote the whole day to it and spend a lot of it driving from place to place. I don’t want to do that, but a scaled-down version sounds like fun. So here’s my plan:

• A single day.
• 100% human-powered. Walking or biking only.
• I don’t want to bird dawn to dusk; I’ve got too much going on with work and the holidays. But I could do an hour each in the morning, noon, and evening, and then just incidental birding around the house during the rest of the day. So:
• 0700 – 0800: Franklin Trail (rural/chaparral)
• 1200 – 1300: Carpinteria Creek Lagoon and Carpinteria Bluffs (freshwater wetland/coastal sage scrub/rocky and sandy beaches)
• 1600 – 1700: Carpinteria Salt Marsh (coastal estuary)

I started listing species, and I think 70 should be pretty easy. With luck I could get to 80 or even 90. If I get all the likely species on my list plus all the “bonus” species that I think are reasonably possible, it gets me to 99.

So, you know, if magic happens: 100. Not that I expect that. It will be fun no matter what; that’s the best thing about birdwatching.

I realize this isn’t anything super impressive for a serious birder. But I’m pretty casual about it, so for me it sounds like a fun challenge.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1NIq4WJ.

Tags: birdwatching, little big day.

This entry was posted by jbc on Monday, December 21st, 2015 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Tumblr. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.