2018 - The Year Of The Chicken

It was a lot of work but I managed to maintain a fairly consistent blog page for 2018.  Awesome adventures, great birds, fantastic friends and meeting new ones along the way.  Looking back on it, I had a very blessed year both personally and more importantly for this blog, BIRDING.  It was quite a challenge to come up with a proper blog title that would sum up the year while giving it the justice it deserves so I settled it on the chickens.  Why?  I got many rarer birds than those, and besides, prairie chickens aren't that difficult, are they?  In  two separate posts, Undercover Birding and Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road, I wrote about the obstacles these birds face and the challenge of finding them.  The Greater Prairie-Chicken and the Lesser Prairie-Chicken both are birds that require an intentional trip to go see them. You will almost definitely not just happen to randomly see them while looking for something else, so I figure unless I do a Big Year I will probably not see both in the same year again.  So... the year of the chicken.

My goals for 2018 changed a bit as the year progressed and instead of focusing on getting 15 counties over 100 species I concentrated on getting a few more 200 bird counties as well as chasing a handful of rarities to add to my life list and increase my year list. And increase I did, finishing the year, presuming I don't get a new one between now and midnight tonight, with a whopping 355 species. My best year by 20 birds (I got 335 in 2015), and 305 was my second best in 2017.  This was a pretty special year that will be hard to beat as I usually shoot for 300 species in a year but with the three best years ending in "5" for some reason I will shoot for 305 in 2019.

So here are my "current" plans for the new year:

  1. 305 species for 2019
  2. 450 birds on my Texas Life List
  3. Get a few more 100 bird counties to bring my total to 15 (added a couple last year but still a few shy)
  4. Bird new counties (no specific number yet)
  5. And turn a few otherwise normal people into obsessed birders. (this one will be the toughest)
Here is a parting shot of Black Skimmers at the Dike

Happy New Year!
 




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