The year 2022 finally felt closer to the birding year I’ve wanted to have for a long time. There were some great trips (though I still have yet to travel for the primary intention of birding!), some good local birding stories including finding a neat rarity for my area, I added 19 new species to my life list, and I managed to observe 299 species for the year!
Travel
On a family trip to Kaua’i, Hawai’i in April 2022, I took some time to intentionally bird a couple of spots that I hadn’t been to on previous visits to Kaua’i. Kawai’ele Waterbird Sanctuary was one of these places, and I would recommend it for the spectacle alone of seeing and hearing so many Hawaiian Black-necked Stilts in one place. A Ruddy Turnstone (turning stones!) was also a major highlight for me here. And I got halfway-decent photographs of one of four Pueo (Hawaiian Short-eared Owl) that I saw this trip. Weirdly enough, I have only seen Short-eared Owl once in mainland North America, but I’ve now seen six of them in the state of Hawai’i!
We also managed to do a smidgen of forest birding in Koke’e State Park on Kaua’i. Here we had an amazing lifer experience with Kaua’i ‘Amakihi, and a heard-only lifer experience with a singing ‘Anianiau (that was at close range, but that never came into view!). This was truly a bittersweet experience for me in the context of the ongoing extinction crisis on the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands have lost ten native species of birds in my lifetime, and so many of the remaining natives are hanging on by a thread. At the time of this writing, Kaua’i ‘Amakihi and ‘Anianiau are not quite yet balancing on that knife’s edge between existence and extinction, but depending on when I’m able to make it back to Kaua’i, it’s possible 2022 might have been my only chance to ever see them. I only wish I had been paying attention when I was on Kaua’i in 2010 – I might have had much better chances to see the adorable but now critically-endangered ‘Akikiki.
In addition to a couple of smaller “stay-cation” trips in Colorado, I also got to do a little birding in my home state of California this year, which is always a treat for me. Top-of-mind for me was making a mini-trip I called the “Return to Bird Island,” revisiting a couple of spots I used to bird when I was going to school at the University of California, Santa Barbara. One of these was, of course, Bird Island, which I “discovered” one day in 2005 walking up Ellwood Beach from my apartment at the time. Seventeen years later, armed with a scope, I could actually identify the multitude of Brandt’s Cormorants that were hanging out there.
Birding stories
I ended the year with 299 species observed for 2022. I did try to get a 300th species on December 31, but came up short. But I finally got some close-up views of Evening Grosbeak as a consolation prize! This number included 19 lifers, including the Kaua’i ‘Amakihi and ‘Anianiau mentioned previously.
I attended the Colorado Field Ornithologists‘ convention for the first time in May 2022, the event having been postponed for the last couple of years by the (ongoing as of the time of this post) COVID-19 pandemic. What a surreal experience that was, due to the weather: driving to Pueblo, Colorado in a blizzard, driving to and around Custer County, Colorado on a Big Day field trip in the snow and mud (“graduate-level driving,” our trip leader said, and she was right), driving around Pueblo rescuing swallows downed by the heavy snow on another field trip…
One of my best birding stories of 2022 was finding a White Ibis in Boulder County, Colorado on May 30 with my friend and fellow birder Jamie Simo (although it’s not as though we were looking for one – rather, it found us! More on that in a forthcoming post.). As you can see from the map on the AllAboutBirds.org page for White Ibis, this is not a bird that’s supposed to be in Colorado, so it was a bit of an event! Many birders got to enjoy this cool bird throughout the first half of the summer as it cruised up and down the Front Range of Colorado.
Community science and engagement
In 2022 I led two half-day outings for Front Range Birding Company. I’ve led a couple of trips for them in previous years, and in 2023 I hope to learn more about nature guiding and lead more trips to share the joy of birding with new people.
On the community science front, I remained active for the fifth year as a volunteer for the City of Longmont’s year-round bird survey program and breeding season raptor nest monitoring program. I participated in my second Audubon Christmas Bird Count in 2022, which I imagine was even more fun pre-pandemic when the social aspects still existed. But any day out in the field with friends counting birds for science is still a good day in my book!
And of course there’s eBird…my first community science love. In 2022 I tried to chart a path to catching up on adding photo, audio, and video observations to my checklists as far back as I can go into my pre-eBirding days…but that’s still a long-term goal, because I keep generating ever more media to post every time I go birding!
What’s on deck for 2023?
- My first trip to the Big Island of Hawai’i!
- Western Field Ornithologists Birdathon in spring 2023
- Colorado Field Ornithologists Colorado Birding Challenge on May 20, 2023
- Colorado Field Ornithologists 2023 Convention July 19-23, 2023
- Continuing my volunteer work
- …and hopefully much, much more!