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LOW HANGING FRUIT

Well, January has come and gone and it was the usual mixed bag of weather. I don’t think I had a particular highlight so far. I guess the only  so called failure would be spending over 4 hours scoping  for the Northern Mockingbird.  A couple hours in, I got excited.. small grey bird, long tail, then dang.. it had a black mask and no white on the wings, it’s a Northern Shrike.  Some of the birds like the Tundra Swan and Prairie Falcon are only here for a short time, but most of the ones I have seen are here year round and common ( easy pickings).   I was checking my list and couldn’t believe I hadn’t picked up a Cedar Waxwing yet. It’s just an example of some low hanging fruit yet to be had.

I like to play around with numbers and was curious about how much time it took to see new birds.  This rate of new birds/ hour will likely decrease as the year progresses as “new” birds will be fewer and I move from birding just to see what I find to more targeted birding. On the other hand, once spring migration gets going perhaps the rate will bounce back up.

For January I was picking up a new bird for every 2.25 hours birded. I had a soft goal of 150 birds for January but am still satisfied with the 139 I ended up with. 

I expect February will be cleaning up the low hanging fruit in Metro Vancouver & Fraser valley zones and moving towards more targeting birding, but more about that later.

 






 

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