1, 2, 3...

Who's perched atop the pile? 

Maybe because we're in the summer doldrums,* a friend recently got the itch to tally up his Louisiana list to submit to the ABA, and he urged me and a few others to do the same.  My total (403, see Booby post below) doesn't measure up to the others in the exercise and probably never will.  I've seen all of the "easy" birds for the state, so each addition to the list now becomes a mini-Everest, and that means there's a whole lot of Himalayas between my list and those in the 420s and 430s.

In comparing the lists of the leaders, we had to figure out what birds are eligible for lists. There's no List Police, but obviously a level playing field is in order.**  We basically went by the common sense rules that have been employed in the past for Louisiana Big Years: Species can't count if they're not on the U.S. list (House Crow), not on the Louisiana list (Monk Parakeet, feral/introduced Canada Goose, Budgies, other exotics), or pertain to sightings of individuals that weren't documented and/or weren't accepted into the state record.

Most of their list totals will make their way to the ABA site little by little.  Feel free to pass my total, I'm not in it to win it.  I may know how to count, but I just want to see birds.  

*I actually like the summer doldrums, and even though I wasn't able to watch birds much this summer, a recent trip in the suffocating heat revealed roadsides loaded with ragweed and ready for migrants.  Fall is in the 100 degree air!

**The issue of creating a level playing field has come up before and might reemerge soon.  A recent glance at eBird shows that a couple of birders are in the 320s/330s on their year lists and stand a fair chance of breaking the state Big Year record if they get lucky.  The only complication is that no one really knows what the Louisiana Big Year total is.  The lists of past competitors that have claimed the title aren't available, but I think the number to beat is about 350, give or take a bird.

Listing Apathy

If you look just to the right on this page, you'll see the little handful of lists I've managed to continue caring about.  The list used to be longer, 20 years or so ago.  At that time I still cared about my North American list, which was probably at about 600 then.  You'll notice that list is nowhere to be seen.  I stopped caring about that one a long time ago.

My Louisiana list has been on 399 for a while now, back since last December.  It only got to 399 because Michael Seymour found a Mountain Plover and I found out that nobody had gotten good photos of it yet.  I knew it'd be a shame to let a first state record get lost because of lack of documentation, so I went to help out. Honestly though, as cool as that bird was and as good as it was to help make sure it got to the state list, I was disappointed to leave my CBC territory for it. 398 is just as good as 399.

Now there are 3 Brown Boobies that birders have staked out near Lake Charles. Somehow none of the pelagic trips I've gone on have turned one of those up, and even a Florida Keys trip failed to produce them in regular spots.  Brown Booby would be a lifer for me, and number 400 for my state list.  However, I really can't bring myself to care.  I don't plan to go see them.

We all have borrowed birds on our lists.  To get to 400 in Louisiana you have to have about 20-30 of them. If you don't have a yard, you've probably borrowed someone's Broad-tailed, Calliope, Anna's, or Broad-billed hummers.  Unless you're one of a lucky handful, you might've borrowed Greater Flamingo, Mountain Bluebird, Tropical and Couch's Kingbird, Cassin's Sparrow, Red Crossbill, Gray Flycatcher, Sage Thrasher, Harris's Hawk, Lark Bunting, Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, Fork-tailed Flycatcher, Iceland Gull, Yellow-green Vireo, Chestnut-collared Longspur. Those are just some of the chaseable birds of the past decade.  Go back another decade, and another, and your borrowed list inevitably grows.  Borrowed birds are the difference between a list in the 380's and one at 400.

I guess I'm just not interested in borrowing birds anymore.          

Once, I actively avoided chasing birds.  A Rock Wren was a few miles away for most of a winter.  I passed. A Painted Redstart was in a woodlot along the way to the coast for a winter.  I passed--literally--many times that winter on the way to the coast.  If I counted up all the birds I've passed on, I'm guessing they'd bring me to 410.  I can't think of many birds I really chased in the classic sense, frantically racing down the highway.  Black-tailed Godwit, yes.  Blue-throated Hummingbird, yes, and Northern Wheatear before that. I really wanted to see the Greater Flamingo, too.  Many of the borrowed birds on my list are only there because I was invited along for the ride: King Eider, Purple Sandpiper, Mangrove Cuckoo, Red-throated Loon...

Nowadays, I guess I only passively avoid chasing birds.  I just don't find it very exciting:  Show up.  See bird. e-Bird. Tick total up one number.  Watch name climb list.

I'm not knocking it for others, but for me, it doesn't live up to the excitement of lucking onto a new bird unexpectedly.  Live long enough, and you'll find it for yourself.  

It's easy to get caught up in the numbers game, hearing someone else's number and trying to catch up or stay ahead.  That's human nature.  It's envy at its finest.  But really, what's the point?  I watch birds for the same reason I fish or hunt.  It gets me out there.  It reminds me that the sky is better than the ceiling.  It relaxes me. It  fills the space in me that religion fills in others.  Mixing competition up with that seems like sacrilege.

Competitive birding makes about as much sense to me as competitive praying.

That opinion might not find favor with everyone, especially folks who chased the mockingbird and chased the rail and chased the sandpiper and found them...right where the latest post said they'd be.  Remember this, though: I'm not knocking it for others.  I'm just saying that birds on a tee aren't for me.  Anyway, how my opinion makes you feel is a function of you, not me.  It's an opinion, not a command to agree.  

So will my listing apathy keep me from 400?  Who knows.  I don't expect to live much longer, so passing up the gimmes might just keep me from it.  But then again, what's it matter?

Finally...

In more ways than one.

Today, with Dave Patton, I made my first trip of the year to the coast, and only my second or third trip down since mid-October.  We never even actually never made it as far as the beach today, but at least we made it to within a few hundred yards.  So--finally--some coastal birding.

After birding in circles in December (CBC circles) and birding in boxes in January (surveying quads for the winter bird atlas), it was nice to be able to do some free-form birding.  One of our goals today was to see a Green-tailed Towhee, a bird that's typically almost mythical in Louisiana.  However, this is no typical year, and almost 20 of these western towhees have been found in the state thus far during the cool season.

When the first few towhees were found this year, I figured it might be wise to chase one while I could.  Green-tailed Towhees are incredibly rare in Louisiana, after all.  When would I ever get another chance?
I've never been the biggest fan of chasing or I'd have gone over the 400 species mark for Louisiana years ago.  I passed on the Rock Wren in Cade, the Painted Redstart in Hackberry, on Lazuli Buntings, Lark Bunting, etc., opting and hoping to find my own instead.  I'm still looking for all of those birds years later, so maybe the towhee was one I might be wise to chase.

The first Saturday I got, I decided to take advantage of the predicted cold sunny morning  to go see the staked-out towhee.  I was figuring it would jump up in the first warm rays of the sun and be easy to see.  Only problem was, it was cloudy, warm, and next to a duck pond on the first day of duck season.  After that day, I decided I could put the towhee dream on the back burner, and hopefully just find my own.  Since then, report after report has filtered in.  Some CBCs had up to 3 Green-tails, but I scratched.  I figured towhees might be hanging out with White-crowned Sparrows, but I went whole CBCs without seeing any White-crowned Sparrows, either.  By this weekend, I'd finally had enough.  I called Dave and asked if he wanted to go see someone else's towhee.

We thought about some locations, and found a few likely ones.  Erik Johnson, the undisputed king of Green-tailed Towhees after finding a nice handful of them, had reported one lately from Broussard Beach, so we tried there. No luck.  Tons of sparrows, just didn't see a towhee.  I'd bet there's still one there; we just didn't see it. Then we tried one Melvin Weber had found.  No luck there, either.

So we decided to start heading back inland.  On the way back, we saw flocks of sparrows on the roadside and stopped to take looks.  Just east of Willow Island, we stopped at a good sparrow spot, parked, and started to enjoy the sparrow show.  We started comparing variation in young White-crowned Sparrows' head colors, and basically forgot all about towhees.  Dave was mentioning how bright reddish or orange the central crown color of some white-crowns is when a bird with a really bright reddish orange crown hopped up out of the brush right next to the truck.  Uh...uh...uh...Green-tailed Towhee!    

We got great looks and listens at the towhee.  Super cool bird.

Finally...    

300

I always set 300 species a year as an informal goal of what I'd like to see in Louisiana. Hitting 300 in a year used to be a little harder to reach than it is now.  Between range expansion, introductions getting common, and splits of species (Baltimore/Bullock's, Eastern/Spotted), there are more species available now compared to just a few years ago. Just as $300 isn't as much as it used to be, 300 species in a year for Louisiana has lost some of its luster.  I still use 300 as a yearly benchmark, but I adjust the figure upwards for inflation.  Nowadays, I think of the 315-320 range as the new 300.

Caracara is pretty much a gimme today.  Just a few years ago, this bird was nearly impossible to see in Louisiana.  

This has been an exceptionally birdy year in Louisiana, so even with some misses, I hit my target a couple of months ago.  I'm not sure exactly where I stand today, here on the final day of 2011. I may stop to tally it up, but I doubt it.  It is informal, after all.

Whoso List to List

I had a nice, spirited discussion with a good birding buddy on our way to Holly Beach a while back.  I shared my opinion that hardcore birding competition was something that I find pretty mindless, and that I wouldn't want to see it creeping into Louisiana birding.  My buddy scoffed, pointing out that I keep a list every year, that I keep lists for multiple parishes, and that I recently even designed a type of birding game based on points for calculating the quality (versus quantity) of a birder's year list.  And he was absolutely right; all of that's true. 

Many of us participate in year listing and parish listing games either among friends or, say, when the LOS sponsors such a game.  These reindeer games can be fun, and should be fun.  I recall the epic year-list battle between Charlie Lyon and Mark Swan a few years ago in which both birders racked up record year lists.  I also recall the LOS's great parish listing game that boiled down to a tilt between maestros David Muth and Phillip Wallace.  What I can't remember is who won either contest.  The real fun was watching the battles develop throughout the year.  What made both battles so much fun was that none of the birders involved played dirty pool; there was far more cooperation than competition all around.  Everybody enjoyed seeing the mutual respect between the parties involved.

My listing games are also designed for fun.  My state list is in the 390s.  Think I'll ever catch the all-time mark of 425+?  Not unless Mac Myers stops birding before we all start counting Muscovies.  My Cameron Parish list is at 347.  I take it pretty seriously.  As for the competition, well, I'm not sure who the competition is--I don't have a clue what anyone else's Cameron list is.

I have birding goals: 400 species for LA, 350 for Cameron Parish--and those numbers are my competition.  My yearly goal has always been 300 species. If I get some lagniappe, that's even better.  Saying that my goals are impersonal  may seem hypocritical or like a naive rationalization, but that's the way it is.

List of Lists

I don't travel outside of Louisiana as much as I used to, and rarely just to bird. That's OK. My way of thinking about my Life List has evolved with age. I've accepted that anybody with a tank of gas or a wallet full of plastic can travel around the continent seeing the birds that are supposed to be there. More power to 'em, and sometimes I envy them, but luckily there's no shortage of exciting birds here.


I've become much more interested in the local birds and my local lists, and the challenge of finding surprises here.


Here is a quick, rough count of the many birding lists I do care about right now and the number of species on each:


My Louisiana state list--399

Cameron Parish list--357

Lafayette Parish--292

Vermilion Parish--284

SW LA--376  

Yard list--163

To Have and Have Not

As I was out seeing the world one bird at a time today, this charming little bird surprised me on a quiet country road near Gueydan. I think it's some variety of Peach-faced Lovebird, but I won't swear to that. I do know it didn't fly all the way here from Africa. Polly was once somebody's pet, but my attempts to squeak her to my finger were in vain and she continued on her way.

Birds like this raise a debate in the birding community. Keep in mind that to many birders, bird lists are nearly sacred. If a bird escapes and perishes, it's not a big deal. However, if it finds a mate and starts a population, should it be counted as a part of Louisiana's birdlife? Or more accurately, can it be counted? Can the Monk Parakeets of New Orleans be added to our lists? The introduced Canada Geese at Rockefeller Refuge? And if so, where do we draw the line? Should birders count chickens and barnyard geese on their lists? There are differing opinions, different trails down that slippery slope.

In other life sciences, the rules are clear-cut. Introduced species that prove they can survive and spread on their own over time are regarded as naturalized and are added to the state list. Fig trees and corn, no. Chicken trees, yes. I love a good fig, but I wouldn't ask a botanist to put the fig tree on the state list. However, a botanist would be crazy not to add the chicken tree. Some birders agree with this cautious approach. Others feel it doesn't represent the reality of our current situation: if people are here to stay, then so are figs, so count them. Ditto for park ducks. I would agree with this approach for a plant survey of an area, but not for a scientific list of the naturally occurring species of an area.

Overall, I look at it like sports versus fantasy league sports. Birding is basically fantasy league ornithology. Fantasy leagues can make up whatever rules they like, but it's unrealistic for them to think that the big sport should change its rules to follow suit. I'll never forget seeing this cool little lovebird, but I don't think it's important for ornithology to remember it.

Anyway, that's my opinion, and it's just opinion. I hope I haven't ended up on the wrong end of your list.