I saw a fun Youtube video earlier this month that talks about doing a New Year Day bird count – the idea being, for a new year, all your bird counts are reset for the year.
Seemed like a fun way to keep birding interesting, so I set a goal to get out on January 1st and do my best at creating a big bird count.
But before that, I need to do a little house-keeping.
I recently added a Barn Owl to my eBird lifelist – this is a bird i had encountered in 2014 but never added to my life list. This is the owl photo on the main page of this site !
By adding the barn owl, all of my lifer numbers since that bird have advanced – so bird #124 is now #125. I’m not going to go thru all my posts here and update the lifers number because you really don’t care so I don’t either.
OK, back to the new year bird count.
Well, the weather reports leading up to today looked dismal – rain all day.
The good news is the rain has simply been intermittent and never heavy.
I started this morning at about 8:30 a.m. – I took the dog out to do her morning business, and started my list. I put her back in the house after 10 minutes and spent the next 30 minutes adding more birds ending up with 15 birds by 9:00 a.m. That’s a good count for me on any day, so the fact I got that so early looked good.
Before lunch, I told the wife I was going to go to the downtown trail and see what else I could manage – My hope was to hit 20 birds for the day – with 25 birds being a record for just me as a solo-birder.
I knew going down to the water I’d see numerous gulls, and I’ve been terrible at counting species of gulls. Also, I was almost guaranteed to see a brown pelican and the red-winged blackbirds. I was pretty confident I could get to 20.
Happy to say I smashed that with another 18 unique species seen – adding 5 (!) lifers and bringing the days total to 33 unique species. Awesome ! Sure enough, I managed 2 new gulls, a new grebe, a new sparrow (Fox) and a beautiful duck – the Bufflehead.
Lifer #147 – Bufflehead
Lifer #150 – Pied-billed Grebe
Lifer #151 – Fox Sparrow
I also saw an exciting visitor – a Bald Eagle. I always get excited when seeing Bald Eagles !
Here is the complete list, with new species in bold.
- California Quail
- Eurasian Collard Dove
- Anna’s Hummingbird
- Acorn Woodpecker
- Northern Flicker
- Stellar’s Jay
- California Scrub Jay
- Common Raven
- Wrentit
- Northern Mockingbird
- Hermit Thrush
- American Robin
- Dark-eyed Junco
- Spotted Towhee
- Yellow-rumped Warbler
- Bufflehead
- Common Merganser
- Short-billed Gull
- Western Gull
- American Herring Gull
- California Gull
- Pied-billed Grebe
- Great Egret
- Brown Pelican
- Turkey Vulture
- Bald Eagle
- American Kestrel
- Black Phoebe
- Fox Sparrow
- Golden-crowned Sparrow
- Red-winged Blackbird
- Brewer’s Blackbird
- Townsend’s Warbler
Gualala Birds 
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