List Lust & Lent

#401 Loggerhead Shrike

2012 was an amazing year in my birding career.  I don't know why I had such luck, but I was able to add 11 species to my life list, which finally topped 400.  I hadn't seen double-digit lifers in a single year in over a decade.  And while my Massachusetts life list is well over 75% of the total, I continued the curious trend of milestone lifers being out of state: #100 in New Brunswick, #200 in Maine, #300 in New Jersey, #400 in North Carolina. 2012 also marked the high water mark for my World Series of Birding team, the Wicked Witchities, who finally topped 200 species in a single day and brought home second place honors and the Stone Award.

#402 Spruce Grouse

2013 has already started with great promise with my team's winter plumage, the Wicked Pishahs finishing with the second highest species total at the Super Bowl of Birding and personally I listed 100 species in the first month of this auspicious year.  I am filled with excitement because for the first time in my life I expect to travel west more than one time zone.  That will mean a huge list of potential lifers. In fact, after carefully mining data on eBird for sightings in recent years for the dates and

#403 Black-bellied Whistling Duck

locations I will be visiting, I have a list of over 225 potential life birds to chase during June.  There is a very good chance that I will tick more lifers this year than any year before (I'm predicting 113) and that I will hit lifer #500 (I'm predicting Arizona for the location). And it all begins so soon, as new migrants show up each week, slowly the pressure is building which will explode with the spring migration and the World Series of Birding (I'm just crazy enough to believe that the Wicked Witchity/Four Loons super team combination has a shot of winning it all!)

#405 Wood Sandpiper

This sort of frenetic anxiety about a thing as ephemeral as a list of bird species is clearly abnormal behavior which takes its toll.  For the most part, the price aside from a significant one-time investment in optics and variable travel expenses is paid in loss of sleep (and some would contend, sanity).  In other words, it is the birder who pays the price, not the bird.  But I recently had to face the cost of my behavior paid by the object of my obsession.

#406 Allen's Hummingbird

Appropriately enough, the day was Ash Wednesday, the day of confession which begins the season of Lent, during which fasting and self-examination are expected.  I heard that a LeConte's Sparrow was being "very cooperative" in Concord, about an hour away.  I decided to chase this bird which was missing from my life list despite a couple of previous appearances by the species in the state during my birding career.  When I arrived, I discovered that I needed to be careful in my approach because the bird was feeding on the ground in the tiniest strip of exposed soil imaginable along the road surrounded my snow

#408 Little Egret

banks a couple of feet tall. There were about a dozen birders gathered around it at distances from about 3 to 10 feet.  When a vehicle passed by we all had to move and the bird didn't move.  When the bird did move it flew to a bush just beside the road.  I only stayed a short while and there were birders arriving as I departed.  From the reports, it appears that the bird stayed a few days and was seen by likely hundreds of birders, all at close range.

I would like to say that I was aware of the stress this bird was under and I did what I could to minimize it.  But the truth is, I added to the stress this bird, far from it's normal range, scrounging to eke out an existence, experienced in its time here.  In fact, it is likely enough that it did not survive.  There is a certain stoicism associated with chasing birds that are rare because they are out of
their range since often they are either already ill, exhausted from the travel, or so ill equipped to survive where they land that they die soon after being discovered.  While that is not always the case, it did seem to be true of this poor sparrow that it was stressed, not just by its misadventure in getting to Massachusetts, but also by the treatment of its "admirers" once it got here.

#409 Le Conte's Sparrow

Perhaps I will take the time to consider more fully the impact of my behavior on the birds I am eager to enjoy the next time a similar situation arises.  More likely I will find myself questioning after the fact.  Regardless, the questions are vital if my behavior is to change.  And I can't expect others' behavior to change if I don't first change mine.  And ultimately, the necessary changes are those that reduce the suffering of the innocent creatures that we claim to want to enjoy and help.