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Month: December 2019

New Year’s Resolution

New Year’s Resolution

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Western Bluebird

Western Bluebird, 2019

I enjoy making goals and checking them off my “To Do” list. It’s gratifying and I feel accomplished. The ultimate feat is to stick with a New Year’s resolution and master it for an entire year. What an accomplishment!

Except, it doesn’t always work out.

We strive to eat healthier, exercise, stop swearing, lay off the sweets, and so on. Yet, we are often back to our usual routine after a month, a week, or a few days. I remember one year I resolved to regularly exercise on my own. That resolution lasted one day. I did some isometric exercises on January 1 and then quit.

Over the past several years, I’ve largely stopped with the New Year’s resolutions knowing that it can be super difficult to maintain all year. However, I recently revisited the idea of making resolutions but with a new spin – birding! In 2018, I decided that I would try to submit a birding checklist to eBird every single day (spoiler alert – I met this goal). It was amazing! I learned so much from that experience. I now know that Oak Titmice are here in the Bay Area all year, it’s just that they go quiet during certain times of the year when I thought they had left. Cedar Waxwings stick around much longer than I thought. I found birds in unlikely places, like random gas stations in the middle of nowhere on a road trip, which I birded in a panic having forgotten to do my bird list for the day during the long drive.

Accomplishing this goal wasn’t easy. Some days I really had to force myself to do a list. Weather, emotions, rushing around all presented barriers, but it was worth carving out the 10 or 15 minutes to tune into the birds.

For 2019, I decided to continue the daily birding since it felt weird not submit a checklist for each day. I also added a resolution to participate in all the monthly eBird challenges. This ranged from submitting recordings of birds, submitting multiple checklists in a single day, or tracking my birding route on a mobile device. I also did long-term challenges that included submitting over 90 checklists with sound recordings over a period of several months. I keep hoping that I’ll win a pair of binoculars for participating in the challenges, but so far, no luck. Earlier this month, I completed the final eBird challenge for December – resolution met!

What will it be for 2020? Create a carbon-free lifer list? Patch birding? Photo Big Year? I haven’t decided. What are your birding goals?

December eBird Challenge – Media Submissions

December eBird Challenge – Media Submissions

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Dark-eyed Junco

I am participating in the December eBird challenge to submit 20 checklists with media attached (recordings or photos). It’s a repeat of a challenge from the spring, which I completed with ease as I recorded lots of birds singing for the breeding season. However, this month is uniquely different. In one word – rain.

We need the rain and I’ve been so happy that we finally have moisture to dampen our bone-dry hills. But I’m not about to drag my camera out into the storms. So I’m focusing on recordings again. During the downpours, the birds are generally tucked away and I’m similarly rushing for cover from the elements. When it does stop raining, the birds are out and about trying to nab food. Humans are out too and quite noisy. I’m suddenly aware of how much construction is around with various loud beeps and buzzes alerting the town to big trucks in reverse. The city noise unsurprisingly drowns out the birds in my recordings.

One morning, I tried to capture at least one recording. The birds were too far in one recording and barely audible even with the volume on max. Another attempt captured a loud garbage truck that suddenly appeared as soon as I clicked “record.” In yet another attempt, the subject stopped calling immediately after I set up the phone. I finally landed a recording of a group of Dark-eyed Juncos, although foot traffic and cars driving by were captured in the background. It’ll have to do.

Dark-eyed Junco recording. General background noise shows as a wash of dark.
Compare with this Mountain Chickadee recording with a clean, white background.

I previously wrote about the challenges of recording in an urban environment, but this December challenge seems unusually difficult, probably because outdoor activity from all creatures (birds and humans) is condensed into pockets of time between storms creating blur of competing background noise. Plus, birds aren’t quite as vocal as the spring. I find it quite interesting to see these differences from the exact same challenge in two very different months!

Birding Maps

Birding Maps

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Hayward Regional Shoreline. The bane of my existence. At least, in terms of nicknames.

Rare bird alert descriptions would note places like “Mt. Trashmore” and “Frank’s Dump,” but I quickly realized these were local names for areas in the regional park not included on any official trail maps. Google searches came up dry. Searches on various Facebook birding groups yielded nothing. I spent many trips wandering around this vast space never understanding exactly where these places were located.

Inspiration hit me the other day – why not create a public map for birders? I threw together a Google Map and posted in on the Fremont Birding Circle Facebook Group asking members to fill out nicknames. I got that and more – landmarks and important birding areas were also highlighted. Most of the edits came from Jerry Ting (thank you!) and we now have a crowdsourced map to help us name-newbies better understand the shoreline.

This is the first of what I hope becomes several maps, some crowdsourced and some of my own. A new webpage, “Birding Maps,” is available in the top menu bar.

Created by Elizabeth Olin
Crowdsourced by Fremont Birding Circle
https://tinyurl.com/BirdingMap-HRS