The Grind - Week 1

January and February are an interesting time for birding. You can get a lot done on a goal of 10,000 county tics because everything is needed. Including the already 17 American Crow tics I have from visiting 17 counties. Black-capped Chickadee is right behind at 15 I believe right now. (Crow got bonus counties because it is super easy to ID from a car moving through a county that is not a stopping point.

That all being said winter for me is an effort on at least 3 fronts...

1. Find as many common birds as possible just to make follow-up efforts more focused. Get rid of needing European Starling and House Sparrow and you allow yourself to focus more on getting warblers and such later.

2. Find as many open water winter only birds like Common Merganser and Common Goldeneye as I can now in addition to winter specialty finches and ag birds. So basically try to pick up Red-breasted Nuthatch, Pine Siskin, Purple Finch, Snow Bunting, etc...as soon as possible so that follow-up efforts don't miss them on timing alone.

3. Manage a large slate of counties by trying to touch them all at least 1 time by the end of February or maybe mid-March. Basically I want a full round of 87 counties before getting into waterfowl migration and early passerines. This I think would give me a solid base for the big push coming in May.

The first weekend was loaded with 110 county tics thanks to birding with Liz Harper who knows the Rothsay (Wilkin) area very well. We were rolling by 4:45AM and had our first bird of the day in Rothsay as a lifer for me Prairie Chicken. Not only that we later got to see them fly over the road in a large flock and land in a tree. It was amazing and a fun add this early in the year. Later as we trolled Fergus Falls pretty hard we found a Black-Crowned Night-Heron in full on overwinter mode. My closest sighting to January is seeing them on spring migration in April so it was an awesome thing to find a juvenile in January.

The tenor of the week really was getting on the easy water birds and grinding out Pine Siskin (9 counties now) along with any other winter special and related birds possible. A day trip with Kevin Smith and Andy Nyhus resulted in 71 more tics with Josh Wallestad providing guide support in Kandiyohi county. 30 species in that county had me very happy even with misses of the key super rare birds. We still had Northern Shrike, Pine Siskin, RB Nuthatch, and Purple Finch on the list and fun overwinter birds like Fox Sparrow (my first January tic), White-throated Sparrow, and even a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

All total as noted I've touched 17 counties already in the first 6 days of the year and intend to keep the efforts up as I'm looking at a St. Louis County, Lake, Cook trip this coming weekend (1/12) with a late month invite to tag along with a small group in Koochiching and surrounding counties as well. I'll just keep putting trip together and executing while the weather is solid.

Using an even divide of 10,000 into 365 parts I'm about 6 days ahead of pace and will need to keep that up these first couple months just to build a solid buffer in the event of bad weather, etc... My hope is to have such a large pace lead that I can absorb bad weather that would keep me out of trip mode for a whole weekend, or....gasp....in the event I need day off from birding.

Every time out I try to tell myself to remember to have fun, appreciate all the small things and to continue to marvel at what nature brings each time in the field. Even if it is just appreciating 2 Brown Creeper hanging out in some pines behind a church in Litchfield, MN. Random location and quality Meeker County birds to snag on a windy late afternoon when most birds seemed to be shutting down.

I'll keep trying to get some thoughts down in this blog as I go and will leave with this idea. The support from others and interest in the goal has been amazing and greatly appreciated. I've already birded with more people in 1 week than I did all of last year on my State Park Big Year. That was central goal of this years effort, to get better at organizing and pulling people into this massive goal effort. I'm certain I couldn't do this without that kind of support so I'm humbled by how many have already jumped in to be a part of things.