Birding Every Day

As a birder, I find myself constantly on alert for observing birds around me. When I walk out my front door I am immediately aware of the birds around me. When I would drive my car, I am making mental notes of any bird I see.  However, these mental notes serve no one but me. With the advent of eBird, any bird sighting can be useful for researchers or conservationists. EBird collects the data in the form of a checklist and processes the data to create population bar charts for the region of the checklist. These data are publicly available for scientists to use to evaluate avian population shifts and relative abundance estimates for all bird species. Several years ago I decided I would make submitting a checklist to eBird a daily ritual. In this way, I turned my birding hobby into a lifestyle. EBird keeps track of contributors daily streak for submitting checklists. My streak is currently 2333 days, which is almost 7 years long.

So when I returned home from the Texas coast In the wee hours of May 5, 2023, I thought about where to go around Fort Collins to generate a checklist for eBird. Using the Birds Eye app, I quickly identified a few species on my needs list, and their location. One of these, the American Bittern, can be a tough bird to find. So later that day I visited Running Deer Natural Area near the Cache le Poudre River and heard the American Bittern sing, a bizarre belching sound. You can listen to my recording which I made with my iPhone using the free Merlin App. I trimmed the noisy ends of the recording and I amplified the sound with another free app on my cell phone-EZAudioCut. The eBird checklist with the recording is here: https://ebird.org/checklist/S136231415.  The American Bittern was species # 623 for my USA and territories Biggest Year.