Nick Komar’s “Biggest Year” in USA Birding - 2023

I picked up Cliff Hendrick at 6 AM, July 19, 2023, and we headed to the Mount Evans auto road, a two-hour drive from Fort Collins. This road is the highest paved road in North America, reaching the peak of Mt. Evans above 14,000 feet. We paid $2 for admission, taking advantage of Cliff’s senior discount to federally managed parks. We scouted the area around Summit Lake where I would return with a field trip a few days later. Bird diversity is low at high elevation. All we observed here was American Pipit, Brown-capped Rosy-Finch and a distant White-tailed Ptarmigan. We also checked the forests at the lower elevations for Cassia Crossbill without luck. One of the principal bird targets of the Convention field trips was Cassia Crossbill, formerly known as Red Crossbill type 9. This population was elevated to species status in 2016 after biologists determined that they were sufficiently distinct from other crossbill populations. Birders in the field can distinguish them from the other 11

I returned home to Colorado on July 9, 2023, after a short but successful trip to South Florida. Mid-July in Colorado is hot (but not as hot as Florida!). Some years are bone dry and bird nesting activity finishes early. Summer mornings with no bird song are eery. Fortunately, this summer in Colorado was wet, and fields that normally turned brown in July remained green. Daily thunder   showers helped keep the insect population high which in turn allowed for many bird species to attempt to raise second broods. This gave me an opportunity to look for nesting species in Colorado that I still needed to find for my Biggest Year effort. I also took advantage of my time in my home county to look for species that I needed for my Larimer County year list. I normally would finish each year among the top three ranked birders in Larimer, but this year I was birding mostly away from home and I had fallen well behind in the local rankings.   One local species that would be new for my Biggest Year wa

In the middle of May, 2023, an amazing story unfolded in south Florida. Two Large-billed Tern, a South American species of larid, turned up simultaneously on both coasts of Florida. An adult was found in a Wildlife Management Area in Indian River County near Vero Beach on Florida’s Atlantic Slope while an immature bird was detected at an inland canal near Tampa on the Gulf Slope.   I had seen the species in Colombia, Peru and Argentina in its native habitat of tropical inland lagoons and sluggish rivers. It is anybody’s guess how these magnificent terns came to Florida, but I like to imagine that the pair had been caught up in bad weather which blew them out to sea where they got lost and disoriented and separated. Either that or they were vacationing in Florida and had an argument about which way to turn on the expressway. Remarkably, several weeks later, both birds had remained present at or very near to their original discovery locations.  These birds are striking in their plumage a