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

Pelagic birds are ocean-dwelling birds that are rarely seen from land. These birds are not well known by most land-dwelling birders, me included. They are probably the group of species least understood by ornithologists. In fact, more and more species within this group are being recognized by taxonomists. This is due to their preference for marine regions, their tendency to nest on remote islands and their cryptic plumages. Few are brightly marked, such as the three species of Puffin. Most are drably plumaged, making identification challenging. This is especially true for the Shearwaters, Petrels and Storm-Petrels and many of the Alcids as well.   There are roughly 30 species of pelagic species that I will need to find this year. I saw some of these from the La Jolla Sea Watch in January (Black-vented Shearwater) and the Point Pinos Sea Watch near Monterey in March (Black-legged Kittiwake, Common Murre and Pigeon Guillemot). Some I saw from the boat ride across the Santa Cruz Chann...

Many birders develop a home birding area where they really get to know the local birdlife. This home area is known in birding terms as a “local patch”. My patch is Larimer County, in north-central Colorado. This means that during most years I spend most of my birding time within Larimer County. It is a rather large local patch, almost the size of Rhode Island! A patch doesn’t need to be so large. It can be as small as your nearby birding hotspot or even your back yard. Larimer County is a great place to live If you are a birder. The principal cities of the county are Fort Collins, Loveland, Estes Park and Berthoud and they all, along with the county itself, have done a great job in establishing parks and natural areas where birding is welcome. The county is also home to Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests and Rocky Mountain National Park. The variety of habitats in these natural areas include mountain peaks, major rivers and prairie grasslands. The county hosts the largest  numb...

North American grouse species are among the most difficult order of birds to see in North America. They are large birds but because of their status as upland game birds, they have learned to avoid humans and adopt stealthy behaviors. Their plumage allows them to blend into their surroundings perfectly.        To see all 27 species in the order Galliformes, which includes typical grouse, pheasants and quail, I will need to visit Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Minnesota and Nevada. However, the largest number of these species can be found in Colorado because of this state’s centralized position on the North American continent.  In fact, Colorado in April has long been a popular birding destination among birders keen on adding many of the Galliformes (up to 13 species) to their life list in one trip. During the spring mating season, many of the grouse species form social leks where males dance and strut and generally show off for females which gather to ...

  March 21 At 2:45 AM, Joe Kipper picked up my friend Scott Rashid and me in his vintage Jeep Cherokee with license plates that read GYRFLCN and dropped us off at Denver International Airport at 4:30 AM for our 6:30 AM Southwest Airlines flight to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. By 9 AM we were rolling in our rented Nissan Rogue mini-SUV. First stop was Veterans Oasis Park in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb. What a great park, with managed desert habitat and a series of lakes. A Rufous-backed Robin, a stray from Mexico had been spotted here about 10 days earlier and reported to eBird. No luck with that, but we did spot 49 other species here in 2.5 hours, a good start to our week-long trip through Southeast Arizona. New Year-Birds were Gila Woodpecker (487), Dusky Flycatcher (488) and Lucy’s Warbler (489). I then guided us to my favorite location for Bendire’s Thrasher at Red Mountain Park in Mesa, AZ at the eastern edge of the Phoenix metropolis. New Year-Birds were Gilded Flicker (490) a...

On my Recent trip to New England, the rarest bird was a common gull ( Larus canus ), a diminutive white headed larid from Europe that was staked out with a group of our familiar Ring-billed Gulls ( L . delawarensis ) in a northeast Connecticut shopping center parking lot. Encountering seagulls in a paved parking lot away from the sea coast is mundane, i.e a common phenomenon. Both Ring-billed Gull and Common Gull are well adapted to habitats dominated by humans (such as shopping centers and parking lots). These birds are not picky eaters. They will eat garbage items generated by humans (such as leftover food from household meals and restaurant kitchens) as well as fish and crustaceans found in ponds, lakes, bays, and oceans. They are also happy to accept food donations and will gladly devour any morsel of food offered by humans that pass nearby to their hangouts. In certain places, gulls have become quite confiding and will attempt to steal food from picnic baskets or even from your h...

  I wrote earlier that the Christmas bird counts would play a big role in my big year effort.    In Central California, several raritities were recorded including Rock Sandpiper, Ruff, Curlew Sandpiper, Little Stint, Wood Sandpiper and Red-flanked Bluetail. All of these were on winter territories so I wanted to visit the region before they left to breed in Alaska or Siberia. Three paying customers and a local guide joined me in a week of birding from Sacramento to Los Angeles.  March 8 We arrived  around noon  to Sacramento and reviewed our itinerary with the guide over lunch. A major Pacific Ocean rainstorm was forecast to reach San Francisco within 24 hrs so we scratched plans to bird in Marin and Sonoma counties and cancelled a whale watch out of Monterey Bay. During the calm before the  storm, I picked up Red-breasted Sapsucker (425) and Yellow-billed Magpie (426) in Sacramento. Then at San Francisco Bay, we didn’t find the overwintering Rock Sandp...

My mother introduced me to birdwatching before I can even remember. I was an infant at the time, and would not consciously appreciate birds until the age of 7. I grew up birding in Eastern Massachusetts, in the village of Newton Highlands. My mother still lives there, and my family and I decided we needed a trip to Massachusetts to celebrate her 21 st birthday. Yup, you guessed it, she is a Leap Year baby, born on Feb 29, 1936. We planned to fly into Logan International Airport in Boston on March 1 and celebrate her birthday the following night. We would stay through March 6 so I began scheming up ways to add new species for my Biggest Year. Several people had reached out to me (or perhaps I reached out to them) and had offered to help me get around the area looking for rarities, including Jim Nealon of New Hampshire, Mike Greenwald in western Massachusetts, and Alf Wilson in Marblehead on Boston/s North Shore. One recent rarity that I had hoped would stick was the Steller’s Sea Eagle...