This week we’re finish up the Amsterdam trip (thank you Captain C) and starting a new adventure with frosty!
(click the image below for a bigger, non-blurry version of this week’s schedule.)
Albatrossity
As many of you have suspected for a while, birders are weird. Many of them obsessively keep lists of birds seen anywhere (life list), birds seen in their yard, birds seen in a particular county, birds seen pooping (shit list), birds seen on heard on live TV shows, birds seen in their dreams, etc.
One of the more common manifestations of this obsession is keeping a list of the first bird heard or seen in a New Year. I don’t subscribe to all of these obsessions, but I do keep track of the first birds seen in a New Year, and so here is a post with some images of those birds from the past 10 years. Most of these images are not the actual individuals I saw or heard on January 1 of those years, since it is usually pretty dark at the time of the actual sighting or hearing. But these are good memories nonetheless!
PS: Happy MLK Day! And if you didn’t get a wall calendar for Christmas,, to help keep track of holidays and birthdays and such, you can still order one at reduced prices this week. After that, they will be retired and the year will roll on regardless.
In 2015 we happened to be in Wellington, New Zealand on January 1, and my first bird (heard, not seen at the time) was a New Zealand endemic species, the Paradise Shelduck (Pūtangitangi, or Tadorna variegata). This is a noisy and gorgeous species, with conspicuous differences in the plumage of male and female birds. The white head marks this one as a female. Learn more here, and click here for a larger image.
On The Road – Albatrossity – First-of-the-year BirdsPost + Comments (20)