Mason County birds - by the numbers

The year I spend in Mason County should be rewarding in a lot of different ways, but the year will be driven to some extent by numbers.  The reachable goal here is to see 150 species in a year.  Is that a lot?  It helps to have a Mason County checklist to look at while trying to answer that question.  This is the most up to date version from Washington Birder.

 http://www.wabirder.com/docs/Mason_list.pdf

269 birds have been seen in the county;  There are a handful of people who have seen over 200 species in the county, and the record for a year is 179 species.  The checklist above lists the birds with a numbered code next to it (explained at the bottom of the checklist).

Code 1 birds:  93

Red-winged blackbird - Code 1 bird. 

Well… I may just call this 92.  The thing is, American and Northwestern Crows may not both be in the county as distinct species.  Supposedly, the small crows hanging out in salt water with high pitched calls are more likely to have mostly or entirely Northwestern Crow DNA.  The larger ones hanging out in town with the lower pitched calls are more likely to have American Crow genetics.  I don’t know how this argument will end, so I’m just going to be calling my crows American Crows this year in the county!  Still, 92 birds gets me over half way to the goal, and even half way to a county record!    These should be birds that I won’t have to work hard to track down – we shall see!

 

 

 

Code 2 birds:  53

Wood Duck - Code 2 bird (photo courtesy of John Riegsecker

These birds are not as easy as code 1 birds, but perhaps not as hard as code 3 birds.  This is always an interesting category, because some of these birds can be quite tough!  Ruffed Grouse, Eurasian Wigeon, and four species of owls are in this group, and I know that these are some birds that have eluded some of the top county birders in the state!  I really want to make some runs for owls this year, and I hope to end the year with all four of those owls on the list!    If I find all of these suckers, and if I don’t count Northwestern Crows above, I’d be at 145 for the year.  Almost enough to reach 150, but still 35 birds or so short of the county record.

 

 

Code 3 birds:  30

Northern Shrike - Code 3 bird, photo courtesy John Riegsecker

These are birds that are seen “annually”, although… I wonder, especially with some of the owls (Western Screech-Owl, and Spotted Owl especially), whether or not there are years where these birds aren’t present in the county.  Both of them have been on the decline, and I don’t know how they go about moving species up and down for the abundance codes.  Mountain Quail is one of the specialty birds in the county, and is probably the “easiest” life bird that I could add this year.  Some of the waterfowl may take me to the south end of the county – near Hartsene Island (which I promise to spell as many different ways as possible this year!), and I’m going to do all I can to understand the tides for finding shorebirds, and… well, I’ll really try with the gulls.  I’m still not all that great at identifying those suckers.  It will be a good project.  All of them… and all the ones and twos… would put me at 175 – still short of the year record!

 

 

Code 4 birds:  20

Sora - A code 4 bird that I found at Theler in 2011

These birds will be fun.  They have been seen 5 or more times in the county, so there is a pattern of occurrence – enough to make some educated guesses about where to look – but they aren’t seen every year, so I don’t know which I will and won’t run into this year (although scrub-jays have pretty much moved in, and shouldn’t be too hard to find!  When do they become a code 3 bird…?).   These are fun birds to research, and I will likely have my hopes way up for many of them!   How many can I count on…?  Not a clue.  If I got every single bird above, I’d need 4 to hit the record.  That seems like a high percentage, but who knows!

 

 

Code 5 birds:  65?

Sharp-tailed Sandpiper - photo courtesy John Riegsecker

I counted twice.  I think this is right.  It doesn’t matter.  Some of these are as likely to show up again as a flamingo.  Some of these are on the list as fives only because they are new to the county (Eurasian Collared-Doves are there to stay), others baffle me because they are annual birds in adjacent counties (why do Yellow-headed Blackbirds avoid Mason County?) and of course there are all of the shorebirds – the chances of finding a code 5 shorebird this year are not bad, it’s just a matter of which one it would be!   The shame of it would be if poor optics or lack of experience caused me to miss some of these.  I see birds like Arctic Loon and Tennessee Warbler on there and worry that I’ll walk right past them, mistaking them for other birds!  At any rate, who knows which will show up, but I think I can count on Eurasian Collared-Dove!   It wouldn’t be too surprising if this whole focus on the county ran me into a bird or two that were new to the county list, which I’ve only had happen once before. 

 

Strategery

 

I actually wrote a lot about this, but it's been a text heavy post already.  How am I going to approach this goal? 

 

The biggest thing I AM going to do is try to build the year with big days. 

 

Wilson Cady holds every county birding record down in Skamania County, I’m quite sure, but a few years back, following a December Big Day that he ran to help me finish my 39 counties year (www.39counties.blogspot.com.  Look in the December posts), he decided to run a similar day during each month in the following year.  Despite decades of birding in Skamania, he broke his county year record in the process.  More interestingly, a birding friend of his from another county had joined him on those big days and had also broken the previous record!  Trying to see as many birds as possible in a county on a single day means hitting a lot of different habitat, staying in motion, and filling the day.  Doing it monthly means multiple efforts to find some difficult resident birds, and it’s a strategy that is good for finding rarities as well.

 

The biggest thing I am NOT going to do is rely on chasing birds.

 

There are only so many birds coming through in a year.  If a rare bird is spotted, and leaves, the number of birds  I'd possibly see during the year will go down by one.  Mason County is as close as an hour away for me, which makes it tempting to hop in the car a lot, but...

 

December 23rd, 2014 - I'm up early, watching The Big Year, and the kids joined me.  Somehow I tricked them into watching a bird movie with me, and Maura stuck around to see how the plot would unfold.  Owen Wilson has just returned from a long trip, and is racing from the airport to meet his wife at the hospital.  As he reaches the door, a friend calls him to report a Snowy Owl, "If you get on the 4:30 flight, you can obliterate your record..."

 

"DON'T!!"

 

Maura delivered this with unwavering finality to the screen, confirming the reason I don't care to chase birds.

 

I won't say that I won't chase any birds this year.  I just know that it is a strategy that is way down near the bottom of my list.  It's a strategy that "works", but it doesn't fit well into the grand scheme of things for me.  So many birders love the thrill of the chase, and rare sightings regularly draw birders away from what they are doing to see birds that they may never see again in their lives.  This trip will be a little more planned than that.  Balance.  Balance is good.