The Great Backyard Bird Survey 2023
The plants have not been cooperating, so I decided that it's time to put some effort into learning birds. The timing was convenient, just a few weeks before this year's Great Backyard Bird Survey. I've been going outside and stumping about in the mud to look at birds when I can, and pouring over visual and audio identification quizzes with Larkwire when I can't. Larkwire has been surprisingly fun and effective, and I'm recognizing a lot of birds by sound now when I go running. Photographing birds is proving frustrating, as I expected it would. I'm afraid getting really good bird pictures requires some really expensive equipment. Someday. Maybe. Anyway, I'm only posting observations here that I can document with photos or sound recordings (of which I've only made one so far).
I had a lot of fun with the survey. Since I couldn't get a decent picture of everything, here's what I managed to see: red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, great blue herons, common mergansers, American coots, Canada geese, northern shovelers, mallards, crows, a spotted towhee, Townsend's solitaire, western bluebirds, song sparrows, house sparrows, house finches, white-breasted nuthatches, American robins, northern flickers, buffleheads, and a ring-billed gull. And a porcupine, which I'm counting with the birds because it was way up in a cottonwood tree along the river. Now I want to figure out the phylogenetic relationships and life histories of everything I saw, but I need to put some more work into a couple papers before I let myself do that.
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