Well this post isn’t about a birding trip I went on, but I wanted to briefly recap the past year as best I could. I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better birding year (well, I could’ve, but realistically…) – so many trips and so many birds!
My 2009 year list finished at 409, the highest it’s ever been in the several years I’ve been birding. This was due largely in part to the 142 life birds (!) I saw on Camp Chiricahua, Victor Emanuel Nature Tours’ youth birding camp in southeast Arizona (2010 camp here). I had an awesome time there, and I highly, highly recommend it to any birder between the ages of 14 and 18. Just a couple of the highlights were (yes, I have to mention it) finding the potential first ABA record of Brown-backed Solitaire, hunting (not literally) for Elegant Trogons, owling almost every night, seeing 12 species of hummingbirds (should’ve been 13), and overall having a great time with other young birders traversing the mountains and deserts of Arizona.
This was my first year with the NY Young Birders Club, and I have to say being a member and meeting other young birders nearby completely expanded my horizons and definitely increased the frequency I go birding. The monthly field trips introduced me to many great spots in New York that I had known nothing about, and got me involved with my second biggest bird highlight of the year, the World Series of Birding in New Jersey. Unfortunately, that was a month before I started this blog, so while I don’t have a written account of it, my teammate, Hope Batcheller, does here. We finished third in the Youth category and twelfth overall with 175 species in 24 hours throughout all of New Jersey. I hope the club can field another team this year!
And last (but by no means least) of my big birding highlights was the Cornell Young Birders Event. We went birding, got exclusive tours of the Lab of Ornithology (I got to touch an Ivory-billed Woodpecker!), met and heard from many people who work there, got a taste of recording bird songs, and a bunch more. Thanks, Chris and Jesse for a great weekend! Another event I highly recommended for any young birder.
Other birding highlights were a crazy May (birding every weekend and sometimes on both days), my third year of Christmas Bird Counts, and many rarity chases over the course of the year (after Arizona, I’ve decided it’s much more fun to actually find a good bird than to jump in the car and go see one). Unfortunately I couldn’t get down to Cape May this year, and a 36-hour pelagic trip I was planning on participating in got cancelled (still have not done one of those!), but I’m sure I will have time for those in the coming months and years. Happy 2010 everybody!
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