Jan 1st - Killdeer and New Year's resolutions

A bit of a tradition for many birders is to work off their hangovers by going out birding on January 1st -kicking of a fresh year of birding and listing. I'm not a rabid lister like so many others and have never kept a "year list", but there's something symbolic about getting out on Jan one.

This year I have two New Year's resolutions related to birding. Firstly, enter at least one e-bird checklist into e-bird every single day of the year. This takes a bit of discipline but otherwise shouldn't be too hard. A checklist can be made just by looking out the window at the bird feeder, or recording what I see while driving to work. The trick will be to do it everyday, and will hopefully make me a better note taker, recording numbers of birds and not just a species tally. I hope to also enter a lot of e-butterfly checklists but for obvious reasons I can't do that everyday.

Second resolution is to see 300+ bird species in Ontario this year - not to be confused with doing a big year! I am NOT doing a big year. For the first time ever I will keep a dedicated year list. 300 shouldn't be hard to reach as long as I get out birding during all the seasons and make a bit of an effort to see some birds I might let slip by in past years. For example, birds like Brant, various shorebirds, etc. you could easily miss from year to year without a moderate amount of effort and "chasing". Caveat - if I do any worldly travels I might miss out on 300, but if I'm birding overseas I'm o.k. with that.

January 5th is this year's Fisherville CBC, so today wasn't quite count week but I went out to scout the area anyways. Only real highlight was a Killdeer that was on the shoreline at 158 Bluewater Parkway, east of Selkirk P.P. Wish I had of snapped a grab photo for the blog, but I didn't think about it at the time. You'll have to settle for this highly cropped photo of two Bald Eagle's hanging out near their nest.