Well, I did do a little traveling in 2019: to Wisconsin for my sister-in-law’s birthday, and to Montana for spouse’s old friends reunion. I’d been to both states before, so no lifers on these trips. My life bird this year was Whooping Crane, in my home county.
- Total life birds: 1112
- Total ABA-area birds: 587. Note this is two more than last year, and I think the bird other than the crane may have been an armchair pickup of a bird added to the ABA list from a split.
- Total state birds: 329. The crane and Brewer’s Blackbird (also in my home township).
Work county. Alas, now that I have left my long-time job, my former county, city, and workplace lists will likely not grow much, although if something really interesting shows up I might run over there and take a look.
- Wayne County: 271. For whatever reason, I had somehow missed Common Gallinule in the county.
- Total Dearborn birds: 231.
- Total birds at work: 203. The last bird for these 2 categories was a Yellow-crowned Night-heron at work.
Home county.
- Total birds, Washtenaw County: 241.
- Total birds in my home township of Lodi Township: 198.
- Yard birds: 161. Coolest was an Eastern Whip-poor-will that was around for a couple days; it was also a township and county bird for me. Alder Flycatcher was an expected species. Several others were flyovers: Caspian Tern, Trumpeter Swan, and Greater Yellowlegs. The tern was also a township and county bird. Yard list is now 176 species.
“Birding” in the sense of really spending time in the field looking for birds has largely fallen by the wayside. My work over the past few years expanded into broader ecological endeavors, heavy on botany and entomology. But in keeping with tradition, here is my catch up post.
- Some new life birds since the last update: Elegant Tern and Red-breasted Sapsucker (2017 on a visit to California) and Spotted Redshank (2018, in my home county), and Slaty-backed Gull (2018, in my former home county).
- Total life birds: 1111.
- Total ABA-area birds: 585.
- Total state birds: 327.
Work county. Alas, now that I have left my long-time job, my former county, city, and workplace lists will likely not grow much, although if something really interesting shows up I might run over there and take a look.
- Wayne County: 270. Last two were notable. One was the first confirmed record for the county for Say’s Phoebe, found by my other half at his work place, a big corporate campus, in December. The other was the above-mentioned gull.
- Total Dearborn birds: 231.
- Total birds at work: 203. The last bird for these 2 categories was a Yellow-crowned Night-heron at work.
Home county.
- Total birds, Washtenaw County: 237.
- Total birds in my home township of Lodi Township: 194.
- Yard birds: 156; my better half has seen more species, so the yard list is actually 169. After 16 years, our yard list in Dearborn was 138.
Juniper (a.k.a. Juni, June Bug, The Bug, My Beautiful Girl) has been with us for ten years now. At nearly 12 years old, she is still as goofy, sweet, and playful as ever. We lost our beloved Sophie in 2013 and it was devastating for all of us, including Juniper. She was clearly depressed for some time, and when she finally came out of it, her personality was much more affectionate, and she became much more attached to me. Thus, she spends more time in my lap than ever before (and she sleeps in exactly the same place beside me as Sophie used to), but still gets the wild zoomies on a regular basis. We now also have another cat, Liberty (Libby). More on her another time, as this is Juniper’s special day!
We love you June Bug!
Did you think I had just given up, abandoning bootstrap to the graveyard of dead blogs?
The last few years have been a crush of winding down my university job, taking an offered premature retirement, and transitioning to more freelance work and more free time (in theory, at least). Although I have kept several of the outlets for my previous gig functioning, I’m going to rechannel my continued research output and outreach to other venues, including right here. I’m not sure if I will ever get back to the level of productivity of personal essays here that I used to, but we’ll see what happens.
You haven’t heard the last of me yet.