March was a… complicated month. Starting with my being rear-ended, then the root canal, then dealing with a true Great Plains blizzard, then blowing a tire. Then, right at the very start of April, I needed to get my brakes worked on. Don’t get me wrong, I had budgeted for “unexpected expenses”, but the month of March accounted for a significant portion of my emergency funds for the year.
Fortunately, however, March can be defined by more than it’s negativity; throughout the month since my last update I have birded with 20 different birders and added 27 new species to my year list, four of which were Lifers. Over the past month I have found myself focusing more and more on sharpening a variety of my birding skills, especially continuing to develop my birding-by-ear skills when it comes to birds I am less familiar with. I have also been making an effort to spend more time observing (and identifying) birds without optics – something I really haven’t done since I was first getting into birding. Between these concerted efforts and just the natural progression that spending most of every day birding was inevitable to bring, I feel as though my birding skills have continued to develop quite nicely.
The past several weeks saw a major uptick in frequency of something that I did very little of in the first couple months of the year: spending multiple days birding with one person. Between Kansas (two days with Tom Ewert), Oklahoma (two days with Mathew Radford), Missouri (two days with Keith Brink) and Kentucky (three and a half days with Asher Higgins), I spent a lot of time getting to know some of the people I have birded with. There will definitely be a mix of this and more “volume-heavy” birding going forward. On that same topic, I have continued to do… less than the best of both reaching out to and maintaining contact with people. I am going to try to do a better job of that going forward, especially as we enter prime birding season on the east coast as migration gets going in full swing.
Some of the highlights of the past month were the Sandhill Crane migration in the Platte River Valley in Nebraska, my Missouri visits to Loess Bluffs NWR and Swan Lake NWR, and my observation of both Greater and Lesser Prairie-Chicken during my time in Colorado and Kansas. The over 250,000 Sandhill Cranes in a 24-hour window was a spectacle that will probably go down as one of my all-time favorite birding experiences.
Looking at one of my favorite documents, the Observation Data Spreadsheet (linked below), American Kestrel have continued to grown and cement their lead as my most-observed species. Northern Harriers certainly had a big boom for the month of March, but unfortunately it seems doubtful that it will amount to anything other than a flash-in-the-pan when it comes to observations for the year.
Speaking of migration getting going in full swing, the past few days have seen the beginning of a the northward push of warblers, and I am thoroughly looking forward to the month to come which will see me head into the Carolinas before following spring migration up the east coast. This is probably, at least birding-wise, one of the legs of my journey I have been looking forward to the most. Spring migration in general – and warblers in particular – has always brought my favorite birding. During the first few years of my birding journey I birded almost exclusively in spring migration, and some of my earliest birding (like… weeks after I first created an eBird account and finally decided to give it a shot after years or incessant attempts by my dad to get me into it) was done at Magee Marsh for the Biggest Week and Tawas Point for the Tawas Birding Festival, two of the greatest places for warbler migration. Just over a month from the posting of this update I will be visiting a third and probably forth of those great places: Cape May for sure, and possibly Central Park – both visits at prime spring migration timing.
While the next month is bound to bring some of my best birding of my life, it is unlikely to bring too many Lifers. Swainson’s Warbler is a target I am hoping to pick up in the coming few days, but aside from SWWA there are very few targets for Lifers in the next several months. Great Cormorant, Bicknell’s Thrush, Atlantic Puffin, Roseate Tern, and Black Guillemot are some of the most likely candidates, as well as any pelagic-type birds I manage to pick up on the Maine Puffin Tour and any seawatching I might find myself doing – though I doubt I will be doing much as my efforts are primarily going to be focused inland.
There are some additional year targets that I am hoping to pick up while birding my way up the east coast, most notably Swallow-tailed Kite and Mississippi Kite in the coming weeks, as my window for them isn’t particularly wide – though of course I may I shots at vagrants elsewhere. There are about 50 other first-of-year birds I am hoping to pick up somewhere along the east coast over the next couple months, which account for almost half of my remaining targets for the year. I am still thinking I will end the year just over the 600-mark – less than a typical “Big Year“, but still a solid number considering my personal focuses for the year.
I think that about wraps up this monthly update, which is quite a bit shorter (and a bit later) than I had planned for it to be. If you have any suggestions for anything you would be interested in me posting about here, please feel free to shoot me an email at [email protected], and I may include those suggestions in next month’s outfit, which I plan to post on May 9th (though I planned to post this post on the 11th and we can all see how that worked out). Tomorrow’s post for Week Fifteen should be out on time at 5pm eastern tomorrow and will cover my time in Kentucky and the start of my Tennessee birding.
Document/Trip Report Links:
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Follow me on my journey to see 100 species in every Lower-48 State during 2025, experience some of the incredible places and events in American birding, and meet and bird with as many local birders as possible along the way.
Posts will be made every Wednesday (I will try to have them out by 5pm, but situationally they might be a bit later) and will cover the previous Monday through Sunday. Additional posts will be made periodically with no set schedule.
