Hello Everyone! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. As this post comes out on Christmas Day I will likely be spending time with my Grandma at her house in Saginaw, and she will undoubtedly be asking me a million questions about my plans for next year, worried beyond measure. To be fair to her, there is some good reason to worry – I mean, what kind of sane person quits there job, pacts all their belongings into their car, and hits the road for an entire year? Of course it’s a crazy idea, but it’s definitely as exciting as it is crazy.
In just under three days, at about 8am on the morning of the 28th, I will be beginning the drive to southeast Arizona to begin my journey. My car is packed aside from a few things I will be using over the next couple days; my pillow, my laptop, my binoculars – all of which are absolutely essential – have yet to make it into my Subaru Crosstrek. Tomorrow I will be meeting some of my Michigan friends to say “Goodbye” until I find myself back home in July, and Friday I will probably be frantically trying to finish up the packing of everything I am not taking with me into some sort of semi-organized state. With the journey rapidly approaching I wanted to use this post as an opportunity to go over some of my plans for the first few weeks.
Like I said, at 8am on the 28th I will be leaving for Arizona, but I don’t actually need to be in AZ until the evening of the 31st, so what’s going to be happening in those days in between? Well, in addition to a lot of driving (about 30 hours of it, to be exact), I of course plan to do some birding. My goal is to break the drive up into six 5ish-hour sections, with one in the afternoon and one in the evening of each day, with the drives being split up by birding in the morning and midday of each day (with the exception of the 28th, where the drive will be in the morning instead of the afternoon).
Along the way I will be testing out my car-camping set up. While I have spent a lot of time on the road before – especially in May of 2022 – I have never spent time like this on the road before. Unlike in 2022 when I had an apartment to return to and was spending probably more than I could realistically afford on fast food, next year everything I own will be packed into the back of my Crosstrek and I will be cooking my own food from my “mobile kitchen”. The biggest test will be seeing how well my Jackery portable power bank functions in terms of powering my electric cooler and my laptop for when I do my blog posts – ideally I should find myself in a situation where it charges enough while I am driving to ensure that it never dies when charging things when I am not, but if that turns out to not be the case it shouldn’t be too big of an issue for me to periodically stop throughout the year to recharge it fully. If you’re asking yourself why I haven’t already tested that before, y’know, driving across the country, then… well I don’t have a good answer for you besides yes I probably should have already done that. I planned to, I really did, but then September (when I got the Jackery) turned to October and then I blinked it was Christmas and I was leaving in less than three days, and yeah. But it will all work out.
My car setup is something I am super excited about. It’s admittedly kind of cramped – or more optimistically put it’s an efficient usage of the space available to me! My bed occupies the most space, taking up nearly the entirety of the rear-passenger side of my car. I say “nearly” the entirety, because not visible in the photo posted here is my “Winter Storage” (warm weather clothing that I won’t need for much of the year but absolutely will need for some and therefore want to keep with me, plus a few other things that I won’t need access to very often) and my Jackery, both of which sit under the bed platform. On the passenger’s side in the front of the vehicle sits my electric cooler and my aforementioned “mobile kitchen”, which consists of a portable camp stove, a pot, a pan, and some silverware, utensils, and plateware. Behind my driver’s seat sits everything else – every piece of clothing, non-refrigerated food item, piece of other gear and all optical equipment. It’s not a lot, but it’s everything.
The year will kick off in southeast Arizona, specifically in Pima County where I will be joining local birder Timoteo Burkhardt on his traditionally Pima County Big Day. Once I am done birding with Tim I will be meeting up with Ken Blankenship of East West Birding Tours for two great days of birding in Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, and then on the 4th I will be heading up to Phoenix to bird with Gordon Karre. That will wrap up my initial visit to Arizona, though I will be back in late February.
After I am done birding with Gordon I will head to Albuquerque New Mexico to meet up with my family. Two of my three brothers have lived in ABQ for the past decade or so, and our family hasn’t all been together in one place in a handful of years. The 5th will be one of the few days of the year not dedicated to birding (though I am certain I will still manage to squeeze some in), and then the 6th-9th will be primarily spent birding near Albuquerque at places like Bernardo WMA, Bosque del Apache NWR, and up in the Sandias for the Rosy-Finches. Most of this birding will be done with my dad (though I may be meeting up with a few local birders as well during this time), and the afternoons and evenings will primarily be spent with my family. Then on the morning of the 10th I will begin my journey south will begin, with my dad following behind in his rental car for the initial stretch as the drive as we squeeze a bit more birding in, and then eventually he will turn back and I will continue on to Las Cruces where I am hoping to meet up with some members of the local Audubon chapter to spend time birding with at places like Leasburg Dam SP, Mesilla Valley Bosque SP, and the Dripping Springs Natural Area.
Finally on the morning of the 12th I will cross the border from New Mexico into the west Texas town of El Paso, where unlike Marty Robbins before me I probably won’t find myself at Rosa’s Cantina. No, instead I will be meeting up with a couple local birders at Keystone Heritage Park or Rio Bosque Park, getting in some birding before beginning the long drive to the Big Bend area. There I will hopefully be meeting up with Houston-based birder David Sarkozi for a Big Day-styled day of birding Big Bend National Park on the 13th. I will also be spending the morning of the 14th in the area before heading on towards the Lower Rio Grande Valley – probably the only place I’ll be all year other than Michigan that I have some level of familiarity with. While in the LRGV I will be hitting some of the must-stop hotspots such as Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and Estero Llano Grande State Park. While I would love to spend more than just a couple days in The Valley, I will then be heading up the coast toward the Rockport area to go out on the Skimmer with Captain Tommy on the Rockport Birding and Kayak Adventures Whooping Crane tours. Once the tour is done I will continue to work my way up the coast into Louisiana.
The trip beyond that will be updated shortly on my Roadmap, which is where I will be consistently updating my plans for the coming 4-6 weeks throughout the year as well as keeping a running summary of the year so far. Over the course of the past few days I have been (and over the next few days will continue to be) putting together my final itinerary for Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. If you are a birder in any of those states – or really in any state anywhere – and you are interested in meeting up to go birding with me when I am in your area, please feel free to reach out by sending me an email at PeoplePlacesBirds.net. For whatever reason the contact page I had here on the website hasn’t been functioning properly so I have indefinitely taken the form down while I figure that out, but in the meantime email (or social media) is absolutely the way to reach me! Also in the next few days I will be continuing to post my Michigan-337 series until its completion – March came out yesterday, April should be coming out later this evening, and then each of the next eight days an entry will be posted for May-through-December. Additionally a post will be coming on New Years Day, which will largely be focused on the drive out to Arizona and my expectations for the year beyond just my plans and the goals I have mentioned.
Happy birding!
Daniel.
First and foremost - thank you to anyone who chooses to support me in this insane adventure of mine. When I initially had this idea and began planning I didn't even consider the possibility that others would want to support me, but I am extremely grateful to those who have reached out to do so. For those who are interested in supporting me, I have set up a Patreon, which can be accessed by clicking the logo to the left (or you can send me a message via the contact page). Again, thank you for your incredibly generous support!
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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.
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