I'm a county birder. What does that mean?
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| Birding is this kind of activity |
First of all it means I'm a birder. I think the more familiar term is "birdwatcher", which conjures up images of.. well, send me a message and tell me what image comes to mind when you hear "birdwatcher", but it's a passive sounding term in many ways. Birding is active. Birding is finding birds, and working hard to identify them. Sometimes it involves lists (oh it does for me), sometimes it involves chasing down a rare sighting (I mean... not really for me, but I've heard it's fun). I want to identify the birds that I see, and I'm actively out there trying to find them.
The county tag on there means that I care about whether or not I've seen different species of birds in a given county. Somehow, county birding in the state has been identified as the more gung-ho way of approaching this hobby, and people run off to corners of the state to try to bring their life lists in each of our 39 counties to 100, 150, 175, and 200 species. "I could never get that deep into it," I've been told by people who care not at all about what county they're in, but would gladly drop what they were doing to chase a bird two hours away.
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| County birding includes this kind of activity as well (spreadsheet available at Washington Birder |
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| Tucannon River - Columbia County |
I had an amazing year in 2011 when I turned 39, attempting to see 39 species of birds in each of the 39 counties over the course of the year. (The 39 counties blog seems to be only 95% intact. Images have disappeared, and it is tied to an email account that will not let me manage it anymore. There are still a ton of pictures, and it's a fun introduction to the state.) I was successful in the end, and continued the push until I got to 100 species in every county a few years later.
"Fair warning. It'll take you just as many years to get to 150," I was told by a fellow county birder. I'm not great with warnings, and this statement got me thinking... Thinking about the path it would take to make that happen - running around to the different corners again and again, and trying to time my visits to get a slightly different snapshot of the county being visited - I decided, "No." I'm far too creative to take a process like this and take just as long to complete it as anyone else.
If I did things just right... I could take much longer.
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| Harlequin Duck - Pend Oreille County |
Big Year Birding
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| Mason County - 2015 |
In 2015, I started a different approach to exploring the state, completing a big year in Mason County on the Olympic Peninsula. One county at a time seemed like a beautiful way to tackle the challenge of seeing more. It's inefficient on a grand scale, to be sure; Any tactical person just trying to "get this done" would continue to visit many counties each year, and would especially run after any rarities that came up (sometimes these rare birds are the only way to bring a small county up to 175-200 species).
One county at a time means that I'm not just passing through. I'm not leaving corners unexplored. In Mason County, it also meant that I was taken in. I was adopted by a couple on a tree farm, got to know the folks at one of the commercial farms (where I was always able to get updates on the Barn Owls), went to the local festivals, had meals cooked for me, given free oysters, was invited onto numerous properties, shown hidden spots, led a field trip, and explored the county by foot, car, kayak, powerboat, and golf cart.
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| Warm welcomes - Mason County |
I found so many birds that year; I missed some as well, but came out of the year with zero regrets. This was how I wanted to do it. I was using the birds as an excuse to get to know people and places in depth, rather than using county lines as an excuse to simply make numbers and checklists grow. This was a year with an end that made the means very justified.
For the foreseeable future then, I suppose I'll be taking on one county at a time and continuing to blog about what I find. This ought to keep me busy for another... oh 30 years or more!
Tinkering
In 2016, I completed a very similar year in Chelan County, making a run at 200 species for the year (nowhere near the record, but still not a bad year!) I landed about where I expected, with 197 species in the end. Chelan is a bit bigger, and a little farther away, and I would say I spent time with about half as many people as I did during my Mason trip. If anything was missing, that was it: the connections with people while I birded. It wasn't absent, but it wasn't experienced as fully as it had been during the previous year.
In 2017, I "took a break" from focusing on single counties. It seemed like a good idea at the time, splitting my trips between Snohomish and Yakima Counties. In the end, this was not the year I had really hoped for. I found 175 species in both counties, and I did get to spend wonderful time with family in both counties, but I felt thin. I hadn't explored many corners of the counties, and the numbers themselves were not enough of a challenge to demand any creativity. Sometimes more is not better!
Lewis County
Throughout this whole process, one birding friend has been a frequent copilot: Kevin Black. The scattered "plan" of doing Yakima and Snohomish in the same year made it hard to plan much at all with Kevin, and we actually spent zero days birding together this year! We got talking about this and have spent time off and on over the last year trying to come up with the right county for us to tackle together. In the end, we decided on Lewis County.
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| Lewis County- thanks, Google! |
Why?? People who bird in the state with very little regard for county lines will accidentally find themselves in a few well-traveled spots time and time again: Okanogan County for boreal species; King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties to chase rarities close to home; Clallam and Gray's Harbor Counties to find even more seabirds and rarities. Over the Cascades on the East Side, Kittitas, Yakima, Walla Walla... all offer diverse habitat and birds that you just can't find on the wet side.
Some counties just end up underbirded, and Lewis County is one of those to be sure. Lewis County has no salt water, touching neither Puget Sound, nor the Pacific Ocean. It also has no contact with the Columbia River - a sometimes stopover for ocean loving birds during the fall. These factors all mean that Lewis has a shorter species list than any comparably sized county in the state (barring Ferry County in the northeast corner - another county I considered tackling this year).
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A dated, but intriguing map of Lewis County
from Roger Orness in Washington Birder
Summer 2003. White-tail Kite sightings noted.
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Lewis County does have some things going for it, however! It touches two mountain ranges: The Willapa Hills and the Cascades. It is surrounded by large mountains (Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and Mount St. Helens are all just outside of the county lines in different directions, and has some accessible habitat as well with the Pacific Crest Trail and the Goat Rocks Wilderness. It has some farmland, some forestland, and a few large lakes. Not counting some of the wide parts of the Columbia that have been given the "Lake" moniker, Riffe is exceeded in size only by Lake Chelan, The Potholes Reservoir, and Lake Washington.
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Goat Rocks, Lewis County
Photo Andy Porter
https://northwesternimages.wordpress.com
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All the other stuff
I'm already hard at work trying to find ways to connect to the county and the people living there. I won't type much about that here, as the stories of those people would best be told as I meet them firsthand. I'm already excited by some of the small towns that dot the landscape there, and can't wait to pay them a visit. Onalaska, Chehalis, Randle, Pe Ell, and Vader...
Birding with Kevin should be a treat. We complement each other really well skill-wise. I have really good ears for bird calls and songs. Kevin on the other hand is quite a bit better than me with all of the little field marks and ageing birds. Honestly, his ears are probably as good as mine too, but for the purposes of painting a picture of synergy and cooperation, we'll pretend that he really needs my ears out there.
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| Not just birds ;) |
Stay tuned! I'm hopeful that this post will at least paint a picture of just what the devil is going on this year.
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