This is where we are: We’ve learned a heck of a lot more about birds and nature in the last 20 days, that’s where we are. When you are trying to eke out EVERY bird you can find in the middle of the mid-Atlantic winter, your senses are at full alert. You look at every gull, every sparrow, every raptor carefully. You listen just a little more intently to every bird song and call. You watch the weather and guage the habitat. You’re out in the field more often. You go to old haunts, like Lake Artemesia in Greenbelt, Maryland, and discover, to your joy, that there’s been a new birding trail, called the Luther Goldman Birding Trail, designated in your absence. You’re happy even if you spent an hour there and didn’t add a single bird to your 2010 list.

 
So … let’s do the numbers. Like many of our blogging friends and colleagues, such as Kathie at Sycamore Canyon, and Larry at Brownstone Birding Blog, we are doing this Big January thing, trying to see as many species of birds in 31 days as possible. Rough goal is 100, although we’d like a lot more than that. Some days they come in bunches, others in 1s and 2s. Some days they don’t cooperate at all.

 
As of Jan 19 at 10:25pm, we have 81 species for our home state of Maryland, and, including the great state of West Virginia and the District of Columbia, 83. We’ve had some lovely surprises, and a few crazy “misses,” common birds we have not laid eyes (or ears) on yet. Stay tuned. We’re not half done yet…