New Year's Eve

It’s New Year ’s Eve, and my quest for 1,000 species starts tomorrow.  I find myself dreaming of what 2014 will bring.  What will be the first bird species, the first mammal, the first insect, well you get the idea.   I plan to use a website called eBird to help locate bird species.  This is a real-time online checklist program that allows people to enter their reports, and then the data may be used for statistics and species locations and abundance.

According to eBird, there is a 1% or greater chance of finding 111 bird species in Kansas in January.  Decent odds if you are in the right place at the right time.  If you really put some effort and travel into it, reduce that percentage to 0.25% and the total increases to 143 species.  And if you are living a charmed life, you can include the mega-rarities (which usually don’t make appearances every year), of which there have been 202 total bird species reported in Kansas in January since the year 2000.  See how fun this is going to be?

I am planning an attempt to see or hear as many species as I can in the next year, with the ultimate goal being one-thousand or more.  My focus will be on birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects and spiders.  There may be a few other categories, but definitely not plants, trees, fish or anything not visible to the naked eye.  My territory will be the ABA (American Birding Association) area, which includes the lower 48 states, Canada, and Alaska.  The journey begins on January 1, 2014.  Growing up on a farm in Kansas, I have been interested in birds and bugs since I was 10 years old.  While I did not choose a career in a nature-related field, I have never lost my passion to find and identify every type of creature.