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?