On 29 October 2017, I boarded a flight from Melbourne to get to Delhi via Guangzhou and managed to spend an entire 24-hour period within the confines of a plane/window-less rooms/airports in the middle of the night. And thus, I went a full day without getting a chance to look at birds for even a short while and failed to make an eBird checklist.
At the time, I was on a 140-ish day streak of birding, and hoping to continue the spell until I was left heartbroken at the airport. Apparently I was so disappointed, I didn’t bother birding at all the next day… and then on 31 October, picked up my binoculars again and started the journey one more time.
This time, despite some very close calls (mostly due to transits in airports, and at least once due to laziness), I reached the milestone I was aiming for - 1000 consecutive days of birding as of today morning (26 July 2020).
My best eBirding streak yet.
A birder, in practice, is always birding. But here, when I say birding, I mean taking out some time each day to actively and dedicatedly make the effort of looking for birds, noting down all you see, and making a list. Often, this effort may only be a few minutes long and sometimes, it may stretch through hours - but it all counts. For my purposes, I decided that I need to engage in the effort of birding for at least 5 minutes a day as a minimum. That low bar I set came in handy a couple of times as I made lists from airports and airplanes… (note that all these are complete checklists)
Places I have birded over the last 1000 days
Thanks to eBird, I’ve been able to track my birding efforts and additionally, become a birder who’s more obsessed with birding at all times and making lists at all places. Along the way, eBird has also acted as a fantastic platform to play the role of my “digital notebook”. Using eBird I am able to see where all I have been, what all I have seen, who I went with, and even what the weather was like at times. But I digress; and before I drone on and wax lyrical about eBird and its many virtues, I will get to the point.
I used this little personal milestone as a way to learn a bit more about myself as a birder. So, I pulled out my data from eBird today evening and set to work to look at how I bird and in recent context, how the lockdown affected my birding. I looked at the lockdown in particular as it was the “home stretch” as far as my 1000-day run as concerned - and motivating myself to get out in the garden and look at the same birds again and again everyday for 51 days often felt like a chore. The differences in the two stats also go on to show how closely interlinked birding is with travelling (long or short distances) for me.
Here’s a couple of frequency bar graphs. The first one showing how often I birded over the last 1000 days, and the second one showing how often I birded over the 51 days of lockdown.
On a little over 400 days out of 1000 (this includes all the lockdown days, mind you), I birded just the once. But on almost 280 days, I birded at least twice; and on over 200 days, I birded 3 or 4 times! In contrast, during the lockdown, I only managed to pick up my binoculars two times in a day on 8 days out of 51. Yikes!
Across the 1000 days, I averaged 2.46 checklists a day but during the lockdown that number fell to a tame 1.15 checklists each day.
I also wanted to look at when I go birding. I was pretty sure this was going to be an easy one to guess - and I wagered that I birded in the mornings 90% of the time. Close enough, but it was a bit more varied than I’d guessed. To get these numbers, I looked at starting times for my checklist, and divided the day into 3 blocks - mornings (4 AM to 12 PM), afternoons and evenings (12 PM to 7 PM), and nights (7 PM to 4 AM). There are likely to be a few evening lists that are night lists and some morning lists that are afternoon lists but the overlap overall should be negligible overall… (I hope)
So, a solid 75% of my time birding is in the mornings. And a fairly measly amount at night - which goes on to explain why I complain about not seeing any owls or nightjars :-) During the lockdown, my suburban environments proved even less enticing at night, while I am pleased I managed to get almost 10 lists out of the way after noon (vs 50 in the morning!).
I also looked at how long my checklists are within these time blocks. In this case, I used the length of each checklist as a proxy for the length of each “period” of birding. Here’s where I expected there to be a major difference. I imagined I birded a lot longer in the mornings and at night, than in the afternoon/evening. The results weren’t as stark. In the mornings, I birded an average of 36.75 minutes per checklist whereas the numbers are not very different for either the afternoons/evenings and the nights with their numbers at 30.28 minutes and 33.63 minutes per checklist respectively. However, I only managed a rather paltry 14.5 minutes per checklist during the lockdown.
Oh well, the idea of keeping this streak going has been very engaging and great fun. And some of the most interesting moments in recent years have involved me scrambling on rainy days, at airports, at events, etc trying to fit in a genuine checklist into my day. Here’s to another 1000 consecutive days of eBirding!