Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

A picture worth a 1000 words. Personal photo. As Forrest Gump once professed, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." Birding is a lot like that as well. I remember going on a birding trip when I was about ten with a teen birder at Wayland Community Gardens in eastern Massachusetts expecting that his advanced years would clearly be an asset to finding a multitude of rare and unusual species. The birds it seemed, had other ideas. The only bird we saw that day was a lone black-capped chickadee investigating the twigs of a bare oak. I was extremely disappointed to say the least, not only because of the poor turnout, but I was annoyed at myself for not speaking up more. I guess, I was just a shy kid. Fast forward to about two weekends ago, I spent birding the Trinity Center property looking for birds for: 1. relaxation purposes, and 2. providing a checklist to submit to eBird the next evening in front of an audience of Road Schola...

In three days, it will be the final week of 2016. While many will see it as the end of a trying and packed year, I see this final week as an opportunity. As of tonight, I am 11 species away from my goal of seeing 200 species of birds for the year. Since graduating from college in 2012, I have always tried to observe (both visually and audibly) over 200 species of birds per year. That year, I reached 228 species. In 2013 and 2014, I managed to skip over the line with 225 and 221 species respectfully, but started the decline into the high hundreds last year with 171 total species. In those three previous years, my career has taken me from Connecticut to Massachusetts, back to Connecticut, down to New Jersey, over to Pennsylvania, back to Massachusetts, briefly up to Maine, and finally to Central New York where I currently reside. From a resume building standpoint, this is pretty impressive, but as a birder with a achievable goal, this was extremely disappointing. My uprooting from Ma...