Birding Trips Bucket List

Guianan cock-of-the-rock.

I have a friend who travels professionally, running high-end tours and events for corporations and organizations all over the world. I used to think of myself as a well-traveled person, having been to 30+ countries around the world. That is, until I saw an Instagram post by my buddy (I'll call him Tim) as he was visiting this 200th country!! TWO HUNDRED COUNTRIES! That's an epic level of world travel.

There are a lot of places I've always wanted to visit, and of course I want to visit them primarily for birding. But things like culture, history, cuisine, music, and meeting local people interest me almost as much.

So, here are 10 places that are on my Birding Travel Bucket List, and a brief explanation of why. I'm hoping that this blog post will act as a penny tossed in a wishing well, bringing me the chance to some day cross these off the list with an actual visit.

Birders lunching near a village in Papua New Guinea.

10.  Kazakhstan. I love being in the wide-open steppe and big sky habitat, and from what I've heard, this country is just that, in spades. Add in some fantastic birds, interesting culture, and the fact that much of the former Soviet Union was off limits for most of my life and you've got a winner.

9. Nepal. The opposite of flat. While I have no desire to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest, I have always been fascinated with the culture and people from this part of the planet. Also: very phunky pheasants.

8. Chile. Birds & wine. Wine & birds. And the end of the Earth.

7. Morocco. I've always wanted to travel in the deserts of North Africa. Lots of endemic birds, too.  I also have a fez collection.

6. Thailand. Pittas, hornbills, and actual Thai food. Oh my!

5. Tanzania. To be fair, there are half a dozen African countries to which I'm equally drawn. But somehow this one seems to creep to the top thanks to its national parks and natural abundance. Tanzania has some world famous sites associated with it: Kilimanjaro, Lake Tanganyika, Ngorongoro Crater, Gombe Stream, Zanzibar. And 1,100 species of birds.

4. Ecuador. While we're on the topic of bio-abundance, Ecuador ranks near the top in terms of its bird list, with 1,660 species recorded. A birder can go from the highest elevation cloud forest to lowland forest in a single day and rack up a significant list en route.

Rainforest birding in Central America.

3. Hawaii. OK so I realize that this is not a country and its native bird life is pretty much doomed thanks to climate change, habitat loss, and introduced exotics. But it would be my 50th U.S. state and I've always wanted to put nene (Hawaiian goose) on my North American life list.

2. Antarctica. Getting to go to Antarctica would solve several things: I'd be able to brag about visiting all seven continents on Earth; I'd be able to drop arcane facts on people, such as: Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth; I'd get to see snow petrel.

1. Australia. For some reason, Oz has always topped my list of most-desirable birding destinations. Certainly the birdlife there is wildly appealing, and the Aussie people are, too. The landscape of Australia is as varied and alluring as the continent's history. There are things everywhere in Australia—on land and water—that can kill you. Besides all these reasons for my attraction, the first article I ever edited for Bird Watcher's Digest,  way back in May of 1988, was about birding on the Cape York Peninsula in Australia. From that moment I was hooked.

These are just 10 places I'm eager to visit for birding and the other reasons mentioned. Ask me tomorrow or next month and I'd probably come up with a slightly different list. After all, there are more than 10,000 bird species out there and I've still got 160-some countries to go to catch up to my pal, Tim.

If you'd like to read more about some of the places I've been (and God bless you, if you do) try scanning back through the last decade of posts on this blog. There are some great trips among the spots, including trips to Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Guyana, Guatemala, Uganda, South Africa, and more.

If you enjoy listening to podcasts, I've shared many of my birding adventures via my podcast, "This Birding Life," which is sponsored by Carl Zeiss Sports Optics and Rockjumper Birding Tours.

Some of the trips I take—both domestic and overseas—have room for other people to join me. One in particular, co-hosted by Rockjumper and the American Birding Association, is taking place in January of 2017, is a New Zealand birding adventure. A special invitation has been extended to "This Birding Life" podcast listeners to join us on this "trip of a lifetime!" New Zealand is so very close to Australia—my number one dream birding destination—and it has sheep instead of snakes! Bonus!

While on this fantastic trip, participants will be invited to be a part of a "This Birding Life" podcast episode. But the more appealing aspects of the trip are all the birds we'll see, the islands we'll visit, and the new friends we'll make.

BOTB birding in Israel in 2016.

 I'll be posting more about the trip here and elsewhere, but for now, you can get more information on the Rockjumper Birding Tours site here:

http://www.rockjumperbirding.com/tourinfo/aba-new-zealand-subantarctic-island-cruise/

Thanks for reading and I'll see you out there with the birds.

BT3

p.s. I'm sure you have your own Birding Trips Bucket List. If you want to share, please do so via the Comments section.

The New Brohemians Head North

The unrelenting winter was slowly turning my mind space to slush and mush when I realized, in a rare moment of clarity, that the perfect curative prescription was adding a life bird to Ye Olde Life List. You may recall, gentle blog readers and lurkers, that I have previously broached the subject of the life list.

I'd recently broken my self-imposed ban on list-serves dealing with bird sightings and the two that I subscribed to represented opposite ends of the spectrum. The Ohio Birds list-serv had reports of great birds from around the Buckeye State, but very, very few species that would require a new check mark on the life list. And NARBA, the North American Rare Bird Alert gave me great birds that were at least 2.5 million miles away in places like Caribou Sac, Yukon and Blown-out Flip-Flop Key, Florida. Most were a bird too far.

What I needed was an attainable goal. And there it was, right there (unchecked) in the middle of my life list and making regular appearances on the Michigan Birds List Serv: The Bohemian waxwing.

I posted on Facebook that I was planning this quest and my friend and fellow birder Geoff Heeter (see photo above) sent me a message asking if I needed a co-pilot. The Heets is a fun dude. So of course I said "Sure." [If you'd like further insight into the humanoid critter we call Geoff Heeter, visit his business website, or his birding festival website, or my earlier post here in BOTB about the trip.

So it was all set: the Brohemians were going after the Bohemians.

Massive amounts of gear.

Geoff arrived late on Sunday afternoon at my mom's house in Marietta. He bolted a plate of food, and we loaded up all of my gear (weighing several tons) into his vehicle. Then I folded myself into the passenger seat like some contortionist getting into a Houdini submersion box. The level of discomfort I was to experience during the next three days nearly wiped out the gratitude I owed Heets for agreeing to drive. We could have taken the Birdmobile, but its track record on snowy, icy roads is scary poor.

So, riding uncomfortably in Geoff Toyota truck, now known forevermore as The Back Breaker, we hit the highway headed north to Bowling Green, Ohio, where my friend Annie had agreed (surprisingly) to let us crash for the night. On the drive we spoke of many things, of cabbages and kings, of bees with no stings, of LeBron with no rings, of caged birds that don't sing, and so on.

Birding junk in the trunk.

We passed through Toledo and then Detroit mumbling our respects, respectively to Jamie Farr and Eminem. The farther north we got, the fewer birds we encountered. In fact our bird list, upon stopping for gas and tire air in the town of Old Gregg, Michigan, was:
European starling
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
American kestrel
Red-tailed hawk
American crow
Snow bunting
Canada goose
some flying ducks
sky pepper

It was not looking good. Yet we pressed on, blindly optimistic that ours was a quest worth taking.

By late in the day we reached the town of Harbor Springs, MI. This is the home of our my friend Sally, who had responded to my query on the MI-Birds listserv asking about Bohemians. She had seen a huge flock of them in Harbor Springs that very day and we were welcome to come up. She, however, was wisely leaving town with her husband before we arrived.

The Michigan birders from the list-serv were very helpful and generous in sharing their BOWA sightings. Geoff and I mapped all of the sightings and concluded that Harbor Springs gave us the best shot—recent intel, plus it was not as far north as Sault Ste. Marie, where MOST of the sightings were clustered. And, being a Michigan native, Geoff was somewhat familiar with the area. [During the next 36 hours I would hear about every youthful misadventure young Master Heeter was involved in during summers spent in Harbor Springs. We'd go past a house and he'd wax nostalgic about some young lassie and a warm can of Hamm's beer. Lucky for us, the statutes of limitations on most such escapades were expired.]

We followed Sally's directions to the letter and found the fruiting trees the waxwings had been, apparently, occupying non-stop for the past month. Most of these trees were along the lakefront streets and nearly all were stripped almost bare of fruit. Not a good sign.
But we could see ample evidence of the carnage—of the raw masticating power of the roving Bohemians.
The snow was stained from the juice of thousands of crushed berries.


We loafed around the harbor and its springs enjoying the quiet of a waxwing-free winter's afternoon. Common goldeneye and common mergansers edged their way onto the trip list. The temperature began to drop from a balmy 12 degrees F so we changed strategies.

We went to the pet store.

I figured it might sell bird seed and therefore the owner might know another local bird watcher and that local bird watcher would know where else we could go looking for the waxies.

Bingo! Within 30 minutes I was talking to a nice woman who was, indeed, a local bird enthusiast. She'd had the waxwings in her yard that morning. We got directions and headed out to her rural home, racing the daylight, which was doing its best to disappear into Lake Michigan.

Then we got lost. Found a general store. Got directions. Found the woman's house and yard, now 100-percent devoid of Bohemian waxwings.

The Waxwing/Bunting Lady's house. She was both nice and helpful.

"They come every morning to eat the fruit on that tree right in front of my living-room window!"

I muttered to myself, feeling slightly wounded.

"Ya can't hardly shoo 'em away once they start eatin'!"

Wound now gushing blood.

"Yeah, I didn't even know what they were 'til I talked to my daughter on the phone and we figgered it out!"

Wound: meet salt. Salt: wound.

Geoff pulled me away, toward Back Breaker. We needed to go elsewhere so I could have my missed-life-bird conniption fit in peace.

And here is where our luck changed ever so slightly. We ran into a big flock of snow buntings. you can read the tale of this in my recent post over at the 10,000 Birds blog.

Snow buntings. In a tree, of all things.

After enjoying the buntings and their weird, tree-perching behavior, we rolled back past the Waxwing Lady's house, just in case we were on an actual roll.

She came out again to chat with us. We told her about the snow buntings.

"Oh yeah, those things come to our feeders round the back of the house every day, all winter!"

I felt my knees begin to buckle.

Back to town we went, but it was to late to see any more birds. Instead we added planked white fish to our gastronomic life lists, got some affordable hotel rooms and crashed out, with visions of Waxwing/Bunting Lady's birds dancing in our heads.

My room had plaid wall paper which made me think I might be sleeping inside a giant Christmas present.

Ahh. Sleep. Let me drift until tomorrow, when I will take on the Zenlike aura needed to ADD THIS #$&(%(+@ BIRD to my life list. But, really, I'm not like that.

I'll continue the saga in my next post.

Viaje a Guate

My apologies for the post-free nature of BOTB since last Saturday. I've been traveling to exotic lands and have not had ready access to the Internet.

This post will have to be necessarily short. It's 4:30 am and I'm sitting in the open-air lobby of the Villas Guatemala Hotel near Flores, Guatemala waiting for transport to Tikal for a final bout of birding. Then it's bus, airplane, shuttle, hotel, shuttle, airplane, airplane, airplane, airplane, Nebraska.

Going from the humid lowland forest of the Peten Department of Guatemala to the snow-blown flatness of Kearney, Nebraska is going to be muy interesante.

For now I'll leave you with this photograph of a black-headed trogon. More soon!