Birds

This year’s lifers are the Prairie Warbler, Burrowing Owl, and Western Grebe. Other notable sightings include a Pyrrhuloxia and a Western Tanager.

New birds this year include the Black-Throated Blue Warbler, the Black Tern, and the Swallow-Tailed Kite.

2024 brought me a number of new birds, including several in San Antonio.

In 2023, my total species count, including 85 new lifers, like these Nanday Parakeets, totaled 315.

2022 was my second greatest year in terms of total species count, partly because out of the 256 total species I saw, 87 were new birds, including 51 between Vancouver, Canada; the San Francisco Bay Area, California; and New Mexico.

2021 consists of the greatest number of lifers, simply because that was the year that I started logging my bird sightings. A good many of the total were birds I had technically seen before, but I only started keeping a life list on eBird in 2021.

Though I hadn’t started logging my sightings into eBird yet in 2020, thanks to my growing interest in bird photography, I had enough photographs that were sufficiently clear for identifying birds. Since eBird allows you to retroactively add checklists if you know date and location, I was able to add not only 36 species for 2020 but an additional 99 species from prior years to my life list.