Birds? What Birds?

Okay, so 2010 has gone down in the history books as our worst-birding-year-ever (to date)... not surprising seeing that I spent several of the best birding months in bed, while Andy spent them catering to my every need or shuttling Aiden all over creation. And then once that was over, we had feisty little Haley-doo to add into the mix. Newborn babies and birding do not go hand in hand, as you might imagine. So I saw a fairly pathetic 195 birds (no idea even how that number was even generated since I was certainly not keeping track, but Andy tells me its so) while Andy weighed in at a slightly less pathetic 201. Not to worry, some things (like adding to your family) are more important than birding. We're looking forward to a more birdy 2011, while at the same time being realistic that we won't get much serious birding in until the kids go off to college in 18 years or so...

Birders gathered on a residential street to gawk at a Townsend's Solitaire. Usually this freaks out the whole neighborhood... got to love it.

However... we're off to a good start with our first lifer of 2011 on a not-too-shabby January 2. We tried for a reported dovekie on our New Years Day excursion to the seacoast and came up empty handed but on Sunday we drove a little over a half-hour to find a Townsend's Solitaire (west coast relative of the robin) in Bow. A big group of geeky birders was assembled in front of some huge houses, all gawking through their ginormous spotting scopes and camera lenses, no doubt giving the residents the total creeps... in any case, it wasn't too difficult to locate the poor bird once we found the right street. Funny, those birders are... per the usual, we were the youngest 4 people there by several decades (a good half century in Haley's & Aiden's cases), and everyone enjoyed "spotting" an incredibly cute and smiley 5 month old birder in addition to the solitaire. Aiden looked for dinosaurs through his binos, and got lots of hints from the assembled crew. How long do you think we have until they both realize their parents are crazy?