Welcome back to the Sunday Edition. I wanted to share my birding “Big Day” from my Cuba trip in March. It will be the last birding post (this year) about neo-tropical birds, I swear.
A “Big Day” count is a birding term for a single-team effort in which the primary objectives are to identify as many bird species as possible during a single calendar day and to strive to have all team members identify all species recorded.
When I went out on my birding tour we had an expert with us and I think it may have been my biggest Big Day yet! Between the 5 of us we identified over 52 species of birds in just four hours!! Many of those birds were endemic to Cuba.
There are global big days and a big year competition that runs annually. (There is a pretty good movie called The Big Year if you are interested in seeing how crazy and competitive Jack Black and Owen Wilson can get!) It is a great way to keep track of patterns in migration and watch for species decline or rebound, or shifts in nesting sites. Scientists can use the data for ornithological studies and birders can use it to find birding hot spots.
There was an interesting article posted not long ago about how the data can also be used for nefarious purposes and how the software engineers are working to keep sensitive data on species at risk out of the hands of poachers and other potentially harmful users. You can read it here.
Anyhow, here are a few more of the images of the birds I spotted on my half day birding tour. I hope to break my Big Day record here in Yellowknife once all the migrants return.
Have a wonderful week everyone and we’ll see you next Sunday.