Homebirding Plans

This blog will make a little less sense than my last three. I know that hardly sounds plausible, given some of the rambling, but yep.  If you haven't read a stitch of my blogs, let me get you up to speed. 

2011:  In my 39 Counties blog (www.39counties.blogspot.com), I had just turned 39, and took a year to bird all of the counties in the state, trying to see 39 species of birds in each of the 39 counties.   That goal was met, and the blog is a nice introduction to birding in the state (as the year was for me!).  

2015:  In Mason County Birding (www.masoncountybirding.blogspot.com), I was birding Mason County, a little county that hugs the great bend of Hood Canal and extends into the Olympic Peninsula.  The existing year list record was 179 species in Mason, and I decided to make a run at it, finishing the year with 180 species (while another birder extended the record even further to 186!).  In this blog, I plunged into a single county in a way that I hadn't while running all over the state in the 39 counties blog.

2016:  Last year in Chelan, I tried something similar.  At the start of the year, I thought 200 species looked like a nice challenging goal for the year.  By the year's end, I had 197 species, which confirmed those guesses.  www.chelancountybirding.blogspot.com documents those efforts.

So... What now?

"You know... there are birds in Yakima too..."


My mother floated this observation at me once or twice over the course of the last year or two.  Yakima was home for ten years of my life (with seven years before that in Snohomish, and a not so memorable first year of life in New Jersey), and I spent all ten of those years almost completely oblivious to birds around me.   Since I developed the birding... problem...I've been back, of course, and explored a little here and there, but Yakima has still been a passing-through kind of state.

So I thought it would be nice to bird home this year.  Where is home?  Home for me is Renton in King County.  I'll be birding the city, and birding the county, probably returning to places where I lived, loved, worked and studied, which includes Seattle as well.   I learned to teach here, learned to cook here, and learned how to bird here.  My actual feeder and the places I visit every day have to get honored here, and even the school where I teach, which has become a home in a way that Phillip Phillips really got.

Home will be Yakima County, where I grew up, and where friends, family, coaches and teachers shaped who I am.  My goal is definitely to barge in on the homes of friends and family during the year.  I'm a bit overdue.  My overwhelming feel about Yakima when I was growing up was that I was stuck in the middle of places that I couldn't visit (The Yakama Indian Reservation, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, an Yakima Firing Center sit on different edges of town).  I want to attack that myth a little, and explore as much as I can.

Home will also be Snohomish County, where the memories are a little more foggy and maybe more magical feeling as a result. I had a moment during my 39 counties travels when I accidentally ended up back at the driveway in front of our old home after getting quite turned around.  As I tried to get back to the main road, I got turned around again, giving home a magical feel indeed.  I have memories of looking up at the mountains from home, of the lakes we lived on, of church and school and playing in "the woods". 



I also happen to have family in every one of the counties I mentioned:  Yakima, Seattle, Renton and Stanwood to be precise.