A Little Bird List Competitiveness

Updating our bird lists last night to account for the chuck-will's-widow, Robert and I compared our ABA life counts - 446 for me, 447 for him.

I have a zone-tailed hawk that I saw driving home from work early one day, a bird that is seen in that part of Austin a couple times per year as Robert knows from the TexBirds listserve. I hadn't been sure what the hell I saw because it looked so much like a turkey vulture with a striped tail. If I hadn't gotten such a good look at him sitting on the wire, and Robert hadn't been able to assure me that other people have seen the bird too, I would have been hesitant to claim it. It's a damn good sighting for Austin.

He has two birds that he saw on Padre Island when he accompanied me to a work conference. It was pretty annoying to come out from the conference center, walk 45 seconds to the bird walk, ask Robert how the birding was, and for him to say "I just saw a Virginia rail." Of course the bird was no longer there. ARGH!

The common wisdom among birding couples is, "The only thing worse than missing the bird is seeing the bird that your partner does not." There have been times that one of has seen a bird and the other has not, but we make a serious effort to refind the bird for each other and this has usually worked out just fine.

For a while, I had a good lead on him with a few birds I saw in California and a bunch of pelagic (ocean) birds that Robert missed being seasick on our outing off Washington state. But he has visited California since then and I treated him as a birthday gift to another pelagic trip that I found pretty much utterly miserable (and did not see anything new) but that he enjoyed and that allowed him to catch me up.

Robert has at least one other bird - wood stork - that he has seen but does not technically have on his list because he has no record of the place and time. I saw a (female) white-collared seedeater when we were in South Texas (a bird with an extremely restricted US range, as you can see from this map - the green edge near Roma), but (1) I felt dissatisfied with my view that was only just sufficient to identify it (as much from micro-location, since the birds are well-known to hang out in that particular set of brush next to that library, as anything else - the bird is damned plain) and (2) Robert didn't see more than a completely useless flash. But I reserve the right, if I am 70 and have not seen another one, to claim it.