This is a subpage of: Birding Life List
Out of a possible 60 birds on this page, I’ve painted 11.
This page is set aside for all the birds I first saw in 2022-2023. In this two-year span, I finally began travel birding (in Nevada and British Columbia) and added some birds from western North America. I also made an effort to use eBird to add a few “target” birds I’d missed from the Northeast.
160. Greater Roadrunner
I was so excited to see this bird in the wild at Clark County Wetlands Park near Las Vegas on my first (and to date only) trip to the desert. It was running along a road, just like in the name!
161. Anna’s Hummingbird
This is a western bird, so it’s not one I’ve ever seen on the East Coast. First sighted in Clark County Wetlands Park, Nevada, and then several more times in Vancouver.
166. Spotted Towhee
I first saw the western version of the towhee in Nevada, then I saw it frequently in British Columbia. The eastern towhee is #88!
177. Bobolink
Though not considered a particularly uncommon bird in MA, it was ten years of birding before I ever saw one.
178. Prothonotary Warbler
A Southeastern bird that’s pretty rare as far north as Massachusetts, but following the bird lists helped me to find it – as did running into a crowd of birders on-site!
179. American Oystercatcher
After admiring these guys in my shorebirds calendar, I was delighted to find a pair wandering around the breakers Winthrop Beach in Boston. They are so distinctive with their big, giant beaks!
190. Glaucous-Winged Gull
Glaucous-winged gulls are huge, screaming gulls with light-colored wingtips that are ever-present in Vancouver. They harassed me on Granville Island at my first visit; the second image shows one swimming in the salt water swimming pool at Kits Beach.
196. Bushtit
These tiny, round borbs seem to appear as if by magic in huge flocks in shrubs and low trees in the PNW. They are gray-brown, so often blend with their surroundings. My experience of bushtits is that you look at a shrub and see nothing, look again and see one bushtit, look again and see 20.
I first glimpsed these at Trout Lake, Vancouver, on my visit in November 2023, but didn’t really get a good look at them until living in that city the following summer.
I tried capture that feeling of the bushtit being drab and nearly blending into its surroundings with this blue & brown earth triad painting.
197. Steller’s Jay
My trip to Vancouver wouldn’t have been complete until I saw a Steller’s Jay. Luckily a birder who struck up conversation with us while we were looking at grebes in Vanier Park told us exactly where to find them.
198. Chestnut-Backed Chickadee
Seen on the same trip as the Steller’s Jay. They landed on us!
200. Ash-throated Flycatcher
My two-hundredth bird is a Southwestern US native, but I saw it in Massachusetts! A rarity for the location, it somehow wound up in Cambridge for several weeks in fall 2023 and let excited local birders get plenty of great sightings. This is one of the only times I’ve seen a rarity, and only because it happened to choose to hang around the park I visited daily on my everyday routine living in the neighborhood.