From 400 to 500: A Ten Year Journey
There are milestones in birding that feel like numbers, and then there are milestones that feel like chapters of your life. Reaching 500 state birds for Arizona is definitely the latter.
The journey began in July 2016, when I found my 400th lifer state bird, a Berylline Hummingbird. At the time, I had no idea that the next 10 years would take me on a journey that would become about so much more than adding birds to a list.
Fast forward 10 years and I've reached 500. Earlier on in my birding career, I thought I'd conquer the world and find every bird. And now? It's not that important. I do what I can when I can. I bird wherever I am. Even life birds don't hit the same like they used to. Much of my new birding perspective comes from that journey to 500 state birds during these past ten years. Life and birding has changed me.
I originally thought I would write about the top 10 highlights of those 100 birds. Pick the most exciting chases. The rarest birds. The most memorable sightings.
But the more I looked at my bird list, the more I realized that I couldn't do that.
Because every bird from 400 to 500 mattered.
Every chase became a story.
Every road trip had its own personality. Every stakeout had its own frustrations and triumphs. There were birds that appeared almost immediately and birds that made me work for every feather. There were long drives, early mornings, questionable directions, missed turns, weather, exhaustion, unexpected discoveries and those glorious moments when everything finally came together.
The first 399 birds were fairly easy to find and took less time to achieve. These last one hundred were another story! Climate change has also had an impact on breeding populations. Once rare birds are now more common like number 400, the Berylline Hummingbird.
And sometimes, the bird wasn't even the most important part.
Some experiences were logistical puzzles, requiring maps, strategic planning, timing and a healthy willingness to drive somewhere that seemed completely unreasonable in pursuit of a creature that weighed a few ounces.
Some were spiritual.
There are moments in birding when you find yourself standing somewhere quiet, surrounded by a landscape that you might never have experienced otherwise, waiting for a bird to appear. You suddenly realize that you aren't just looking for a bird anymore. You're standing in a particular place, at a particular moment, and somehow that moment belongs to you.
Those are the experiences that stay.
Looking back now, I realize that these last one hundred birds helped shape the birder I am today.
Maybe that's what happens when you look at 10 years of birding and realize that a list of birds is really a list of moments in your life.
So rather than giving you a neat robotic list of birds, I'm going back.
I'm going to tell the stories.
I'll be writing a series about the journey from 400 to 500, one group of birds and experiences at a time.
Some stories will be about the birds. Some will be about the people. Some will be about the places. Some will be about the ridiculous logistics involved in getting to a bird.
And some will probably be about me standing somewhere at an ungodly hour, wondering exactly why I thought driving hundreds of miles for a bird was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And that's birding. And somewhere along those 100 birds, I stopped thinking of the journey as simply reaching 500. I started realizing that the real milestone wasn't the number. It was who I became along the way and continue to be, a birder changed by these experiences.
So here's to the first 10. One bird at a time.
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