Birding Log 12-26-25 Location: Various waterfront parks in Belfair & Allyn, WA
A lot of Bufflehead out. They're the smallest ducks in my area, generally just very cute. They're diving ducks, which means they dive fully underwater for food, as opposed to dabbling ducks (like mallards), which just stick their head underwater to feed while their butt floats up in the air. Bufflehead are easily the most common diving duck around here, and maybe the most common duck period, with Mallards a close second. I love the name dabbling duck. I've often been a dabbling duck myself, moving from interest to interest, always with my butt stuck up in the air. I think this time, with birding, I'll be a diving duck for awhile, trying to find out what's way, way under.
One fact about bird diving that I learned recently is that the Common Murre, a seabird commmon in Alaska that sometimes shows up in the PNW, can dive up to 550 feet deep. Think of like, the deep end at a community pool is 12 feet and you can feel the pressure on you when you go to the bottom. The deepest someone scuba diving with a full tank and everything will go as just a recreational scuba diver is 130 feet. Somewhere there has been a submarine made for deep diving who was going WAY WAY down and looked out one of their little portholes and saw this:
On this trip I spent a long time trying to identify a Grebe. I think I spent some time in my last blog post talking about how winter plumage makes all of these non-duck-waterbirds look the same, and Grebes are a big part of that, along with the Loons and Alcids. So I'll sit there and stare for SO LONG. Just like looking at this little speck in my binoculars then staring at a guide, then doing it again. The wind is going crazy, maybe it's raining, I'm probably cold, but I HAVE to know what this bird is so I'm staying. Sometimes birding feels like yoga for my ADHD, stretching it to see how long I can be very patient for this thing I'm hyperfocused on. It turns out it's sometimes an hour or more.
I've been doing a lot more reading about birding culture, primarily Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, which is a birding memoir about his experiences hitchhiking around the country in the late 60s and early 70s, trying to do a Big Year (seeing as many birds as possible in a year--often trying to break the record) and meeting other birders, including the very beginnings of the American Birding Association, which is still the main organization for birders (though audubon society and the cornell ornithology lab's membership program are there too, each with overlapping but slightly different focuses and approaches). I'm going out with a group of birders for the very first time in mid-January. I'm not sure how I'll feel about birding with other people who are super into this, like if they'll move too fast or two slow, or if I'll feel disappointed if I don't get a chance to ID a bird myself because someone else pointed it out to me, or if that will be nice and feel like we're all doing it together. I've birded with other people before, but it's usually friends and most of them are at a similar level of birding interest as I am. My friend Threshold has been doing it off and on along with her hiking and other nature stuff for decades, but for her birds are not the obsessive focus, just one of many things to learn and appreciate. I want to get there too, but maybe I am more of a diving duck than a dabbling duck after all. I'm doing birds first.
Lists are somewhat controversial among some birders. I think this is because some people get kind of crazy about them. People doing a big year will fly across the country back and forth, spending huge amounts of money on short notice to see one rare bird that showed up somewhere before it leaves. I'm not sure checking a bird off your list is worth the pollution created by taking so many flights for single birds. And at that point, do you even get to appreciate them, really? For me listing is an excuse to enjoy birds, an excuse to get outside, an excuse to get myself to pay closer attention to kinds of birds I might not care about initially. And it's a game you play with yourself of "How many can I see?" Right now I'm at 77 species. Which is not very many. Washington state's got probably 500 species, though some are very rare visitors from the arctic or the open ocean and many are endangered. But 77 species is nice for me. I want to get to 100 on my Arizona trip. I think getting 33 birds in ten days of nothing but birding in a new bioregion with access to both mountains and deserts should get me that. Stay tuned :)