Birds. Birds?

Seems like about time for another bird round-up, so hey why not fly in the face of the current fashion of doing year-in-review things at least two weeks before the end of the year (I'm not sure to what extent Spotify is to blame for this but I am definitely blaming Spotify) and do a year-in-review thing of the actual year. (If we had an actual culture in our society we would be well on our way to instituting a year-end uh Saturnalia in which nothing you do counts because it's outside the scope of all years-in-review and so will never have officially happened.) Anywut, how about let's do my top 15 birds of 2023, by number of ebird checklists they appeared on (with their places on my last all-time top-15 round-up in brackets):

1. Black-capped chickadee, 351 (1)
2. American goldfinch, 330 (2)
3. White-breasted nuthatch, 270 (3)
4. Downy Woodpecker, 249 (8)
5. American Crow, 201 (5)
6. Hairy Woodpecker, 178 (6)
T7. Blue Jay, 167 (4)
T7. Common Raven, 167 (9)
9. Mourning Dove, 139 (7)
10. American Robin, 119 (10)
11. Red-eyed vireo, 101 (12)
12. Purple Finch, 97 (11)
13. Eastern Phoebe, 93 (13)
14. Chipping Sparrow, 83 (-)
15. Red-breasted nuthatch, 68 (-)

Birds in the previous top 15 not in this one: ruby-throated hummingbird (14) and dark-eyed junco (15), but they were 16th and 17th in 2023, right behind red-breasted nuthatch with 66 and 65, so. Song sparrow was 18th at 64, and then brown creeper 19th at 59 but coming on strong because I learned (sort of, I will have to re-learn) to pick out their songs and calls this year, and, y'know, they're creepy, so they're a lot easier heard than seen (although their creeping is pretty distinctive if you notice it--for some reason, unlike nuthatches, the smaller red-breasted ones of which you could otherwise easily mistake them for at a distance, they only creep upward).

Downy woodpecker jumped way up the list last year, and leapfrogged hairy woodpecker, apparently because they presumably randomly happened to nest near the house so were around consistently through the summer. Mourning dove continued to slide in the early part of the year but has started coming back lately to the point of becoming a near-daily regular again. Blue jays I'm guessing ebbed with their food supply; apparently it was a great year for acorns a couple of years ago--well, I guess 2020/21, before the dreaded moths-formerly-known-as-the-thing-they-were-formerly-known-as (which suffered a plague after wreaking most of their destruction in 2022 and were not a thing in 2023) showed up en masse--and there's lots of oak trees around here. Chipping sparrows, probably I've just gotten better at picking out their calls, but also maybe they've been randomly nesting around here more the last couple of years.

Birds I recorded on ebird for the first time in 2023: surf scoter, cliff swallow (in Detroit), least flycatcher, mourning warbler, willow flycatcher, magnolia warbler, Lincoln's sparrow, green heron (in Buffalo), bohemian waxwing, Cooper's hawk, and snow bunting. Of those, Cooper's hawk I had almost surely seen before but hadn't learned to ID (and specifically to differentiate from sharp-shinned hawk); there was a family nesting a ways back in the bush from the house last summer. Snow bunting I had definitely seen at least once before, before I was ebirding; bohemian waxwings I'd seen and IDed on two pre-ebird occasions. Of the rest, green heron is the only one I'd guess I'd never seen or heard before (and oddly for a heron it was in a tree when I saw it); surf scoter I think I may possibly have IDed once some years ago; the others aren't particularly rare so there's a good chance they've been around me without my having any way of knowing it.

So them's the birds, ayup.