Birds? Birds.

[cincinnatus_c]

Last week I hit 1000 consecutive days of recording my bird counts on ebird, so it seems like a decent time to update my top 15 birds by number of my checklists (out of a total of 1171) they've appeared on (with where they placed as of June 24, 2020):

1. Black-capped chickadee, 1065 (1)
2. White-breasted nuthatch, 949 (2)
3. American goldfinch, 854 (3)
4. Blue jay, 696 (8)
5. American crow, 611 (7)
6. Hairy woodpecker, 554 (6)
7. Mourning dove, 545 (4)
8. Downy woodpecker, 542 (5)
9. Common raven, 391 (-)
10. American robin, 382 (9)
11. Purple finch, 336 (10)
12. Red-eyed vireo, 290 (13)
13. Eastern phoebe, 269 (11)
14. Ruby-throated hummingbird, 199 (-)
15. Dark-eyed junco, 183 (-)

Falling out of the top 15: red-winged blackbird (12), red-breasted nuthatch (14), and song sparrow (15).

I wasn't expecting to find anything very interesting through this exercise, but it does look like the corvids have come on strong--maybe on the rebound from the West Nile plague of a decade or two ago, I dunno. Hummingbirds appearing on the list this time and not last will be a product of a larger proportion of summer checklists, I guess. Red-breasted nuthatches have become regulars again lately after not being around much at all last winter. Red-winged blackbirds, not really sure why I was getting so many of those before. No absolute decline in song sparrows, they're still always where you'd expect them to be. I'm surprised juncos made the list, since they're gone all summer.

So, ayup, them's the birds.

--
Currently at Belmont Lake: -5.9. High there today: -3.4. Currently under my porch: -6.2.