March 3 - A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to 302

Every birder keeps a list. At least one. There are some who keep several. There are state lists, there are town lists, there are lists of birds you've seen while driving mroe than 50 miles per hour, there are commuting lists, international lists, year lists, month lists, checklists for every variable of which one can think. Some people prefer to keep a mental list, others have leapt into the computer age with Excel spreadsheets, while some are surrounded by huge, shambling piles of cardstock in four-by-six dimensions.

I started birding, in earnest, about three years ago. I kept all my field cards, but didn't really start to think about the big number - the life list - until late in 2007. The life list is just what it sounds like: every species of bird you've seen in your entire life, irrespective of nation, state, town, whether or not you were driving to work when you saw it, etc. (Of course, I also have a life mammal list, a life herp list, a life wildflower list...but I digress).

So I began the process of going through the field cards back through the late fall of 2005, when I started work as an educator for Mass Audubon's South Shore Sanctuaries. There was the thick-billed murre on Scituate Harbor that winter. Glad I got that one, as I haven't seen one since. Then there was the boreal chickadee at a feeder in Plympton early in 2006, and the fox sparrow that joined it on the ground below. I've since heard boreal chickadees in Maine, and only saw my second fox sparrow this winter at a feeder in Plymouth.

There have been the chase birds, the snowy owls on Duxbury Beach, the rufous hummingbird at a feeder in Marshfield, the Swainson's hawk in the Cumberland Farm Fields in Middleboro, the pileated woodpecker in Wompatuck State Park in Hingham. And then there was the big surprise bird, the miniscule yellow rail that appeared less than a mile from our offices in Marshfield, in a marsh just off the North River. There were birders with us that day that had been at it for sixty years and never seen one.

There are the birds of Maine - puffins, common murres, razorbills, a spruce grouse and her young - and those of Nevada, like the California quail that run the streets, and the western scrub jay that invaded my wife's grandfather's backyard. There were the various birds of Arizona on last year's Red Sox/Grand Canyon trip, the white-winged doves, cactus wrens, the gila woodpeckers, and the pyrrhuloxia. There have been countless early morning owl prowls, offshore trips for pelagic species, forays to the Finger Lakes, downeast Maine, Nantucket, Block Island, up and down Cape Cod, and into and out of backyards, wildllife sanctuaries and state and national parks.

So I totaled them all up and began to count. Ducks, geese and swans? 34 species. Grebes? 3, and all of them in Massachusetts. Hawks, kites, eagles and allies? 13 (ooh, I'll have to change that). Gulls and terns? 16. Owls? 7. Hummingbirds? 5. Woodpeckers? 8. Wood-warblers? 31.

Overall? 300.

Are you kidding me?

I recounted. After just about three years of birding, I had a round, even number. The three-century mark. 300. What were the chances?

So I went home from work that day and told my wife Michelle. I said that I had included everything, even the bananaquits, frigatebirds and pelicans we had seen on our honeymoon on Tortola in th British Virgin Islands. "Right, everything," she said. "Like that black and white bird we saw on that electrical box on the way to Lake Tahoe."

What? Wait a minute! Did I check off black-billed magpie?! No. My 301st bird came three years ago on vacation.

That all became moot a few days later. On a recent Friday morning, David Ludlow, our property manager, and someone who shares many of my lifebird sightings around New England, and I led our regular Friday Morning Birdwalk. We headed for Scituate, staked out yet another feeder - on a tip from the owner, one of our regular birding program attendees - and watched as a flock of about 100 common redpolls flew in to feed on a thistle sock. There, amongst them, were two bigger, whiter birds. Hoary redpolls. 302, baby.

I had a temporary dream of retiring with 300. I thought what better way to call it quits than with a nice, round easily remembered number. But now, I'm resigned to the fact that the listing must continue to at least 500. And now I have to think about what the celebration at that point will be. One birder I know brought a can of Mountain Dew all the way to Africa to celebrate his 3000th species.

And I also have to wonder what number 303 will be. The beauty of spending so much time outdoors exploring the nature of Massachusetts is that surprises are around every corner, under every stone, hidden in the leaves of every tree. I have no idea what number 303 will be. It may come on my upcoming trip to Nantucket, to the Finger Lakes, the White Mountains, downeast, or it may just show up at the feeder outside my window at work. But I know there will be a number 303.