Lower 48 Big Year 2026

 Lower 48 Big Year 2026

Before the wheels come off, I wanted to do a birding Big Year in the Lower 48 states.  Big Year because I do like to list, and because I wanted to avoid becoming a daytime TV sofa zombie in the first year of retirement, and Lower 48 because I lacked enthusiasm for spending cumulative weeks on wind-blown treeless Alaskan islands looking for Asian vagrants.  Lower 48 is enough of a challenge, at least for the first time.  Also, because the ABA area now includes Hawaii I didn't want to spend a lot of time burning jet fuel flying trans-continent+trans-Pacific.  I've not yet birded Hawaii, so lack even basic experience on what to look for where.

Generally my methodology follows the ABA Big Year rules in that:

1. Has to be on the ABA list to count (no random exotics)

2. Heard-only birds are OK (e.g. Barn Owl in TX) but I prefer actual visuals

3. Introduced exotics follow the ABA introduced species list

Rule #1 might be bent in "edge cases" e.g. an obviously new-to-USA species that hasn't wound its way through the ABA list-addition machinery.  But you can't count any old parrot you might encounter in FL or TX (e.g. in TX I've also seen Yellow-headed Amazon and White-fronted Amazon in 2026 but these are not established populations - eBird counts one of them on my list).  I have added the Mangrove Yellow Warbler/Northern Yellow Warbler split that's present in eBird as of late 2025 (and therefore also in the Clements list) but not yet in ABA, so I've already broken rule #1 although not yet counted Mangrove Yellow as of writing.

To a certain extent I'm attempting to document new year birds via eBird submissions (which also allows me to do a certain amount of in-the-field documentation) - that's also designed to let me take more efficient advantage of the eBird Alerts system that lets you get regular mailings on "Year Needs" and rarity alerts for regions (national, state, county).  In particular the year needs alerts only subtract sightings from within the same region that the alert is set up for.  I use a python interface to the eBird API to query sightings for specific species and needs lists - valuable when planning trips - and that (my own Python programs) responds to my current year list.  One value in being able to do my own searches is that I can functionally replace the frequently-broken ABA NARBA "service", which is probably just using the eBird API itself.


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