On Monday, December 31st myself and honorary nemesis birders Josh Lefever and Mark Mizak are embarking on a 5 day birding trip through Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The goal of the trip is to find some lifers for Josh and Mark, conduct a Big Day in Delaware, and get a really nice start to our 2013 year lists!
Harlequin Duck
(Photo by Alex Lamoreaux)
Like we did with the Thanksgiving Birding Adventure, I will be running a live blog throughout their trip! The live blog will feature real-time updates from the field concerning our successes, failures, and any interesting sightings or anecdotes from our trip as well as photos and video. The live blog will be towards the bottom of this very blog post, so be sure to check back often to see how we are doing throughout their trip as well as join in the excitement!
As you can see from the Google Map below, we have quite a few target species and locations lined up – hopefully the birds cooperate and we have a little luck on our side! The general outline for our trip is to leave Hershey, PA early on the 31st and drop down into Maryland for the day, attempting to find a few rarities in the state to end 2012 on a good note. From there, we will jump over to Delaware to do a little scouting for January 1st. On the first, we are hoping to do a Big Day throughout the state of Delaware. Thermal Birding‘s Tim Schreckengost (who lives and works in Delaware right now and is also a good friend of ours) will be joining us for the Delaware Big Day. We have been planning for over a week, so we are pretty pumped to finally get out there and do it!
From the 2nd to the 3rd, the three of us are jumping across Delaware Bay to New Jersey. Here we hope to pick up some rarities and as many new year birds as possible. We will then work our way north up the NJ coast and eventually over towards Philadelphia, PA. On the 4th, we plan to hit a few targets in southeast PA and then head back to Hershey. This is the plan for now, so we will see how it actually all turns out!
Feel free to explore our target map and click on the markers to check out the birds we hope to see! The second map shows our current location using my phone’s GPS so you can really follow along with us (and see us get lost, etc)! We hope this will be fun for our viewers and we would love for you guys to comment on this post – I will try to reply to as many as I can between birding and driving!