My Life’s Birds: #190-203
May 7, 1994 – Greene Co, Mo - Taking a quick break from SuperBowl of Birding retrospective to cast my mind back to my very first Big Day. It was the first year my dad and I were “serious” birders, and the first Saturday in May, peak time for migrants coming through southwest Missouri, was the day we had staked out well in advance to bird dawn to dusk to see how many birds we could turn up in the forests and fields in our area.
My memories of the specific day are somewhat hazy, specific birds even more so, as it is when you see so many new ones all at once. But we started the morning at the Springfield Nature Center, on whose trails we’d always had good luck. And that’s the way it was again, with Red-eyed Vireos and Great Crested Flycatchers singing from the treetops, Magnolia Warblers and American Redstarts flitted through the willows near the lakeshore, and both Veery and Gray-cheeked Thrush. Though if I remember right, the only reason we were comfortable with the thrush was because a friend was doing some banding and had one in the hand. That certainly makes it easy.
From there it was off to the backroads of Greene County where the vernal ponds in the fields hosted some fantastic birds of their own. The key to a good Big Day is variety of habitats, as there are certain birds you can always be sure to find if you get to the right place. Tooling around the pastures in the rural part of the county netted us lots of waterfowl, and marsh birds like Franklin’s Gulls and Forster’s Terns, not to mention Tree Swallows swirling over the water and flocks of Western Sandpipers (at least we figured that’s what they were, shorebirds were still intimidating to us then) on the shoreline.
But the best birds of the day were reserved for the place we called Palmetto, a weedy expanse of pasture and marshes that, we had heard, was the best spot for certain prairie migrants. I rolled into Palmetto at lifer #199 and instantly was struck by 200, that backwards blackbird, the Bobolink, males and females in real numbers on the barbed wire fences that ran parallel to the road. Closer inspection turned up more subtle denizens like Grasshopper and Savannah Sparrows, and singing conspicuously and distinctly, dozens of Dickcissels.
I don’t remember the exact count we ended up with, though it was easily north of 100. The real benefit was that we became far more comfortable with birding site that we’d use for years to come and set a template for future Big Years. The life birds, especially the 200 milestone only 10 months from my first, was icing.
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