A Big Year

Many may recall that the Druids sometimes review movies, then rank the movies, as 1-4star(s).  So there is a movie on TV at this very nonce, The Big Year.   The movie features actors pretending to be birders fixing to espy as many birds as they may espy in a single calendar year.  Thus, The Big Year.  The Druids rank The Big Year, a one star feature film.   That's because the Druid audience was actually able to sit through the entire movie, once.  Not all at once though.  It took three sittings combined for the Druids to get through the whole movie.  But we did sit through it all, eventually.   So it gets one star.  However, had The Big Year featured something besides birds, with all else unchanged,  it probably would not have received an entire star.  No.  It would have received a fraction of a star indicating that we could not watch it all the way through even once. 

Thus, The Big Year is, relatively speaking, a bad movie worth watching once all the way through, but probably not worth watching one time through at one sitting.   But enough.  Suffice that  a lousy movie, The Big Year,  may have inspired Crumby to do his own Big Year.  Actually,  it was not just that stupid movie, but an unusual run of bird sightings  after the Winter Solstice that may be fixing to inspire and fire Crumby up for a Big Year.  Yes.  We have had a pine warbler in the yard,  a purple finch within spitting distance and a fork-tailed flycatcher just across town.  Course none of those would get counted in this  Big Year,  cause that was last year,  but they do serve as inspiration. 

One of the big deals about a Big Year is, to have much chance of espying plenty of birds, the average birder has to travel around to where the birds are, at.   Where the birds are, some bird waits for me.  Woodle, woodle wee.  Tweedly dee!   So everyone was surprised when Crumby announced that he was fixing to do a Big Year, because Crumby hardly ever even leaves the yard.  But then Crumby burned all his notebooks.  Mercy!  All those notebooks full of lists went up in smoke.  There now, that proves I am serious.  I have burned all my notebooks.   Let the new list begin. 

So far Crumby has espied 63 species and two genera or, as genera are known to birders, spuhs.  The spuhs are a swallow and a meadowlark.   The swallow spuh is either a cave swallow or a cliff swalllow.  Who knew that either of those would turn up in these parts on January 1 /   But there they were.  The mute meadowlark spuh indicates  the usual suspects.

But hark.  Crumby took a picture of the meadowlark.  Does the picture help?  Hmm.

Anyway, despite the spuhs already accruing, Crumby is having some luck, like the red-breasted nuthatch at Hornsby Bend today.