Shifting gears in 2019: The 5MR Challenge!

The 5MR Challenge is really taking off! It involves seeing as many species as you can within 5 miles of your house (5 Mile Radius = 5MR) and a semi-official challenge is being coordinated by Jen Sanford (see also the Facebook group). Carbon-free is not required for the challenge, but of course that's how I will be birding, and a few other participants have said the same - 5MR and Green are a great match. 

Wisconsin also hosts an annual 7.5MR Challenge, so I'll have two nested circles to track. Here they are:

The large flags are public hotspots in eBird (blue for 5MR, orange for 7.5MR), and the small orange dots are all my personal locations. Some of the personal ones are incidental (like my lifer Connecticut Warbler behind a random parking lot, which I first heard from the road while in transit for my Green Big Day), but others I bird frequently and could warrant being turned into hotspots. Pretty nice variety of habitat in there - if I could add just one more spot to the 5MR circle, it would be the New Amsterdam Grasslands (AKA berrylands, AKA sparrowlands), but that's just at the top edge of the 7.5MR. Otherwise, I've got lake, river, marsh, bottomland forest, bluffs, and a little agriculture even in the 5MR, which represent nearly all of the habitat types in the county as a whole.

Last year, I ended up with 203 species inside my 5MR (of the total 238 that I saw in WI by bike, of which 219 were in La Crosse County), which reflects the local focus of most of my birding. I had 211 species in my 7.5MR circle, which would have been good for a tie for 5th place in all of Wisconsin (scroll down to the very bottom of the post), if I'd remembered to update my numbers at the end of the year! I'm not sure how many more I could have found within either circle if I'd tried - but this year I aim to find out!

It's fun to have a new challenge for the year and an additional fun, supportive online community to go along with it. The coordinator has also concocted a monthly challenge to keep us getting out there and birding regularly, even if it's not the birdiest month of the year, and even if my patch will never be able to compete (in terms of number of species) with one on the California coast. There are 330 members in the Facebook group now - I can't wait to see how many rarities we find in random neighborhood parks, now that we'll all be out birding in typically neglected spots!

Of course, I'll participate in the statewide Wisconsin Green Birding Challenge again, too, even if I don't leave my home county very often. The official results from last year haven't been announced yet, but it looks like my 238 species put me at the top of the pack - by only three species! (Ross Mueller is still the all-time champ with 243 species in 2016!)

Birding has been slow so far this year. My total (all green) is 28 species so far - 27 of which have been in my 5MR and the last was in my 7.5MR - despite having birded a fair bit in the past week or two. Birders throughout Wisconsin are noting low numbers and diversity this winter. Last year I found 23 species on January 1st alone - this year I had 8 at the same spot! Once spring arrives, though, things will really take off.

Even the typical winter birds, like this American Tree Sparrow, have been pretty sparse this year.

Best bird so far this year is this Merlin - I've seen only 4 per year in the last couple of years, though I would be surprised if I missed it entirely this year. A heard-only Great Horned Owl was nice, too, as owls are surprisingly hard to find in my 5MR.

Anyway, even though I'd intended this blog to be mainly for my Green Big Year, I wanted to post an update with my plans for this year. I'm not sure how much I'll blog this year - maybe only after Big Days or big trips. Maybe more often if I continue to have plenty of free time due to shutdown furlough, though....

10 March 2018: Patch-birding, owling, and a few more FOGYs

The other day I was reading about "5MR" (five-mile radius) birding, which reminded me that Wisconsin has a patch-birding competition. Patch-birding has been gaining in popularity in the last few years. So many birders focus on going new places all over the world - which is the best way to find new birds to add to your life list. But many birders are gravitating more and more to birding locally, really getting to know the area and watching the seasons change. During migration, the birds come to you, and it's always thrilling when each species returns. 

The definition of a "patch" varies depending on whom you ask; eBird prefers patches to be small, usually a single hotspot (but you can define your patch however you want), while the Wisconsin Local Patch Challenge uses a 7.5-mile radius centered on the birder's home. In all of those cases, though, a patch lends itself well to green birding. So, naturally, I set up my patches (one 5MR and one 7.5MR) in eBird to see what they looked like. I was surprised by how much ground the 7.5MR patch covered - and even more surprised by how many species it accounted for! Last year I had 213 species on my green list; of those, I saw 195 within my 7.5MR patch. Does that mean that it was a waste of time and energy for me to bike beyond that patch? Of course not - every bird counts, and biking is great exercise regardless, and exploring is fun. But it does demonstrate how much you can find close to home - and I wasn't even trying to build my patch list last year. Many patch-birders in Wisconsin have found well over 200 (even over 250) species in their patch, which is pretty impressive.

My 7.5-mile-radius patch, centered on Onalaska in southwest Wisconsin. Note the state borders, shown as pale, thin lines - the southwest slice of the circle is in Minnesota and Iowa. I'll probably never bird there because those species wouldn't count toward the Wisconsin Green Birding Challenge! Plus, getting there is annoying - the closest bridge over the river is I-90, which I will not be traveling by bike. I drew the patch in Google Earth with the "ruler" tool.

Of course, now that I've defined my patches, I want to build those lists this year! I've already added a few local species, and when I tallied up the patches, I found that overall (last year plus a few new species so far this year), I was sitting at 199 species in the 7.5MR patch. That's annoyingly close to 200, so of course I started looking forward to the next new species I would find. The 5MR patch had 194 species - again, going a little farther for 7.5MR added only a little diversity - so it'll be fun to build that to 200 as well.

The forecast for Saturday was mild and calm, so I left home in the dark to listen for owls. The clouds had cleared overnight and it was rather colder than expected (16 F when I left home). I love biking in the dark and birding by ear; there's very little traffic before 6am on a weekend, so it's quiet and I can concentrate on the birds. Northern Cardinals were the first to wake up - I never realize how many of them there are when I'm out in the daylight! - followed by robins and Song Sparrows. A faint Barred Owl in the distance was the only owl I heard before dawn, but it was still nice to be out.

I was biking up a valley that hosts an interesting mix of brand new development and old farmsteads. There's a nice mix of habitats there, and I saw a couple of deer bedded down under the ornamental spruce trees in the yard of a new house. My first FOGY (first-of-green-year) of the day was a group of Wild Turkeys (#63) gobbling in the woods; on my way back down later, I saw that there were at least 11 of them sauntering across a field. This was also a new species for both my patches!

Looking up Smith Valley - agriculture meets new condominiums.

I walked my bike periodically on my way back down the valley, because I was too cold to ride downhill! Walking helps reduce the self-generated windchill and get some blood flowing to my fingers and toes. Then I biked up another side road, this one sans condos, which was devoid of car traffic. A few Song Sparrows gritting on the side of the road got my hopes up, but alas, they were not longspurs or buntings.

Spot the sparrows. We had our biggest snowstorm yet early last week, and the fields are still covered, so the birds like the bare areas next to the roads.

I found a Purple Finch (#64) on my way back down that road. Another quiet road yielded a Great Horned Owl (#65) singing at 9am, which made it seem like my early departure had been for nothing! (Some birders don't count heard-only birds on their lists, but I do, partly so that I don't face the temptation to go out with a spotlight or tromp around in breeding habitat just so I can see a bird that I've heard while potentially stressing it out in the process.) A couple of Eastern Meadowlarks (#66) in a snow-covered corn field were a nice surprise at the end of the ride. I rode a total of 33 miles over 7 hours, but I'd left so early that I was still home in time for lunch!