The month is young and already incredibly busy. I thought things would calm down a bit with the Halloween event passed and the ultra-race completed, but definitely not the case. Most of the time consumption has been tedious busy work, putting the Halloween props back into storage, getting the Christmas decorations out of storage (need to decorate before Linda’s upcoming knee surgery), picture processing and stat updating – we will get to those latter ones in a bit, but first I want to congratulate Team Raven.
This was a big weekend for the two of them as Linda and Raven earned their 5th CPE Agility Championship Title (CT-ATCH 5). Nothing better for the little guy than winning an award (bar/ribbon) that is 5 times your size. We had to take it away from him afterwards as he was continually going around taunting his brother Ruger saying “Who’s got four paws and a prestigious title” and then whacking him with the bar – There is a lot of attitude that comes with a 4.75 pound Poodle. More importantly, Raven is going out on top as he is retiring from competition. He has been competing for 11 years and he has earned the opportunity to kick back and give his brother some of the limelight. Way to go Ravi-man (and Linda of course).
Next up, a few stats. Now that the “Tetris packfest” is mostly over I had a chance to get back to processing some of my picture backlog. As of yesterday, I now have our March (looks sheepishly down..) 2025 Arizona trip completely processed. 532Gs worth now trimmed down to 187G. The January 2025 trip to Texas was 727G pared down to 243G. That probably seems like a lot, but keep in mind, that is 6 or so weeks shooting from sunup to sundown (and past for the nocturnal birds) every single day. Trust me, there is a reason for the ridiculous backlog ha. With that work, I updated my life list counts. 530 species lifetime and 521 recorded in eBird since January 1st, 2022 from 882 checklists and 2,264 ticks across 26 US states (unique species by state). Current annual count for 2026 is 450! To put things in perspective, I have only blogged on 332 of those lifetime species ticks – let’s just say I still have plenty of fodder for upcoming posts ha! Oh, and since we are talking numbers, the 11th Blue Chew commercial just came on in the YouTube screen that is running on my second monitor at the moment. Please god make it stop!
Guessing you are thinking that same thing about my ramblings, so let’s get to today’s Featured Feathered Friend.
To be honest, my birding life list count rose at least two notches while I was just sitting in my den. The bird you are looking at is the catalyst for one of the increases – hit the jump to read more about this specimen that gave me quite a struggle.
Continue reading Congrats, Stats and Warbling
