Some yearlist thoughts

 

So, a few days back I was thinking of what birds I could potentially add to the yearlist, and what my final total may be. back in August I wrote a post on this subject, and at that time I needed 2 code 2 speicies, and 11 code 3s. Since then, I have seen both of the remaining 2s (Parasitic Jaeger and Brant), and 6 of the code 3s (Long-tailed Jaeger, Sabine's Gull, Purple Sandpiper, Cattle Egret, Red Phalarope, and Pacific Loon).

Let's assume I can come up with 2 of the remaining 5 code 3 birds... That would bring me up to 353. After that things get a bit trickier, as any future additions are hard to predict because they would be genuine rarities (code 4-6s). It is hard to know which of these rarities will show up this fall, but a few of them definitely will. I had a look back at OBRC records and made a list of OBRC level rarities (which are code 4 and above) that met two requirments...

1)  They had to have been found between October 18th (a few days ago when I made this) and December 31st.

2) They couldn't be just any rarity, I only included ones that I haven't seen this year. 

For my purposes I looked at data in the last 10 years. The following list was the result...

Year    # of Rares

2021 - 12

2020 - 9

2019 - 10

2018 - 8

2017 - 7

2016 - 9

2015 - 7

2014 - 5

2013 - 9

2012 - 5

2011 - 4

So in the worst of those years 4 rarities were found, and 12 in the best. Now keep in mind not all of those were chaseable, as often they were seen by a single birder and then never again. With that in, I narrowed it down to only the definitive chaseable birds.

Year    % of chaseable birds

2021 - 8/12 

2020 - 8/9 (!!)

2019 - 5/10 

2018 - 3/8

2017 - 5/7

2016 - 7/9

2015 - 4/7

2014 - 2/5

2013 - 5/9

2012 - 3/5 

2011 - 3/4

As you can see some years have significantly more chaseable birds than others. It's interesting that there has been somewhat of an increase since 2011 year over year... Maybe just due to more coverage of the province because of more birders?  Better reporting methods (i.e. Discord)? Anyways, as you can see, during the best year there were 8 chaseable rarities, and in the worst year there were 2. 

The average is 5... which honestly, I would not complain about! 5 would bring me up to 358. Now if we go into fantasy land... 360 would require 7 rarities, although that did happen in 2020 AND 2021. I would be over the moon if I ended with 360... although I feel like that is a tad ambitious...

Just some random numbers & what is going through my head right now : )

In other fun news, I passed 30,000 views on the blog recently! Thanks folks

I'll include a Golden Eagle on this post, because it's that time of year.