Have you ever wanted to do a big year, but weren’t sure how to actually do one? Well, in this article I will discuss about how to plan a big year.
Types of Big Years
First thing that you want to decide is what kind of big year that you want to do? This may seem like a no brainer, but it is a good to decide what kind of big year you want to undertake. There are many types of big year such as:
- World
- ABA
- County
- Bigby (a big year that consists of only using environmental friendly transportation).
Deciding this will help you determine how much time and money you will need to spend on you big year.
Setting Goals
The next thing that you should consider is whether your big year is about just trying to get a species goal that you have given yourself or actually trying to break a record for your state or area.
This is a big factor because this will determine whether you will want to bird hard or not. Also, this factor will decide on how much money you are willing to spend on your big year too.
Overall, this factor is a very important one to consider when deciding on doing a big year.
Planning
The next thing to do is to do the actual planning.
Try to make a list of all the species that you think you will be able to see and then figure out when your best chances to see birds and then bird according to that.
For example, you aren’t going in the forest to look for warblers in January. Instead you would be going to the local marsh to get winter waterfowl. Because of this you should try to plan your birding according to what birds are around then.
Weather
The last thing that you should remember is that you should pay close attention to the weather because sometimes picking the right day to bird during migration can give you a lot of new birds and save you a lot of time having to look for them.
If you don’t know how to use weather to predict bird movements please check that out on our weather birding post.
Overall, I hope that this has been helpful to any of you who have ever wanted to do a big year, but wasn’t sure how to plan it.
Good Birding,
-Landon