It was not too long ago that I first learned what a "lifer" is in birding. A "lifer" is the first time a new species of bird has been seen by a particular person. Many birders keep a lifer list, a list of all the different species of birds they've seen. Many of them also record the date and the place the lifer was seen. I've loved wildlife all of my life, but my passion for birds took an uptick a few years ago, sometime after Covid started, and I first started my own lifer list. First I started an Excel spreadsheet listing each species of bird and where I first saw it, then about a year ago I added a column on the spreadsheet for the date I did my first blog post on that bird. My spreadsheet entries were aided by my previous submissions to iNaturalist where I can go back and find each bird I've photographed and submitted and the place and date the photo was taken. I started on iNaturalist on July 18, 2020 and when I started I went back through photos I'd previously taken over the years and submitted them with dates and places to the best of my memory. I also went back to my previous posts on birds on Cannundrums since I started blogging on March 18, 2009. Obviously, most of the dates and places for commonly seen birds were of recent origin as my memory is not that good, but I do have some specific birds on my lifer list that include old sightings, including a northern saw whet owl I caught when I was in grade school (and is still the only northern saw whet owl I've ever seen). Then I determined to do a blogpost on each species of bird I've seen as part of my lifer list record. That was about a year ago and just yesterday I posted my last post on a bird that was previously a lifer for me. As of yesterday, my lifer list was 970 birds and as of yesterday, I've done a post for each one. I started a daily string of blog posts beginning August 14, 2025, a string of about 362 posts, the vast majority of which have been on birds.
Until just recently my criteria for my lifer list was only birds I'd photographed. Within the last year or so I've expanded it to birds I've seen but was unable to photograph. This was based on the fact that I've now used a number of human birding guides that have identified the birds I've seen and I was confident their identifications were correct. Many of the the birds were also in foreign countries where I'm not likely to go again to get a photograph. I specifically indicate in my spreadsheet when a lifer has only been seen and not photographed, and that number is now 31, but also includes one bird that I only heard, under a special circumstance. I was with a birding guide in Arizona and we heard and he saw only the second recorded black-vented oriole in the State of Arizona. The first sighting was in 1991, 35 years earlier. It was broadcast out into the birding world by an eBird rare bird alert and we had people drive in that day from many miles away just to try and see that bird themselves.
I had a goal to get to 1,000 lifers by the end of 2026, but it is looking unlikely. We were originally scheduled to go to Uganda in July which has lots of bird species. But we had to cancel our trip because of the War in Iran and the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right near the border with Uganda. It was replaced by a trip to Turkey and Greece where I saw a few birds, but nothing to the extent I would have in Uganda. We still have a trip to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia scheduled for the end of the year, but they are not great birding areas either.
