(Little League) World Series of Birding

For the 4th year in a row, I was the coach of a WSB Division B Youth Team from my school. We had a lot of fun with Spring Training, strolling the wooded edge for about an hour before school every fair weather day.

I call our effort a Little League World Series of Birding because of our limited field of play AND "morning only" approach. For a slew of reasons, our Big Day is focused solely on our relatively small town of Voorhees, NJ. While this is not a tiny village, Voorhees does not have much in the way of habitat diversity. With our limitations in mind, I projected our first year would yield 50 species.

Well . . .

The first year we hit a pretty nice 60 species.

In 2007, we wanted to set a personal best record - 72 species including many unexpected birds.

I tried to keep my hopes in check for 2008 with just a single 3 year veteran. To our surprise, we found 82 species = )

This year, we went for broke and decided to go for a century run - 100 species. We added a few stops and a couple of hours. While we did not achieve our lofty goal, we did set a new school record with 86 birds.

More importantly, our WSB efforts are not just a game of numbers. My morning birding kids bring their families, and sometimes friends, for a social birding experience. It transcends the Big Day. We talk about bird distribution, habitat needs, conservations concerns, and the stunning beauty of the birds themselves.

Even though many of them have moved on to high school, I still hear from the kids (and their parents!)about birds. They tease me about my "Mississippi Kite run". In my defense, it was the first county record of Mississippi Kite to the best of my knowledge!