I know, my birding has been pathetic lately. My ebird ranking has been slipping slowly but surely out of the top 100 for the state of Michigan, and I can foresee a time where I could be out of the top 100 for my own county too.
But I have a plan.
The daily ebird alert (a real torture engine for a birder like me, since you basically receive every day a notice of all the incredible birds you won't have the time to chase anyway) that I have subscribed to for the last 2 years has shown, that, statistically, there is a spot in Michigan where the magic combination of a unique geographical location (along the shore of Lake Huron), and the recurrent convergence of strong winds coming from various birding paradises brings over flocks of exotic gulls from the pacific shores, charms of mountain finches, rafts of Eurasians waterfowl, flights of asian sandpipers in numbers that defy human logic....
That site is Harrisville State Park. That site is that good, that a single birder has been able to reach the top 10 of the ebird patch ranking, (for the US) more than 20 species above the best birder at Cape May.
So I took a closer look at the ebird statistics (a painful job, since the ebird reviewer, weirdly enough, has been systematically removing every single of those sightings from the ebird database, so these rarities have to be extracted from each individual ebird checklists) I have been able to summarize.
I figure out that in a single week end, I should be able to reenter the michigan top 100. A week or 2 in the spring should push me easily in the top 20.
That's the plan at least. I don't really see what could go wrong.
