Pondering My Life List

Masked duck was one of my most recent life list additions.

I need some input from you, the readers of this blog. I just updated my life list and found that I now have 674 species on it, after recently adding masked duck in Florida and several pelagic species off the coast of California. While I've never been much of a lister—I sometimes go years without updating my life list—I DO enjoy the thrill and challenge of adding a new bird to it.

Adding a new species to your life list can be a task of Bunyanlike proportions.

This number, 674, puts me within reasonable striking distance of 700, which is a pretty decent milestone for which to shoot. I have some big holes on my list, too: Bohemian waxwing, gyrfalcon, greater prairie chicken, spruce grouse, short-tailed hawk, yellow-billed magpie, Bicknell's thrush, Smith's longspur, ivory gull, California condor, plus a bunch of pelagics, Hawaii's endemics, some birds in central Alaska, and a mix of semi-regular vagrants. Oh, and ivory-billed woodpecker, Bachman's warbler, Eskimo curlew, passenger pigeon, great auk, Labrador duck, and Carolina parakeet.

My question is this: Should I try to get to 700? Or should I merely wait for life to bring me these life birds? I have made attempts at several of the "hole" birds listed above, but I've rarely chased a vagrant merely to add it to my list. Most of my recent life birds have come as a result of being in the right place at the right time coincidentally in the course of my travels to birding festivals and such.

Celebrating life birds is awesome. In this case, we were celebrating a Swainson's warbler in West Virginia.

So what do you think? I must confess I am on the fence about it. Time and money are limiting factors, obviously. If I DO decide to try to get to 700, I'm going to need some help in finding out where these birds are.

Several years ago I finally added a nemesis bird to my life list when I saw a Connecticut warbler in Minnesota. I'd missed that bird at least a dozen times before. I think my next most annoying miss may be the Bohemian waxwing. So maybe that's where I should start, if this quest is to happen.

Your thoughts, my birding peeps?