Preliminaries: Part 1

I recently decided to do a big year (I hesitate to write "Big Year") in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Unless you live in Virginia you might not have heard of Prince Edward County, at least not as a birding destination. Virginia's better known birding sites are generally either coastal (think Chincoteague, Cape Charles, and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel) or in the mountains (i.e. Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and more). But I live in the Piedmont, near the middle of the state, and for the last 15+ years a great deal of my birding has been done in Prince Edward County. Though not as rich in bird life as some of the areas just mentioned, it has its charms.

Location of Prince Edward County, VA (red).
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

I lived in Prince Edward for several years, and though I no longer do, I still drive through it on my way to work (I teach at Southside Virginia Community College in Keysville), and I still bird there quite a bit thanks to the many accessible public birding areas in the county. These include Briery Creek WMA, Sandy River Reservoir, and Wilck's Lake, three areas I visit frequently. So the first reason I might give for doing a big year is simply convenience. It's a lot easier for me to do a big year in a county I'm already birding in than any other one -- including Buckingham, where I live, which is actually larger and would be more difficult to cover logistically. So if I'm going to do a big year, and I don't intend to do one on the statewide level (not this year!), Prince Edward seems an obvious choice.

Red-necked Phalarope at Wilck's Lake, 22 May 2013.
Good luck seeing one in the county in 2014....

A second reason is that for some time I have been writing a birding guide and annotated checklist for the birds of Prince Edward County, and I have the idea that doing a big year would give me a final push to track down some birds that I believe should be better documented in the county before I finish the guide and attempt to publish it in some format. These include a couple of owls, a few migrant songbirds, and perhaps a couple of shorebird species. More details on these as the year progresses.

I might identify other reasons for this big year, but for now, I'll post this so my new blog has some content. I'm not sure who might actually read this, but here we go....