Texas Century Club: Fun for crazy psycho listers!

DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS — Texas comprises a whopping 254 counties. Its closest competitor is Georgia (oddly enough), which contains 159. Our smallest county is Rockwall, weighing in at just under 150 square miles (i.e., approximately 12 miles by 12 miles in linear dimensions). The biggest is Brewster, which is almost 75 percent larger than Delaware, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia combined. It’s also larger than Connecticut.

So what’s a birder to do?

Well, if you’re David Sarkozi, you dream up the Texas Century Club: a challenge to find at least 100 bird species in at least 100 Texas counties. (Here’s the email that started it all.)

It may sound deceptively simple, but I estimate that if you birded full time, with an unlimited travel budget, you would need to bird for at least 18 solid months to pull that off. And that’s if you’re smart, competent, and lucky.

Given a more moderate but still quite adventurous birding pace, we’re looking at years — even decades — to accomplish the goal. Three Texas birders have seen 100 birds or more in over 50 counties: Dell Little (67), D. D. Currie (66), and Anthony Hewetson (52).

Well, I finally got bit by the bug. It’s kind of insane, but there are several reasons I gave in:

1. Suddenly, every bird is exciting. Can you imagine actually trying to find House Sparrows and coots?
2. I’m kind of a sucker for numbers games.
3. Keeping county lists forces me to pay attention to distribution and habitats. Where do Red-bellied Woodpeckers stop and Golden-fronted Woodpeckers begin?
4. I am motivated to explore new places and learn new things.
5. Reporting observations from underbirded parts of the state is satisfying because I feel I’m contributing in some small way to our knowledge of bird distribution and abundance.
6. I have an excellent tool — Birdstack — to track my lists. (Yes, I’m one of Birdstack’s owners, but I’m also one of its biggest fans.)

I’ve made a little graphical map to track my progress by county:

After poring over various old records I have, I came up with a list of 65 Texas counties in which I’ve recorded at least one bird species. I’ve recorded over 100 only in five (Dallas, Galveston, Harrison, Smith, Tarrant) but am close in three others. One frustration is that I didn’t keep better records between 2000 (my first visit to Texas) and 2007, so dozens of counties have only a few species recorded because I kept track only of highlights. You can check out my lists on Birdstack; counties with over 100 species have a “TCC” prefix while others have a “Texas” prefix.

So now I find myself planning trips to hit new counties or boost my lists in various counties that I’ve visited before. There’s actually quite a bit of strategy to the whole thing — identifying habitats, picking different times of year, seeking out cemeteries, hanging out in Walmart parking lots ….

Help!

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1. Fierce winds
2. Picking up again in Texas
3. Upper Texas Coast in crisis
4. A postcard from south Texas
5. Winter in the Piney Woods