I’ve decided not to call this a Canada Big Year because we are not going to be in a position to fly all over trying to get rarities, nor try for the record that currently stands at a whopping 480. We simply want to visit all the provinces during the year and try to get to 400 species of birds seen during 2025. It will not be the crazy chasing like Ontario was. I hope it will be almost leisurely traveling with lots of birding LOL. This is not to say that we will not willingly go past the 400, but it will not be the priority. Birding and lots of birding is the priority and seeing Canada’s top birding spots along the way. Because we will get Western and Eastern birds on trips to other provinces we do not need to chase these birds as rarities in Ontario so we can wait and get them in their usual ranges. The only birds to chase in Ontario will be species from outside Canada that might show up.

In any given year there are about 535 species of birds seen in Canada and hitting 400 is much more of a challenge than getting 300 in Ontario because of the vast distance of our country. In 2024 there was only one person at 405 and in 2022 4 people, the most in one year, managed to get over 400. Many years there has been no one over 400. In 2022 when we drove out West and birded Ontario as we normally do we saw 370 species so we know we can likely get the 400 by adding an Eastern trip and getting a few more Western species.

So the plan at the moment is this:

Start the year in Ontario with a winter trip or two into Quebec for owls, rare ducks, seabirds and Willow Ptarmigan. In early February we will take our one flight out to Vancouver and the Island for a week or two to pick up winter birds that we will miss in the summer.

Back to Ontario for spring and 2 weeks at Pelee in May and then we start driving out west at the beginning of June – Rainy River, Grasslands National Park, Waterton National Park and out to Grand Forks (my brother lives there) which will be our home base for the summer. We will cover the Okanagan, Vancouver and the Island again, then a bit into the Interior and north to Jasper National Park before heading back through Alberta and heading home for August.

We will stay in Ontario for August/September and then in September/October (not decided yet) we will head out East for our first trip to Newfoundland with visits to the other eastern provinces.

Then back to Ontario for the rest of the year but quite willing to chase into Quebec for any rarities or misses.

I’ve got excel lists done and I have some lists of where to see what across the country but I will also be watching my Needs Alerts lists for the provinces to decide when and where to do some of the trips depending on what birds are being seen. So some things will be last minute. I don’t like last minute. I like everything booked and planned way in advance but I am not sure that strategy will work for this year. I might have to be flexible and spontaneous…ugggh! I did get lots of practice last year with being flexible every time the Discord beep would come and my plans changed in an instant so maybe it won’t cause me anxiety to do this year in the same way.

Basically in Ontario we are just repeating our Big Year but chasing less rarities and since we know where we ended up seeing most species we will just repeat a lot of those plans. I don’t really need to hit the 300 mark this year but it would be good to be in the 290’s for sure.

We still have responsibilities with Babi ( Jerry’s mom) and are hopeful that she will be in her care home in the next week or so but we still have to decide what to take and move everything in and then we will need to support her in the transition so that she is happy with the move. We then have the task of emptying a very full 3 bedroom condo to get it ready to rent. I’m hopeful we can still get in quite a bit of birding in these next months but if not we can leave the Quebec and/or BC trip until the end of the year and get those same species then. There is flexibility and if I learned anything last year it is that many of the expected rarities return at the end of the year so there is always another chance. I’m not going to stress over it.

I hope to keep the weekly blogs going but if things are slow I’ll lump a few weeks together. Thanks for reading along!