Listing Surprise

Back in April I decided to let my inner Lister go wild, so I expanded upon my Life List (which I have ordered chronologically and taxonomically), and added the following:

• A year list (2005, and every year going forward)
• A state list (Colorado)
• A state-year list (Colorado 2005, currently the same as the CO state list
• An ABA-area life list
• A Costa Rica life list
• A Peru life list

Tonight I decided to create a "retro-list" for California. In all my years living there I never had one, but now that listing is important to me, I went through my ABA-area list and filtered out the non-CA birds, but I did leave in those which I know I've subsequently seen in CA, even if I don't have a date or location for the sighting yet.

To my surprise, my all-time CA life list, which includes birds I saw over a 10-year span, is only 10 better than what I've seen here in CO in just one year (235-225). Goes to show what some time off and living across the street from a list-crazy neighbor can do for you.

Now if I could only count those exotics I saw at the Denver Zoo last September....

tags: lists birds