The Quest

Mostly, this is the fault of ebird.  The new profile feature has a very cool map that will show you all the places you have birded.  Looking at the map of North Carolina, I couldn’t help but want to fill in all those blank boxes that represent counties.

It snowballed from there.  I decided I really wanted to fill in those boxes, and I didn’t want to wait forever.  I thought it would be a great adventure to visit all those places.  I mentioned to my wife that maybe I should try to ebird every county in NC in 2017, and she said to go for it.  I decided to do it, thinking, “Hey, one county a week isn’t so bad.”  That was about a day before my kids reminded me there are 100 counties in North Carolina.

As December rolled on, I realized that I needed a plan.  Averaging 8 counties a month was not going to be easy.  I started a Google Doc outlining when I would hit each county.  I sent an email to a much more experienced birder asking him when would be a good time to visit the various parts of the state.  I bought a copy of the book, Birding North Carolina.  I bought a corkboard and printed a county map of North Carolina to help track progress.  Here it is:

I mentioned my plan to a friend who expressed interest in joining me on some of the trips, so I decided I needed somewhere to post The Plan.  I came across this free website offer from WordPress.  [edit:  shortly after I posted this I did some research and decided that if I am going to put the time in to type all this, I really should post it properly on a hosted site, hence my move to this domain – myblarg.com]  I wasn’t originally planning to do any blog entries here – I was just going to use it to post my plan information.  But then I figured I would log my travels and thoughts.

So that’s what I’ll do with this blog.  I don’t expect anyone to be reading this but myself – I can use it to store memories and photos and log my thoughts for posterity.  It should help with future trips to the same places and provide myself directions and reminders.  I’ll also use it to help track progress and document what should be a really fun journey.