Black-necked Stilts are visible in a number of national parks/Kirby Adams

I’ve written a few times about the national parks I consider the best for birding, but several readers have asked which would be the best to visit to maximize the diversity of birds seen. When we talk about number of different birds seen, I always think about a big year. During a big year, a birder tries to see as many birds as possible in one calendar year within a certain geographic range, or under certain conditions.

There are state big years and county big years. Green big years, where no motorized vehicles are used, are becoming popular. The most famous big year is the ABA Area big year, encompassing all of North America north of Mexico. The record for that year was set in 2013 by Neil Hayward with 749 species spotted.

I think we could pull off at least 500 bird species in the confines of the American Birding Association area by visiting one national park each month, and thoroughly birding it for those four weeks. Only birds seen in NPS units will count toward the total in the hypothetical national park big year.  Let’s see how it turns out.

January:

We’re going to spend January in Florida, because January is a dead month in much of the north and Florida is Florida. Everglades National Park will provide us with plenty of birds this month. Water levels are lower in the winter dry season, so the birds are more congregated around what water there is. Mrazek Pond will give us some ducks and American Coots. Eco Pond will supply an early Black-necked Stilt, and Paurotis Pond will be reliable as always for Roseate Spoonbills. We’ll walk Anhinga Trail at dawn almost every day. Before the crowds get there, even the shyest of the heron family – the American Bittern and Least Bittern – will show themselves.

February:

February will see a change of theme to the Pacific with a month-long stay at Channel Islands National Park. Our year total will jump quickly as we see Brant, Pacific Loons, and Common Murres offshore. On land, we’ll get the Island Scrub-jay, an endemic specialty of these islands. We’ll be able to get most of the birds we need on Santa Cruz Island, and most of those without straying far from Prisoners Harbor. But with a month in the islands, we’ll be able to visit all the islands and improve our chances at a serendipitous encounter with a Wandering Tattler. That’s a great bird, but we deserve it. After all, there’s no lodging in this national park, so we’ve been roughing it for the whole month.

March:

How’s Death Valley sound? It definitely sounds better in March than the egg-cooking heat of summer. Fall is really the best time to bird in Death Valley, but we’ll be busy elsewhere, so we’re going to visit in early spring. Some southwestern birds like Lewis’s Woodpecker and Costa’s Hummingbird will be our targets here. Desert species are slightly different here than in Arizona, and even more so than in Texas, where we’ll be next month. Say’s Phoebe is another interesting bird that, looking at our schedule, we might not encounter for the rest of the year. Let’s get ‘em while we can!

April:

We have to be in Big Bend National Park in April. It may seem silly to plan so specifically for one bird, but if we’re serious enough to do a big year, we’re going to want the Colima Warbler. This warbler is a resident primarily of Mexico, but by April of every year, a few nesting pairs settle in for the summer at Big Bend. We may have to make several strenuous hikes into the high country to make sure we find one, so it’ll be nice to have a whole month here. When we aren’t in the mountains, we’ll be enjoying Greater Roadrunners and Vermillion Flycatchers at lower elevations. Perhaps the biggest treat will be hearing an Elf Owl from the campground every evening.

Tufted puffins are easy to spot at Glacier Bay National Park/NPS

May:

Everyone knows May is the time to watch warblers in the East, so naturally we’re headed to…Alaska! Cruising around Glacier Bay National Park will help us see some birds that won’t be easy anywhere else. It’s all about the murrelets here. Ancient, Kittlitz’s, and Marbled Murrelets will be easy to find floating in the bay. We’ll also get a Northwestern Crow, a bird that is identical to the common American Crow in everything but voice.

June:

We’re at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore enjoying a cool Lake Superior breeze as summer begins. We’re here for warblers. We missed the spectacle of Eastern spring migration by spending May in Alaska, so we’ve got to get to the warblers before it’s too late. Pictured Rocks hosts 23 species of nesting warbler – more than any other park except Apostle Islands and Great Smoky Mountains, which also have 23. We’ll be out before a hint of light every morning, preparing for the dawn chorus. Most of birds here will be identified by their song, but with a month of hiking in these woods, we’ll manage to track down nearly every one of them for a good look.

July:

If Lake Superior didn’t keep us cool enough, searching for birds above 12,000 feet will do the trick. We’re spending the heart of summer in Rocky Mountain National Park. White-tailed Ptarmigan and Brown-capped Rosy-Finch are the high elevation specialties we’re after here, but there’s plenty of other Rocky Mountain avifauna to keep us busy. We’ll get Williamson’s Sapsuckers, Cordilleran Flycatchers and American Three-toed Woodpeckers fairly easily. Clark’s Nutcracker and Gray Jay will entertain us on a hike up to Emerald Lake.

August:

Back to the shore in August, but this time it’s the Atlantic. Cape Hatteras National Seashore will give us shorebirds migrating southward. This is a good month to go shorebirding if you have more than a few days to search. Fall migration is more of a languid, drawn-out affair compared to spring migration. Birds may linger in one spot for longer and might show up at unpredictable times. Being able to walk the seashore every day will maximize our chances to see almost all of the eastern shorebirds we need. The highlight of this trip is up-close looks at the endangered Piping Plover.

September:

Now we sprint to the opposite coast for Western shorebirds and other migrants. Point Reyes National Seashore offers the best shot at any shorebirds we didn’t see during winter in the Channel Islands. Black Turnstone and Pacific Golden Plover will be nice additions to our year list this month.  This is also the heart of fall migration for songbirds and Point Reyes is a famous migrant trap. Western specialties like Hermit Warbler will be easy to come by.

October:

We want to add some birds to our list and get to see some of the best fall foliage this month, so we’re headed to Acadia National Park. Some warblers will still be in the area, but we likely got all of them in June at Pictured Rocks. The additions here will be the more boreal birds like finches. Red Crossbill and White-winged Crossbill can be found in the conifer forests of Mount Desert Island, and we’ll be hunting for them all month. Since many of the other birds here will overlap with what we saw in northern Michigan, we’ll spend time on the shore watching migrating waterfowl. There may be a treat like a Northern Gannet that we didn’t snag at Cape Hatteras.

November:

We’re on another coast-to-coast flight Halloween night. November will be spent in Olympic National Park. Olympic is famous for its diversity of habitat. Pacific coastline, alpine tundra, and temperate rainforest are crammed onto the peninsula. Our goal here is to pick up some northwestern specialties like Chestnut-backed Chickadee and Varied Thrush. If we’re lucky, Hurricane Ridge will give us a Sooty Grouse. It’s getting late in the year and we’ll take anything we can get. Most of the seabirds here we already got in Alaska, and most of the shorebirds at Point Reyes. Still, the beaches will be worth a look. November is rarity month, so you never know what might float by.

December:

December is mop-up time during a big year. We might consider staying home and monitoring the bird alerts for a rarity in a national park anywhere, but why not spend the daylight hours scanning for gulls on Lake Michigan? We’ll be at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where the winter gulling can be phenomenal. More than a dozen gull species have been recorded from this area. It’ll be cold and windy, for sure, but we may add two or three species that weren’t on our list. Southern Lake Michigan is a rarity trap for all sorts of things, so this is a good place to wrap up the year.

When we tally the numbers on New Year’s Eve, we see that we got more than 500 bird species during our national parks big year. Could we have gotten more? Certainly, if we threw caution, money, and carbon footprint to the wind. Instead of spending all of May in Alaska, we’d take a couple flights back to migrant hotspots like Padre Island National Seashore, and Shenandoah National Park. We could have squeezed in a quick trip to Gateway National Recreation Area if a rarity turned up there.

Saguaro National Park with its desert species and Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the edge of the prairie probably should have gotten some scrutiny, but we couldn’t devote a whole month to those.

Six-hundred species should be possible across the National Park System in one year, but it would take some extreme effort. Then again, that’s what a big year is all about. I’m glad this big year was only hypothetical. I was feeling stress and pressure just writing about it. I’ll settle for a “big life” in the national parks and leisurely grow that list.