Pajareo sin fronteras

  Among my birder peers, I'm a little unusual in that I've been a dedicated user of eBird practically since my first days of birding. That's partly because I started embarrassingly late in life, but discovering eBird was also one of the things that got me properly into birding as a serious hobby. It's mostly about enjoying being in the presence of birds and trying for good looks and pictures, but there's something about tracking my life list (and country list and province list and county list and year list) that my lizard brain finds deeply satisfying. As I get older I find my birding philosophy increasingly evolving toward "I just want to have a good time and see some cool birds" rather than obsessive listing, but the act of filling in the little polygons on my eBird map will never not be illogically rewarding.  One extremely list-y thing that I do take somewhat seriously is eBird's  Global Big Day , where birders worldwide try and see as many speci...

  Once I finally nailed down a time to visit the Philippines , Nikki and I started thinking about doing a brief trip somewhere else in the region, so that she had an excuse to get out of the house and I had an excuse to take a little bit of vacation. I casually suggested Vietnam as a possibility, as a few friends of mine had visited there recently and my social media was being flooded with pictures of interesting endemic birds. Nikki immediately agreed, since she was in the mood for an adventure as well as some food tripping. I had been to Vietnam way, way back in the day when I studied abroad in Can Tho and Hanoi, but that was long before I started birding, so I was excited to return and visit some new places.  We had thought about doing a circuit of South Vietnam, spending some time in Ho Chi Minh City and in Cat Tien National Park down in the lowlands, but those plans quickly changed when we saw the weather forecasts for the week we would be there. May is the hottest time ...