Look To My Coming At First Light On The Fifth Day

A female Allen's Hummingbird shares a feeder with a male Anna's. With new friends like these, I have embarked on a brave new Geri Birding voyage. Photographed at Ranchito Bolsa Nueva.

Well...it's been a while, hasn't it? I didn't plan to not write a blog post for a year (!), it just kind of happened that way.

You see, a Very Significant Thing happened last year...we bought a house, and moved right on out of Santa Clara County two counties away over to MONTEREY COUNTY. For the first time since 2006, I no longer am tied to a Bay Area residence, and find myself under the heady and heavy influence of a new bay...against all odds, I am now a Monterey birder.

Between moving, yard work, work work, and parenting, blogging just kind of stopped, although birding has been going strong (obvi). By the time I felt like dipping a toe into the blog waters again, my computer was on its last legs, and repeated catastrophic freezing events was the last straw in shelving BB&B.

But now I am no longer busy moving, the fever of fall birding on the coast has subsided, I have a new computer, so no more excuses for avoiding you all. Blogging in the year 2022, of course, is an atavistic endeavor. If you are a birder who wants to create "content" (barf) and rack up the views, blogging is NOT the way to do it. That said - and this may be a bold claim - I think some people still like blogs. I sure as shit prefer writing on here to making Instagram posts (yes....you can follow us there @feloniousjive) and I don't think I have the brainspace to even consider attempting a podcast. But people still read and still have an attention span that exceeds an IG or Twitter post (well, some do) and so blogs may still have a niche. BOLDER PREDICTION: Blogs, or something blog-flavored, will eventually return. They will never regain their dominance, but they occupy (occupied?) a role in birding cyberspace that has little direct competition.

The gears of the collective blog machine may already be turning...by now almost anyone who is reading this is aware of eBird's trip report function, which everyone is very excited about, at least in theory. Well, think about it...what trip report looks better and is more fun to look at (whether you were there or not)...the trip report that is just a bunch of checklists and pics, or the one that has site details, some anecdotes, travel tips, maybe even some attempts at humor here and there?  Birders who put these things together are going to get way into making them awesome, and that leaves you with a final product that will be pretty similar to a well-constructed series of blog posts.

This is not what I planned to be writing about today...not at all. Musing about the future of bird blogs? Good lord. Well, I suppose the clogged and gunky writing pipes just had to be cleaned out, and this is the respulsive mind-goo we are left with. I hope you have found a nugget or two in my pile of mental debris. Anyways I'm not going to make some outrageous claim about posting on here all the time now, but I hope to return to this old and beloved space with more frequency than none times a year...how embarrassing.