Canada Big Year 2022: Is a Birding Slump a Thing?

I spent over 40 years with the Toronto Blue Jays, as their Video Coordinator. Using video I helped players from the days of Bob Bailor to Joe Cater, Vernon Wells and Carlos Delgado get out of hitting slumps. I watched video with Roy Halliday and J.A. Happ when they were struggling. And eventually, they turned their slumps around. Here I am in the first week of April, in a bit of a slump myself. After the success of the Redwing, and though I have added species in Newfoundland, Ontario and British Columbia, I have been pitched three rarities, and a few other tougher birds, and swung and missed at most of them.

It can get you down, when doing a Big Year, knowing that every missed bird is a bird that must be chased later in the year or will possibly be missed altogether; but I remind myself of the great birds I have seen, the amazing adventures I have already had and the ones yet to come. April is a tough month here in Southern Ontario. Most of the winter birds have headed north, and few of the migrants have yet made it north. The migrants are here in ones and twos and I have seen Eastern Phoebe, Osprey, Winter Wren and Willet, and just recently added Cliff Swallow, Swamp Sparrow and a lone Lapland Longspur here in Brant County. But it is the ones that got away that sit with me.

That’s not to say that things are not looking up. Though the weather has stubbornly stayed closer to early March temperatures than those we long for once the calendar has flipped over to April, there are signs that better things and birds are coming. Some warblers are already being reported and there are Eastern Towhee and Meadowlarks around. I just haven’t seen them yet. And I always seem to miss Spruce Grouse in Algonquin Park, even though it seems everyone else sees them when I am not there.

The thing is, and I have to continually remind myself of this, if I just relax and let the birds come on their own schedule, and I am patient, the slump will end and I will start having a string of successful hits and will be swinging for the fences once again. There will be more rarities to chase and I will catch up to one or two of them. For it is only early spring, and as Alexander Pope once wrote, “Hope springs eternal.” And Spring Migration is always full of hope. As the likes of Joe Carter and Carlos Delgado have taught me over the years, working with them through their slumps, just let the birds, ahm pitches, come to you. Swing and don’t worry about the results. Once the ball leaves the bat, it’s out of your control.

For over 40 years now, the Blue Jays and now birds in particular, have been a big part of my life. In baseball you need to brush off one week where you lose a lot of tough games, and in birding, one week in early April where it seems you’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time to see new species, is no more than a statistical anomaly.

Now, stop hanging your head in frustration and get out there and go birding.

(PS: Feel free to share your “birding slumps” in the comments).

Here are some photos of birds I have seen in April…