In the early spring of 2019 I left with my dad on a road-trip around the country. Over the course of two and half months we traveled from Maine over to Wisconsin all the way down to Florida and then up and over to New Mexico. Over the course of this trip we saw 208 new species of bird. Some of my highlights were a Green Jay (tips state park TX) a Flamingo (saint marks WMA FL) a White-Tailed Hawk (side of dirt road TX) and a Vermillion Flycatcher (also at saint marks). The White-Tail Hawk was easily one of the birds we searched for longest and hardest. After searching for days in many different locations we finally found them sitting in a shrub in the middle of a field. we would see them again a few days later on a telephone wire. The Green Jay on the other-hand was a total chance encounter. We had just woken up in a camp-sight we had pulled into late that night and I was taking a scan of the foliage nearby, and there it was sitting atop a dead branch practically asking to be seen. The Vermillion Flycatcher actually turned out not to be very rare as a few days later we went for a walk at a state park and saw 13 of them, but it is my favorite bird so was definitely a highlight no matter what. The Flamingo was one that we spent one very long hot day looking for. This was a bird we had almost definitively known was there because it had been sighted there repetitively for more than a week. We finally, after walking for a few hours, found standing in a shadow swamp basically as far away as it could have been from where we started.

Here are some photos of the van we traveled in.