Introduction: Birding the Capital Area Greenway in Raleigh

This blog was inspired by two things.  First, I saw the movie The Big Year, about three birders who set out to identify as many species of North American birds as they can in a year’s time.  The movie got me wondering about the possibility of doing a Big Year of my own – maybe one a little closer to home.  One idea was to do a Big Year within my own county (Wake) here in North Carolina, or perhaps even in my home city of Raleigh.

But I knew that my job would often keep me from birding on the weekends, and in the summer, I’m likely to be out of the country for eight weeks or more.  I needed a goal that was not time dependent, but which had a definite endpoint.

The second inspiration came when I “discovered” the Capital Area Greenway here in Raleigh. I don’t know what I’ve been doing the last eight years I’ve lived here, but it apparently doesn’t involve paying attention to my surroundings.  A couple of weeks ago, I was taking a walk while waiting for my car’s annual inspection to be completed and happened across a section of the Greenway called the Crabtree Creek Trail.  The trail was paved, but it passed through some woods along the banks of a small creek, and in the short time I was on it, I heard and saw a number of birds.   

It turns out the Capital Area Greenway has been around since the 1970s, and is still growing.  According to the City of Raleigh, it includes 69 miles of trails and covers 3700 acres of space.  Many of the city’s parks are connected to each other through the Greenway, and the City’s goal is to create a large network of interconnected trails.

Once I saw a map for the Greenway, and realized it passes through many different parts of the city, and often along the banks of creeks or rivers, I realized that the Greenway might be a way to do some birding without having to travel far to do it.  Birding the entire Greenway might also be a way of setting a definite endpoint to my endeavor without having to worry about a time limit.  Once I’ve walked every trail on the Greenway, whether it takes a year or three years, I’m done…..unless I want to start over again!

So I decided to make it my aim to spend some time birding the Greenway.  I will keep track of the birds I see, and then blog about my sightings so that others can use them to find good places to go birding in the city, or to view a specific bird that they might like to see.  I should note that I am not a seasoned birder.  Over the past decade or so, I’ve probably been birding only two or three times a year, on average, and at least half of those experiences have been overseas (Thailand, Japan, Denmark) or in other states.  At the start of this project, my life list is only 300 birds long.  You might say I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous.  Perhaps having this blog will encourage me to get out there and bird more often.

I currently use a pair of Nikon Action 8x40 binoculars, a Garmin GPSmap60CSx for longitude and latitude, and three field guides.  I carry Stan Tekiela’s easy-to-use Birds of the Carolinas Field Guide and Roger Tory Peterson’s Eastern Birds, and I leave a copy of Fred J. Alsop III’s Birds of North America – Eastern Region in the car as an extra reference.  My favorite category of birds is woodpeckers, so I suspect my posts will be particularly focused on woodpecker sightings.