Armchair Ticks

   

Black Chinned Sparrow

   For those of you that don't know what an armchair tick is let me explain. As many of you know, birders keep all kinds of lists. Lets say you've seen one hundred species of birds. Every year, the ABA ( American Birding Association) looks at the latest science and decides if a species may actually be two different species. Sometimes there is evidence that a bird has evolved differently from one location and is a totally different species. While a bird may look very similar it could have a different song or habits. If DNA confirms that there is enough of a difference than the ABA could decide that what we thought was one species is really two different species. If you have seen both of these populations in your hundred species, you get to add one and now you are at one hundred and one.

   This recently happened with Meadowlarks as my friend Scott told me. The Eastern Meadowlark was split into two. While there still is an Eastern Meadowlark, there is now a Chiricahua Meadowlark. The latter bird lives in the southwest from western Oklahoma to central Arizona. Scott had previously seen this bird in that range. So when the species was split, he got to add it to his lifelist without leaving his couch. Hence the name "armchair tick". Tick would be another term for checkmark or mark to identify you have seen the bird. 

   Another example of an armchair tick would be when the ABA allows a previously unallowable bird to be counted. Lets say someone lets there pet parrot free in Miami or one escapes. If I'm driving through Miami I can not count it because it is not a wild bird. I can not count a parrot that was raised by humans anymore than I can count a chicken in someone's back yard, it is not a wild bird. But say many parrots escape and they start breeding. Now they are not domestic birds, they are wild born. After a number of years, I believe twenty five, if that population is self sustaining then the ABA will announce that the bird can be counted. So if I were driving through Miami on my 2019 vacation and I saw that parrot species and in 2022 they announced it is countable, I get to add to my list without leaving my chair, hence...armchair tick.

 

Longnose Leopard Lizard

     All of my birder friends keep lists. The ones that travel can't wait to find out if the ABA split any species so they can add a bird to their lifelist. I know a few nature lovers that keep a dragonfly and butterfly list, but beyond that, I know a couple that keeps track of  herps they have seen. I know very few that keep track of much other than that. The best example of someone that does is my friend Charles.  He seems to keep a list of everything from Damselflies to Mammals. 

   Until this year I had my bird lists which are only in two categories, birds I've seen in RI (on ebird) and total birds (in a notebook). I have a half hearted butterfly list. Last year I kept a list of herps I saw in 2022 and this year I have done the same.  That was until this weekend.

   This week I put together my life list of fish. That in itself is worthy of its own blogpost for another time. I also decided to figure out how many species of herps I had seen before. This was pretty tough. I'd gone on vacations to Florida and North Carolina in the last few years. I took photos of pretty much anything that sat still long enough. If a lizard wanted me to take a photo I was happy to oblige. I never gave them much thought after I got home.

   In North Carolina I took a lot of reptile photos but I'm attracted to megafauna. So I'll take hundreds of photos of a Black Bear and forget to ID a turtle. When I got home from North Carolina I actually did pretty well with getting ID's of my lizards but didn't get too many turtles identified. 

   Much more of a problem was my vacation in 2010. DJ and I went all over the west. I snapped photos of everything. With over three thousand photos after deleting the blurry ones, there was a lot to go through.

 

Peters Rock Agama, Florida Keys

   Which is exactly what I did on Friday night. I was alone and had the night to myself. So I started looking for photos of all of the herps I had seen this year and put them in a folder so I could make prints. Then I decided to go through my Florida photos. I found three lizard species and a snake species that I did not know the identity of.  I also found the turtles from North Carolina and put them in the folder. 

   Next I tackled 2010. The job wasn't as bad as you'd expect. I didn't have any lizards until I reached Utah. I didn't have to go through my photos from Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons. However, we covered a lot of ground in the southwest. We went to the Grand Canyon, three Utah national parks, Flaming Gorge Dam, and two national monuments. It did take me a couple of hours to find all my herp photos. I tried to get positive IDs of the reptiles but did a piss poor job. 

  The following morning I posted the lizard pics of a reptile Facebook Group. I posted the snake from Florida on a Snake group and the turtles on a Turtle Identification group (who knew?). To my surprise, all of the species were identified. The snake was a Peninsular Ribbon Snake. All of the turtles were in the slider family but I had seen those species before. The lizards were all identified for me by a real reptile expert out west. I thanked everyone that was kind enough to help me out.

   All in all, I had thirteen species identified (not including the turtles) that I previously did not know what they were. In a stroke of a pen, I got thirteen armchair ticks!!! Needless to say, I was on cloud nine all day on Saturday. I am going to get prints of all the herps I have photos of including the species from these trips and make an album the way I do for birds. 

Sidenote- one of the thirteen armchair ticks was a bird. I found a photo of a species I saw in Utah and asked Scott what it was. It is a Black Chinned Sparrow a very handsome bird. 

Not that anyone cares but the previously unidentified species are:

Black Chinned Sparrow (bird, Utah)

Florida

Green Anole (was pretty sure but wanted confirmation), Brown Anole, Northern Curly Tail Lizard, Peters Rock Agama, Peninsular Ribbon Snake

Utah

Long Tailed Leopard Lizard, Side Blotched Lizard, Ornate Tree Lizard, Common Sagebrush Lizard, Western Whiptail, Plateau Striped Whiptail, Plateau Fence Lizard 

Peninsula Ribbon Snake