Let's start this discussion of Connecticut Audubon’s 2019 Birds of the Year with a sad truth: there are no large, pink, subtropical species on the list.
The Roseate Spoonbill – with its garish color, its accommodating photo availability, its fanboys and fangirls (and we were definitely among them) – was so 2018.
This year’s list has nothing quite so spectacular, although it does have a state first-record, as the spoonbill was.
But the 2019 list has great birds. They’re a year-end reminder of how much fun birding can be.
Which is not to suggest that it is nothing but fun. As conservationists, maybe we should have chosen as “Birds of the Year” the 2.9 billion birds that have vanished since 1970, as the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and others reported a few months ago.