Making the list in Kansas

I seem to manage breaking 50% of the species in about one state per year, which means getting my name in the ABA list report. Usually at the beginning of any year I have a short list of possible places to concentrate on. It shifts around depending on what happened along on side trips and chasing lifers the previous year as well increasingly on the price of gas and possibilities to compact targets into the minimum miles. Visiting friends and making contact with the local birders is also a consideration. At the beginning of 2007 the closest state that I had a pretty good count in was Kansas and the annual meeting of the Kansas Ornithological Society, hereafter KOS, was set for the 4-6 of May. I'd already had a great trip early in the year to see the Sandhill Cranes in Nebraska, which had given me a running start. It's posted below in this blog. I'd just finished the Elderhostel boogie the weekend before, and still had the spring hypomania urge to travel, so it was off to Kansas again. I ended up hitting Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska as well.