lovely dark and deep has been on the internets for a month now and it’s been fun.  I’m addicted to my stats, and I obsessively check them.  Who’s looking at my blog right now?  How did they end up here?  What can I post that will make them come back?  Am I too obsessed with this bright, shiny, blog-thingy?

Rare birds that everyone wants to see help bring people to the blog.  The three most-viewed posts are about the Jones Beach Smith’s Longspur, the Snowy Owl at Piermont, and the Piermont Ivory Gull.

I like to think cliffhanger endings and teaser titles bring people back but I fear I am fooling myself.

Links certainly help.  Links are the nerves of the internets.  And to get the attention of a creature as huge as the internets, you have to get a lot of nerves firing off messages to its brain all at once to draw its attention.  When a blog is connected to more sites more people (the brain, you) have the opportunity to look at it.  And I think that the huge creature has taken notice of me…kind of like I would notice a House Sparrow, worth a quick look, but not something on which I would normally focus.

I link to the blogs that I read regularly, the photography pages I admire, and the organizations that have relevant, useful information on-line.  Some bloggers have linked back to me which is greatly appreciated.  I and the Bird, the marvelous carnival that Mike made, moved more people to visit than I would have guessed.  I hit my high point, page views-wise, on the day of my first I and the Bird, hosted by The Ridger at The Greenbelt.

The visits on that day were also increased by Will’s posting my URL to the New York State Birding Listserve.

So what else have I learned in the last month?  It’s tough to constantly come up with new content.  It’s tougher still to find time to create that content.  And it’s even tougher to put up a post that I really like and see it sink into near-oblivion.  I constantly feel the need to come up with some hook with which I can catch you.

As Mike pointed out to me in my blog’s infancy (or is it still an infant?), it helps to think like a bird and find the on-line equivalent of an ecological niche.  Mine isn’t just birds (too much competition for a limited resource) but birds in upstate New York.  Hopefully I’ll manage to thrive in my niche and not go the way of the Dodo.

I currently post six times a week, on Sunday through Friday.  I doubt I’ll be able to keep up that pace for long.  Prewriting helps: this post has been written and rewritten for almost two weeks now.  When I have some spare time and I’m not birding, reading or socializing I’m working on the blog.  Beats watching the boob-tube or playing video games.

Oddly, bird blogging has changed the way I bird.  I find myself paying more attention, camera-wise to “common” birds, knowing that I want to have a nice balance of words and pictures in each post (or anything to post about at all!).  After an encounter with a bird I start to rerun the encounter in my mind, not to make sure that I saw what I think I saw (though sometimes I do) but to figure out the best way to tell the tale.  I sometimes even find myself talking aloud, trying out different phrasings (as if spishing at unseen birds in bushes didn’t make me look crazy enough to passersby).

Also, actually writing about the amount of travelling I’ve been doing for birds is making me realize the impact I’m having on the world in terms of my carbon dioxide emissions.  I might have to talk to Charlie.

Anyway, that’s about enough about blogging.  Here’s a bird:

Fox Sparrow in Alley Pond Park, Queens, New York, March of 2006.