One of my goals as a photo-birder is to someday photograph all of the regularly breeding birds in the ABA continental checklist area but despite extensive internet searching I have not been able to find a list or tally for these species. I have tackled this question by counting the regularly breeding birds on the 2016 ABA checklist v7.9.0.

I have defined as regularly breeding species those with some or all of their breeding range in the ABA area using the range maps in the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America 6th Edition (Dunn and Alderfer, 2011) while excluding the irregular breeding species which show a dotted line irregular breeding range extending into the ABA area. In some specific cases I have used the range description in the text to assess the extent to which some of these species breed in the ABA area. The most difficult birds to sort out were those with a very small breeding range extending into the ABA area because most of these birds are already rare at the extreme end of their range.

The figure above also shows my top three picks for most difficult to photograph regularly-breeding birds in the ABA area (Black Rail photographed in Contra Costa County, California, Gray-headed Chickadee photographed in the Arctic NWR in Alaska and the Himalayan Snowcock photographed in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada).