I can understand those birders who keep “life lists”—lists of every bird they’ve ever seen—but I don’t understand those who try to see as many birds they can in a year, spending oodles of money to do so. Likewise, many of my friends go to distant climes to see birds. I can appreciate that, too, but I don’t understand why they favor birds instead of, say, butterflies, nor why many of these folks find themselves in places like Polynesia or Myanmar, but largely ignore the other sights to peer at beasts with feathers. But to each their own.
I was, however, intrigued by a report in Slate about Noah Strycker, a young man who set out, with the sponsorship of the Audubon Society ahd Hougton-Mifflin (clearly there will be a book) to break the world’s record for the number of birds spotted in a calendar year.
First, how many species of birds are there on Earth? BirdLife gives a number of 10,426, which is surely an underestimate, but probably not a serious one given the avidity with which birders scour the Earth.
And what is the record? Before Strycker’s 2015 odyssey, the record was held by a pair of Brits:
But worldwide Big Year attempts are almost unheard of. Too grueling. Too expensive. Too many logistics. American ornithologist James Clements made the first real attempt at a global Big Year in 1989, finishing with 3,662 species. Two Brits, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, took on Clements in 2008 and finished with 4,341 species while dodging armed robbers and abandoning sinking boats.
The Slate piece details Strycker’s plans to travel the world in 2015 and break Davies’ and Millers’ record. It wasn’t easy: imagine the logistics, the plane reservations, the visas you’ll need, the immunizations, the guides, and so on. Not to add all the things that can go wrong. Oh, and did I mention that Strycker had to actually learn to identify all the birds he’d see? That required a stack of field guides taller than he is.
Fortunately for Strycker, the year went pretty smoothly, and he easily shattered the record. How many birds did he see?
6,042 species from Jan. 1 to December 31.
That’s pretty amazing: 58% of the world’s species!
Now I’m not sure how all his sightings were verified: the article doesn’t mention that, so perhaps some readers can tell me. But here’s a precise of what he saw:
Strycker’s Big Year began with a cape petrel off his ship near Spert Island, Antarctica. He worked his way north into South America, finding a pied-crested tit-tyrant in Peru in February for his 1,000th species and a shining honeycreeper in Panama in April for his 2,000th. He was in and out of the United States by the first week of June and found his 3,000th species, a tawny pipit, in Turkey in the middle of that month.
Moving on,
A mountain gray woodpecker in Tanzania on Aug. 17 was Strycker’s 4,000th species, and with four months and two whole continents to go, the new record was all but assured. His record-breaking 4,342nd species was a Sri Lanka frogmouth a month later, and a month after that he saw a flame-crowned flowerpecker in the Philippines for his 5,000th, nearly half of all the world’s known bird species.
After sweeping through New Zealand and Australia, Strycker returned to far-eastern India for the final week of the year. A yellow-rumped honeyguide in Mayodia was his 6,000th bird. (A quick note on honeyguides: They actively lead mammals, including humans, to bees’ nests in order to feed on the scraps after the mammal opens the nest. Incredible, delicious, behavior.) A group of silver-breasted broadbills, as light was fading in Tinsukia on Dec. 31, was his 6,042nd and final bird of the Big Year.
The last species: Silver-breasted broadbills (what a gorgeous bird!):
The winner!:
I like looking at birds, and my own endeavors are limited to finding unusual or gorgeous birds, so I’ve sought out, and seen, resplendent quetzals (several times), a three-wattled bellbird (a video from Montverde, Costa Rica, where I saw it and heard its amazing call, is here), and cocks of the rock, as well as turquoise-browed motmots and many tropical hummingbirds, which I mist-netted during an Organization for Tropical Studies course in 1973. But I have no desire to see little brown birds.
Reader Taskin, who told me about this article, was fascinated by the honeyguides, which she hadn’t heard of, and sent me a link to an Attenborough clip about them. I knew about the bird’s striking behavior but wasn’t aware that they had a specific call to alert humans (as opposed to other predators) to the presence of bee nest. I’m still dubious about that human-specific call, but perhaps readers can comment. The Wikipedia article on the bird suggests that the symbiosis is limited only to the bird and humans:
Honeyguides are named for a remarkable habit seen in one or two species: they guide humans to bee colonies. Once the hive is open and the honey is taken, the bird feeds on the remaining wax and larvae. This behavior is well studied in the greater honeyguide; some authorities (following Friedmann, 1955) state that it also occurs in the scaly-throated honeyguide, while others disagree (Short and Horne, 2002). Despite popular belief, there is no evidence that honeyguides guide the honey badger, though there are videos about this.
I was warned off bird watching when meeting my first interested bird watcher – who had contracted malaria in Africa! Scratched right off my bucket list.
Potential spelling advisory, FWIW and no need to change the article: The Slate article is consistent with “Strycker”, the post is consistent with “Stryker”.
Fixed, thanks.
I don’t think I even met 6000 humans in one year.
I am amazed by the dedication and knowledge of birders. For most of us, the best way to learn is to attend events where dedicated birders are present. The annual Festival of the Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico is one I would recommend to readers of this site. It is held the week before Thanksgiving. Not only are their tours with experts, but Audubon Society members set up at overlooks around the refuge with spotting scopes and displays. It is just south of the little village of San Antonio, NM which has two restaurants that serve the best green chile cheeseburgers in the state.
There is a ranger at Big Bend National Park that does fantastic bird walks. We saw an amazing number of different birds when we went out with him.
I am sure there are many other great places/events with people like this.
It would be interesting to hear all the logistics, places he went and the cost. Can’t imagine doing that.
My wife places markers in one of her bird books when she identifies birds, just in this area. Has about 50 marked off – only 5992 to go.
The honeyguide is amazing. But I wonder if the behavior is mostly learned by the birds and constitute a bird culture rather than an inherited trait? Going back before humans were around, in places where there were few of us, the bird probably followed some animals which fed on hives. But the honey hunting animals would probably not have followed the bird. Perhaps then when humans came on the scene, there was more of a two way cooperation.
The culture hypothesis could be tested by raising birds without exposure to their bird community, and see if they behaved similarly.
Although the other members of the genus predate on bee-hives, guiding behaviour seems to be pretty much limited to the Greater Honeyguide (although there are reports of it having been witnessed in the Scaly-throated Honeyguide, Indicator variegatus). As far as I know the Greater Honeyguide displays the behaviour throughout its range (much of sub-Saharan Africa but not the equatorial forest zone) although the Birds of Africa (Fry, Keith & Urban) notes that there is variation and that guiding is “less prevalent (or absent) in settled areas”. As well as guiding humans the species also regularly guides Ratels or Honey Badgers (Mellivora capensis) and possibly also baboons, genets and mongooses according to Fry et al. I have experienced being led to a hive by a Honeyguide in Botswana and it is a truly remarkanble experience.
Honeyguides also have very interesting – if rather macabre – breeding behaviour. They are brood parasites and lay their eggs in the nests of various bee-eater species and other hole nesting birds. Unlike cuckoos which typically nest in open cup nests the Honeyguide chick is unable to push the host’s eggs out of the nest which is often at the end of a tunnel so it has a different strategy to ensure it gets 100% of the parent birds’ attention. For a short period after hatching the Honeyguide chick has a sharp hook on the end of both the lower and the upper mandible and it uses these to attack the host’s own chicks as soon as they hatch. The lacerated chicks soon die and the Honeyguide has the nest and parental attention to itself.
I thought the point of birdwatching was that they come to you (your garden) rather than you having to go to them?
The fanaticism of the hard-core birder can be staggering (and mystifying) to the uninitiated. As a student many years ago, I shared a house with one such devotee. Not only did he keep a life list, year list, British list and world list of all the bird species he’d seen, he also kept a “TV list” of species he’d observed on TV programmes not specifically about birds or other wildlife, i.e. anything shown on a David Attenborough documentary didn’t count, but if a gull flew across the pitch during Match of the Day, or a mallard drifted into view in the background of an outdoors news broadcast, that went on the list. I wonder whether he’s still doing it.
Collector’s mania gone ballistic!
It has many forms. When I was a schoolboy we used to try and ‘spot’ as many railway locomotives as possible, sometimes ticking them off in little books. I don’t think even the keenest of us would have contemplated devoting a year of our lives to it, though.
By the way, I think “those who try to see as many birds they can in a year” should have ‘species’ inserted in it. I don’t think counting all these:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/27/article-2514252-19A6D9E700000578-825_972x536.jpg
would qualify.
cr
Really addict birders are sometime a bit too much. during my field course on marine biology (mostly intertidal ecology and faunistics) at Roscoff, Britanny, a rare occasion for landlocked Swiss students to discover marine biodiversity. It is a splendid place, with tides up to 9 m, and very diverse biotopes of cliffs, rocks, boulders, sands and mud. Beneath a very rich marine fauna, the place is full of wintering birds – we are looking at them too, of course. But once I had a pair of students interested in absolutely nothing except birds. They used to disappear kilometers away in poursuit of some rare wader just when it was time to retreat because of the incoming tide, and they even “borrowed” a small boat to look at a rare siberian subspecies of willow warbler across an estuary. I don’t think they did see any crab in two weeks.
I called them the ornithopaths.
With regard to the Honey Guide. Chris PACKHAM on the Beeb recently presented ‘World’s Sneakiest Animals’. It is part 3, ‘Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks’.
Forty four minutes in there was a piece about this bird and its less than pleasant chick. The female lays an egg in the nest of ‘Little Bee Eaters’ in a manner similar to the Cuckoo. The larger Honey Guide hatches first and then kills the smaller nest mates. Brutal!
Birds are given the funniest names. There is the Bananaquit, the Kerguelen Shag, the Bushtit….
Oy! That’s just over 16.5 birds/day. He couldda probably gotten more if he’d waited till 2016 (=leap year), or would that have been cheating?
And since you didn’t mention The Big Year (2011: Steve Martin, Jack Black, Anjelica Huston), I will. Wasn’t expecting it to be good, but thought it was hilarious, partly since I know a couple people who, while they don’t compete in Big Years, are nevertheless pretty hardcore. One, when I mentioned Anjelica Huston, started to tell me about the actual person her character is based on.
I was going to mention that movie. I loved it!
Alan Davies and Ruth Miller now run http://www.birdwatchingtrips.co.uk/
If I remember correctly they sold their house to finance their trip, and much of the time had local guides to help them. The new record seems unassailable!
http://naturetravelnetwork.com/perfect-birding-year-alan-davies-ruth-miller/
is an introduction but they also wrote a book.
Lovely photos above, even though David Attenborough looks like a schoolboy – he is now 89! He’s ageing nowadays, but is currently on British TV again with “the Hunt” which shows and describes the various hunting techniques of animals all around the globe. I am sure it will cross the pond before too long – well worth a watch.
Being a person with a birding life-list, I followed Noah’s odyssey from the beginning. And yes, the logistics and planning must have been enormous. He did mention having bad effects from food a couple of times, but apparently never got sick enough to keep him away from the birds. That in itself is quite an achievement given all of the places he went! The book is coming out in 2017 so perhaps some of the underlying machinery of doing a worldwide Big Year will be exposed.
I’ve never done a Big Year as such, i.e. a year where birding takes precedence over all other activities. In other words, no oodles of money (or not many oodles) are spent. But I will spend some effort to maximize my year list in British Columbia (where I live), but only to the extent of getting in the car and driving an hour or less to find a rare bird which might show up.
And yes, +1 to Festival of the Cranes!
My username means ‘bird seeker’, so I have much in common with Strycker. One thing I love about birding (seeking out species) as opposed to passive birdwatching (letting them come to you) is that it is also a geographical pursuit of taking in new places or seeing new birds in familiar places.
And what a geographical pursuit this was for Strycker! I dare say he covered every major ecoregion on the planet in order to encounter such a massive diversity of birdlife! Just scroll through his list to find some bird names you’ve never heard of and put them in a google images search.
As for how his list is verified, it’s not, it’s all based on the honor system. This system actually works pretty well since most serious birders take great care in learning bird identification and distribution. If someone is dishonest or unqualified it can become apparent eventually.
It’s worth noting that heard-only birds count on these types of lists so some of the species on Strycker’s list were not seen at all but identified solely by vocalizations. For many birders, such as myself, learning vocalizations is much of the fun and some species are more spectacular by sound than by sight.
Of course in between the single-minded quest to see as many species as possible and the passive letting the birds come to you that you describe there are lots of other ways to enjoy a passion for birds.
Many birders contribute to our knowledge and understanding of birds and their ecology by participating in surveys and censuses. Some spend years closely studying the biology of individual species. And of course many birders are devotedly attached to a “local patch” in which they record not only the rarities that drop in at random but also the seasonal and year on year waxing and waning of the “regulars”.
For amateur naturalists birds are a very attractive group to study for several reasons:
– they are conspicuously present just about every where;
– beginners and children can see and identify a range of species quite easily with relatively little expensive equipment but as skills develop they offer tricky challenges that require considerable expertise to crack. Consequently one can continue to develop one’s skills and knowledge over a lifetime;
– birds are inherently attractive with (to many people) beautiful form and plumage and often lively and engaging behaviour;
– birds are found in virtually all biotopes and as knowledge of birds and their habits develops so does familiarity with these biotopes and the other fauna and flora they contain. Many birders develop an interest in and knowledge of other taxa as well as their beloved birds.
Silver-breasted broadbills are beautiful things. The female has the neck stripe. I wonder why? Both sexes incubate and feed the young.
I note that the very interesting honeyguides of Africa would be classified as “little brown birds” by many on first observation. So perhaps you can find a place in your “interests” for LBB’s after all. The honeyguides certainly do lead humans to the hives, but whether their call is “human specific” would be tough to test without human observers to monitor it (we would need some sort of remote non-humaniform follower, perhaps a sophisticated all-terrain robot?). As to the cultural aspect of bird vocalizations there is much evidence for this, including ongoing cultural evolution of local dialects documented in a number of species of oscine passerines. I began birding at 13 (late starter according to many friends) and I’ve been at it for over 50 years, it has also given me a rich window into the rest of the natural world. Most of the serious birders I know also appreciate other natural organisms large and small.
I wonder how long Strycker spent in Colombia?
I have it on good authority from the most world-class birder I know (by reply from sending him the link to this post) that the most bird-species-rich country in the world is Colombia, with 1912 bird species = close to 20% of the world total. (He emailed this factoid from Colombia, too.)
From his final list on Audubon’s site:
https://www.audubon.org/news/the-final-species-list-taxonomic-order
it’s possible to figure out that he was in Colombia from March 18 to April 13. Unfortunately Audubon has removed the pages which listed the species seen in chronological order — don’t know why they would do that.
He is fortunate to have had this opportunity, but it seems curious to care about wildlife & then jet around the world – that is some carbon footprint & damage to the environment, isn’t it?
I have never (knowingly) seen a honeyguide, but in Kenya I was told that they specifically attract Honey Badgers (Mellivora capensis) to the nests. Apparently their thick coat and skin protect against stings and their strong claws easily break open nests.
Yes that is correct but also humans and possibly other species. See also my response to #5.
Congratulations Noah! His quest is on the outer limits of birding – even farther out than the “Big Year” knuckleheads and rivaling such legendary birders as Phoebe Snetsinger who died birding in a car accident in Madagascar on her lifelong quest to have the longest life list – 8398 at the time of her death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_Snetsinger.
My personal big year was 329 species within New York State in one calendar year – not really close to a record even for that year (I think I was #3). Birding like that can get you up for a dawn sea watch on a day when winds are driving sea birds on shore. It gets you to climb mountains in spring time to hear Bicknel’s Thrushes singing at dawn. We all do a dawn to dusk big bird day each year for the annual Christmas Bird Count.
Birders are all now wired into the “tubes” and their sightings become part of an enormous database curated by Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology called eBird.
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/