Seeing half the birds — and more

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, bird watching, birding, obsessions, travelogues

Everybody collects something…or several somethings. Collections of small things are most popular because the collections don't take much space. A collection of 50,000 postage stamps takes up a few cubic feet; 10,000 worldwide coins would be of a similar size. These days, if one foregoes printing photos and putting them in albums, a collection of tens of thousands of high-resolution photos will fit on a single 64- or 128-Gbyte SD Card.

At the other end of the spectrum, H. F. du Pont, defining what it means to be filthy rich, collected salons. Not just "rooms", but the very large rooms used for large scale entertaining, complete with all furnishings, from 175 American mansions at his "home" in Greenville, Delaware, now known as the Winterthur Museum. A typical tour at Winterthur takes up to two hours to show just five of the rooms. I wonder whether many of the rooms have ever been toured; I don't think they have nearly enough unique tours.

Bird watching, bird listing, and other facets of "birding" can take up very little space, if one collects mainly memories. Just seeing and getting to know the habits of a few or a few dozen—or a few hundred—species of bird is very rewarding to many people. Lists can be made of the birds that visit your yard or neighborhood, or a certain town, county, state or country. Or the whole world.

Noah Strycker decided to take a whack at the all-time one-year record list of world birds by planning to see at least one-half of all species of bird in one year. 365 days. There is more than one "official" list of all species (biologists differ on a few percent of species, whether they are truly one species or more than one). Anyway, the number of known bird species in 2014 was roughly 10,500, so Noah set out to see at least 5,025 if possible, and possibly more. He traveled upwards of 40,000 miles, spent time in 41 countries in all seven continents, at a cost of about $60,000.

Just to get ready, he had to collect as many bird handbooks as possible. This photo shows the stack. Its volume is greater tha most stamp or coin collections…and that's just his prep work. How did he carry it with him? He scanned every page and stored them in his phone. It must have taken months! My guess is that the stack represents about 20,000 pages. I hope he had several backup copies, including one "in the cloud" in case his phone was lost, stolen, smashed by a Cassowary or whatever.

As chronicled in his book Birding Without Borders, An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World, he eventually saw, including verification by other bird enthusiasts that were with him, 6,042 species of birds. The prior record for a year's quest had been about 2/3 of that.

Creating such a world record is amazing in itself. To Noah, it was secondary to the memories of the birds, the stories about many of them as told by local birders who helped him along the way, and the relationships he built with literally hundreds of bird enthusiasts in every one of the 41 countries.

I had a vague thought of putting a lot of photos in this post. But I took Noah's example; he didn't put many photos in the book. Just 22. So I'll confine myself to just one more picture, of the world's most famous bird, a Giant Antpitta in Ecuador, that one of his new-found friends, Angel Pax, had half-tamed so visiting birders would actually get a chance to see one of the shyest bird species.

Birding Without Borders is astonishing. For one thing, Noah had much less trouble overall than he or anyone else would have any right to expect. When you share an obsessive fascination with people around the world, and you call on them for help, stand back! you're going to get help. Many of the local birders who accompanied Noah went out of their way to show him the rarest species they knew how to find, while keeping in mind the pace he had to maintain.

Just to see 6,000+ birds in 365 days requires a pace of 16-17 new species every single day. Since there are bound to be a few unfavorable days, and Noah even had a couple of "zero" days, seeing 30-40 birds on some days is practically a requirement. This is hyper-endurance marathon stuff.

The reading is much more enjoyable than running a marathon (at least for me, with my poor joints!). I consider portions of this book to be micro-biographies of a few dozen of the wonderful people Noah met all around the world. There's a lot of good stuff packed into this book.