Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Big Year

Starting point is 00:00:00 Many people have hobbies, pastimes that they enjoy and maybe even spend a lot of money on. However, there are some people whose hobbies become an obsession. This is particularly true in the world of bird watching. Some birders have spent their entire lives trying to view and count as many species of birds as possible. And an exceptional few have tried to do it all in a single year. Learn more about the big year and how birdwatching became competitive on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past? were wrong. Throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story

Starting point is 00:00:48 that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I should start out this episode by noting that I am not a birder. However, in the course of my travels, I've had the pleasure of meeting several very serious burders. One man I met, was a student in Singapore who would tramble to northern Malaysia after his classes were done on Friday, just so we could spend a few hours trying to see a rare bird before returning to his classes on Monday. I met several groups of birders during my trips to the Galapagos Islands. They would obsessively document everything they saw every night on board the ship. They would get

Starting point is 00:01:34 excited at seeing even the smallest, simplest, simplest finches, which no one else ever even bothered to pay attention to. I'm not trying to imply that all burders are obsessive. The vast majority of them are not. However, as with anything else, from collecting baseball cards to building model train sets, some people can take things to an extreme. Before I get into the meat of this episode, I should explain a little bit about how birdwatching came to be. While the origins of bird watching began in the 20th century, it really sprang out of the 19th century trend for collecting. Many upper-class people, especially in Britain, would tend to collect birds' eggs and stuffed birds from around the world. They didn't necessarily visit these places or collect them themselves,

Starting point is 00:02:15 but rather people would ship specimens to them. In the 20th century, optics improved, and devices such as binoculars became more popular and more affordable. Instead of shooting birds and mounting them, it was now possible to observe them from a distance. Automobiles actually increased bird watching as people could now easily travel to other places to see birds that they couldn't at home. groups sprang up around birds and bird watching, such as the Audubon Society, the American Ornithologists Union, and the British Trust for Ornithology. Guides about birds were published, and lists were created of what birds could be found in what area. Perhaps the most revolutionary book, for the purpose of this episode,

Starting point is 00:02:53 was a 1934 book published by Roger Tori Peterson titled A Field Guide to the Birds. Once you had lists, it wasn't too long after when people began trying to check things off their list. One thing that many bird watchers will do is keep a lifetime list. This is simply a list of every species of bird that they have ever observed in their life. How many bird species you can observe depends on a host of factors, the biggest of which is simply where you live. If you live in a country such as Columbia, you would have more species of birds around you than in any other country in the world. If you live in the Canadian Arctic, not so much. The total number of bird species in the entire world is somewhere between 10,906, which is the number given by the Clements Checklist of Birds

Starting point is 00:03:39 of the World, and 11,001, which is the number given by the International Ornithologists Union. The record for the most birds ever observed by one human is held by a former American diplomat by the name of Peter Kastner. Depending on the list, he has observed over 9,800 species of birds in the wild, and there have been 22 people who have observed over 9,000 species in the wild. And there have been 22 people who have observed over 9,000 species in the wild. Just as an aside, in the process of researching this episode, I've wondered exactly how many species of birds I've seen without even knowing it. I've been to the Galapagos, on safaris, and in national parks all over the world.

Starting point is 00:04:14 And I'm guessing my lifetime list would probably be around 2000, having not even tried counting. Most of the serious burgers I've met will be able to tell you the number on their life list. However, having a lot of birds on your life list is mostly a function of how much how long you're able to travel, and not everyone can do that. Many of the first birding accomplishments were local in nature. The man who started the competition, which is the focus of this episode, was a traveling businessman by the name of Guy Emerson.

Starting point is 00:04:44 In 1939, during the course of traveling for business, he managed to observe 497 species of birds in North America. The single calendar year record for the number of bird species observed in North America is what later became known as the Big Year. Emerson's big year record was broken by Bob Smart in 1952, who observed 515 bird species. The very next year, British author James Fisher and the aforementioned field guide writer Roger Troy Peterson,

Starting point is 00:05:13 made a huge 30,000-mile trip around North America writing a book and filming a documentary. They claimed that they had observed 572 species. Then, in 1956, English ornithologist Stuart Keith followed the same route that Peterson, and Fisher did and saw 594 species of birds. In 1969, the North American big year rules were formalized by the American Burning Association. Their rules held that you could observe birds in any of the 49 continental United States, excluding Hawaii, all of Canada and the French

Starting point is 00:05:45 islands of St. Pierre and Michelin. You could also observe birds at sea within 200 miles of shore. Here I should also note that the big year competition, and in fact all birdings, statistics and accomplishments are all done on the honor system. You don't have to photograph every bird. You just need to document that you saw it or that you identified it from its song. So in that respect, it's kind of like the completionist club. In 1971, an 18-year-old high school student named Ted Parker spent his last semester in high school going up and down the east coast of the United States searching for birds. And then he went to the University of Arizona in the fall where he did more burning. He wound up with 626 species for the year. At this point, with official rules being

Starting point is 00:06:31 established, big year records became something that was actually pursued for the sake of setting the record. In 1973, Ken Kaufman and Floyd Murdoch both pursued Ted Parker's record and demolished it. Kaufman ended up with 666 birds and Kaufman got 669. In 1979, that record was broken by James Vardaman, who observed 699 species. And just to give you an idea of how much things had changed, Vardamon traveled 161,000 miles in his big year, compared to the 30,000 miles traveled by James Fisher and Roger Troy Peterson in 1953. In 1983, Benton Basham reached 710 species, and in 1987, two burgers competed for the record.

Starting point is 00:07:16 Steve Perry ended up with 711, and Sandy Camito reached 710. 72 bird species and a single year was the record for over a decade until 1998. That year, three different birders made a serious attempt at the record. This was the year that the concept of a big year was brought to the attention of the public. The current record holder, Sandy Camito, along with Al Levittan and Greg Miller, all chased the record of 722 species. Sandy Camito ended up holding onto his record with 745 species, which was later updated to 748.

Starting point is 00:07:53 The 1998 competition was turned into a book titled The Big Year, which was later turned into a movie starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson. Here I need to explain something else. A North American Big Year isn't just running around seeing all the birds you can, although that's a big part of it. The American Birding Association has a list of North American birds that a big year is based on. This list is changed every year as subspecies are defined as new species and other species that might only migrate through North America are included.

Starting point is 00:08:24 Sandy Camito saw four birds in 1998 that were not on the ABA list. He submitted all four to the state birding association's rare bird committees. Three were then approved and sent to the National Association, which were then added to the list. The other thing is that North America, even if you just include the United States and Canada, is really big. Near Newfoundland and Baffin Island, it's possible that you may get occasional birds that wander over from Europe.

Starting point is 00:08:52 The Aleutian Islands, especially Atu Island, the most distant of the archipelago, is only about 700 miles from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. Asian birds can easily get blown off course and wind up there, birds that are not on the ABA master list. For example, one of the four birds not on the list that Sandy Camito saw was the yellow-throated bunting on Atu Island. The yellow-throated bunting is native to Japan, China, and Russia. The other thing is that birds are not evenly distributed.

Starting point is 00:09:21 A big year will begin on January 1st of any given year. It would not be uncommon for a serious burger to observe over a hundred species in just the first few days. Easily, over 90% of the birds a burger might see in a big year might be observed in just the first few months. The rest of the year is in the pursuit of a few rare birds. Camito's 1998 record stood for well over a decade despite several attempts to break it. It was a testament to the difficulty of the achievement and to the integrity of the birders. To spend an entire year and come up just a few birds short on something that was entirely on the honor system really says something. The record was finally broken in 2013 by Neil Hayward.

Starting point is 00:10:02 He viewed 747 species on the list, plus another three more provisional species, two of which were approved, giving him 749, beating the record by one. In 2016, the record was broken in July of the year by John Weigel, an American living in Australia who had previously set the Australian Big Year record. He ended the year with 784 species identified. The ABA then made a huge change in the Big Year rules in 2016, adding Hawaii to their list. This was an enormous expansion of the North American list, as the birds found in Hawaii are largely those not found in mainland North America. And this resulted in a distinction between an 80s.

Starting point is 00:10:42 ABA area big year and an ABA Continental Big Year. Dave Weigel currently holds both the Continental Record, which he set in 2016, and the ABA Area Record, which includes Hawaii, of 840 species, which he set in 2019. Every year now, multiple people are attempting their own big years. Many people now put certain restrictions on how they do their big year. Some have attempted it without flying, and some have done it only on bicycles, and others try to do it photographing every species that they see. Moreover, the idea of a big year has spread to other countries.

Starting point is 00:11:17 There is a world big year record now. In 2016, Dutch birder Ariandwar's house saw 6,852 birds in a single calendar year. And this is a remarkable achievement, considering it's a full two-thirds of the Lifetime list record. Burgers in many countries have started doing their own big years. In 2021, Nikki Carrera Levy and Marioso Ossa set a single-season big year record in Columbia when they saw 1,453 species. There is even a big day record. One team in Ecuador spotted 431 different species of birds

Starting point is 00:11:51 in a single day in 2015. While I'm not a birder, I've been fascinated by people who pursue a big year. A couple of times every year I'll check up on people who are attempting their big year just to see how they're doing and to see if anyone is close to breaking the record. And that's because attempting a big year requires a lot of luck, a lot of patience and a lot of perseverance.

Starting point is 00:12:14 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Eric Sudam over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Turns my commute into an educational adventure. Gary is like my travel companion. While in reality I'm driving my kids to school in Michigan, in my imagination I'm time traveling the entire world.

Starting point is 00:12:39 Thank you. I'd also be interested in episodes about ice hockey. Also, if you could, mention the best senior women's hockey team in all the world, the Ice Pack, because Ice Pack rules, all others drool. That would be great. Thanks, Eric, an episode on Ice Hockey is certainly possible. And I also want to wish the Ice Pack best of luck in their upcoming season. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Big Year

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