Lost Among the Birds
A Big Year is very much an American creation. Here in the UK there are plenty of birders who have had a serious go at competitive year listing, but it is really the poor relation to the Stateside version. For a start, the area in which to list is much smaller. There are fewer species to seek out. The logistics of travel are not as difficult. There is a literary tradition of Stateside birder's attempts to see how many bird species they can find in a calendar year. Roger Tory Peterson kicked it all of when he wrote ' Wild America' which told of his lengthy trawl across America with Brit James Fisher in 1953. They ended up seeing a then giddy total of 572 species. Ken Kaufman followed this up with 'Kingbird Highway' in which his 'on-a-shoestring' attempt of 1973 was told, and a new landmark of 666 species was set. Mark Obmascik's ' The Big Year' was written as if a suspense novel, as he revealed the story of 1998s three -pronged attack on the...