Big Year - History

History

The wide publication in 1934 of the first modern field guide by Roger Tory Peterson truly revolutionized birding. However, in that era, most birders did not travel widely. The earliest known continent wide Big Year record was compiled by Guy Emerson, a traveling businessman, who timed his business trips to coincide with the best birding seasons for different areas in North America. His best year was in 1939 when he saw 497 species. In 1952, Emerson's record was broken by Bob Smart, who saw 510 species.

In 1953, Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher took a 30,000 mile road trip visiting the wild places of North America. In 1955, they told the story of their travels in a book and a documentary film, both called Wild America. In one of the footnotes to the book Peterson said "My year's list at the end of 1953 was 572 species." In 1956 the bar was raised when a 25-year-old Englishman named Stuart Keith, following Peterson and Fisher's route, compiled a list of 598 species.

Keith's record stood for 15 years. In 1971, 18-year-old Ted Parker, in his last semester of high school in southeastern Pennsylvania, birded the eastern seaboard of North America extensively. That September, Parker enrolled in the University of Arizona in Tucson and found dozens of Southwestern U.S. and Pacific coast specialities. He ended the year with a list of 627 species. (Before his death in 1993, Parker went on to become one of the world's most renowned field ornithologists, and the acknowledged leading expert on the birds of the American tropics. He is recognized as an influential birder today.)

In 1973 Kenn Kaufman and another birder, Floyd Murdoch, went after Parker's record. As recounted in the book Kingbird Highway, both broke the old record by a wide margin. Murdoch finished with 669 in the newly-described ABA area (North America north of Mexico, essentially) and Kaufman had 666. Kaufman set a North American record of 671 species, with the addition of five species that he had seen in Baja California. Murdoch's record was broken in 1979 by James M. Vardaman, as recorded in his book Call Collect, Ask for Birdman. Vardaman saw 699 species that year and travelled 161,332 miles (137,145 by airplane; 20,305 by car; 3,337 by boat; 160 by bicycle; and 385 by foot). Benton Basham, in 1983, topped that with a total of 710. 1987 marked the second time that there was a competition during a single year, with Steve Perry ending up with 711 and Sandy Komito setting a new standard with 721. In 1992 Bill Rydell made a serious attempt at the record and ended with 714 species for the year.

Big year competitors of 1998 were the subject of a book, The Big Year, by Mark Obmascik. Three birders, Sandy Komito, Al Levantin, and Greg Miller, chased Komito's prior record of 721 birds. In the end Komito kept the record, listing 745 species birds plus 3 submitted in 1998 and later accepted by state committees for a revised total of 748. The book was adapted for the 2011 20th Century Fox film The Big Year.