History
The idea for the World Series of Birding came from Pete Dunne, one of America's foremost authors on birding and natural history, and currently the director of the Cape May Bird Observatory. The first World Series of Birding was held on May 19, 1984, and the winning team included Dunne, David Sibley (author of the renowned The Sibley Guide to Birds), Pete Bacinski (current director of the Sandy Hook Bird Observatory), Bill Boyle (author of A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey), and the legendary Roger Tory Peterson (inventor of the modern field guide) and was sponsored by Bird Watcher's Digest. Their total included 201 species, including a Fork-Tailed Flycatcher—a tropical species rarely seen anywhere in the United States, let alone New Jersey.
Since the first competition, the World Series has been held annually on a date between May 9 and May 19, which coincides with the height of the spring bird migration through New Jersey. Winning tallies have ranged from a low of 182 species in 1985 to a high of 231 species in 2003 for the team sponsored by Nikon Sport Optics and the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club (DVOC). The event has steadily gained in popularity over the years; in 1984, 13 teams took part, compared with over 60 in 2006. Over the years, the World Series of Birding has raised more than $8,000,000 for bird conservation.
Read more about this topic: World Series Of Birding
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)