The Big Year
In the heart of every serious birder lurks the desire to do a “Big Year”. A Big Year is a sustained effort to see the maximum possible number of species in a single year in a specified place. This is the story of my not-quite Big Year of 2018- my “Biggish Year”.
You may have seen the movie The Big Year, starring Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black. Surprisingly (for Hollywood) it’s a reasonably accurate representation of what a “Big” Big Year means as three fanatic birders vie to determine who can see the most birds in the USA in a year. Most of us don’t have unlimited funds, and most of us have real lives to live, so for all but a tiny minority this sort of Big Year is out of the question. Fortunately a Big Year can be done on a more manageable scale – within a province, a county or even a city.
However, whichever way you set it up a Big Year is a non-trivial undertaking. It means that for a year a lot of normal life stuff has to take second place to the single minded pursuit of birds. Because it requires a lot of sacrifices (notably from one’s significant other) it’s really not worth doing in a half-hearted way.
It’s also hard to hide. And once your birding pals know you are on a big year, they will work hard to support you – passing on sightings, helping you see target birds, and working their contacts to ensure you have the best chance of succeeding. So you can’t really just lose interest halfway through – once you’re in it’s all in.
The Biggish Year Manifesto
So… am I about to announce that I’m doing a Big Year? Well, yes and no. Yes, in my first full year as a full-time birder (i.e. a retired guy) in 2018 I am going to see every bird I can in Ontario. But no, I am not doing an official Ontario Big Year. By convention a Big Year in Ontario is 300 or more birds. Given that only 291 species of bird actually breed in Ontario, that means seeing them all as well as any rare bird that happens to wander by. The latest guy to set the Big Year record, Jeremy Bensette, put 90,000 km on his car chasing every rarity in the province for a year.
I could try to replicate that, but having done most of my birding in the UK, I don’t really know the Ontario birds well enough to set 300 as a goal. Yet.
So what I am going to do (indeed what I have already started to do) is a Biggish Year. The target is a mere 250 species, but to make it harder I want to see them all – just hearing them won’t count. (Yes, that means a bunch of purely nocturnal species are pretty much off the table).
And happily for all, I am not going to use some fake goal of “raising awareness” to hit up my friends for donations. My Biggish Year will be entirely self-funded.
The Plan
But I am counting on my friends in the Kingston Field Naturalists to help me out with tips and suggestions, and a couple of my Army Ornithological Society pals will be coming over from England to do an intensive 10 days during Spring migration. All the usual stations of the cross – Pelee, Long Point, Presqu’ile, Algonquin Park and Prince Edward County – will be thoroughly patrolled, and far-away places like Rainy River are on the programme.
So consider Biggish Year 2018 as a recce for a future Big Year. And standby for upcoming posts recounting the successes and the inevitable “you should have been here yesterday” stories.
