Dear Roger, and Hello Tweeters,

There are a lot of people who have seen 1000 species in one year, counting the world rather than just the ABA Area. I would say that a thousand in one year qualifies as a big year, on any geographic scale. A few birders?have even found 2000 in one year. If you go on eBird, you can explore this. You go to "Top 100," on the Explore Data tab. Once on Top 100, you select a certain year, and make sure that you are looking for the?top 100 by species, rather than by checklists. I just checked this, and I see that, for every year from 1995 through 2013,?at least one?birder has recorded over 1000 species. In 1994, the high was just 782. There are fewer and fewer 1000-species years on eBird as you go back farther, because there were fewer people doing such big years in earlier times, and because some of the people who did them simply have?yet to put?their data onto eBird.

There is an account of a great three-year trip in the book "To See Every Bird on Earth," by Dan Koeppel. The author describes a trip?begun in 1959?by a birder named Dean Fisher and his non-birding friend, Noble Trenham. With no books to help identify birds in remote areas, this six-continent trip ended up?with a lot of question marks as to bird ID, but the book says that they saw over 3000 birds on that trip--even though it took Fisher close to forty years to figure out what all the birds were, by comparing his field notes to the ever-improving information in the literature.

I often wonder whether anyone is going to go through old documents and start putting really old records onto eBird. For example, Lewis and Clark left quite a few records of species seen on their journey. It would be cool if someone put their first sightings of Clark's Nutcracker and Lewis's Woodpecker onto eBird. It would be really cool if someone took the time to type in all of Roger Tory Peterson's birding records, too! Perhaps it would be wise to wait for the development of a robot to do all that, though--robots don't get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch


>________________________________
> From: Roger Moyer <rogermoyer1 at hotmail.com>
>To: tweeters <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
>Sent: Monday, February 10, 2014 12:19 AM
>Subject: [Tweeters] Big year
>
>
>
>A question for the brain trust. Does anyone know if anyone has ever done a Big Year on a global scale?? If anyone has information on this I would love to hear about It. And no I won't be attempting to do it. Though it would be intriguing and a great deal of fun.
>
>
>Roger Moyer
>Chehalis, Wa
>Sent from my Sprint phone
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