I just got my “List Supplements” for 1986-87 from the American Birding Association. This is the list of the listers, a record of the names and achievements of all the birders who keep careful accounts of every species they see–and then send those accounts to the American Birding Association for publication. The supplement requires 32 pages, two columns to a page, 93 names to the column, to list the names, total numbers of birds sighted, and home states (or countries) of the listers.
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One of the things we notice is that there are more listers than there used to be. Birding has been gaining in popularity for some time, of course; but the growth of the listers does not so much show an increase in the sport as a whole as an increase in an elite, a group of highly skilled, experienced birders. These people bird in all seasons. They bird where they live and when they travel; they take birding vacations.
They know the annual cycle of bird life in their home area and on the rest of the continent. They know when to go to Capistrano to see the swallows, and they also know when to go to Duluth to see the goshawks, when to find sandhill cranes on the Platte River, and when to look for shearwaters in the Pacific off Monterey.
But in the 70s, the jet airliner and the interstate highway system did for birding what the forward pass had done for football: they opened up the game. No longer did birders need to hope that they could live long enough to reach 600 at the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust pace that travel conditions allowed. Now you could reach 600 in a year, as a man named Ted Parker did in 1971.
Some retired people have the necessary combination of time and money to really pursue birding. The current number-one lister in the ABA area is Theodore Koundakjian of Albany, California, who has seen 764 different species. His wife, Christine, is number six on the list, with 753. Ted Koundakjian is an engineering professor, now retired, whose new leisure has allowed him to move from 79th place in 1984 to the number-one spot today.
Each state or province has a list of possible sightings compiled as a matter of record by local birders through private organizations, such as Audubon societies, or through state government agencies. A man named Tony White, who sells a birding software package called Bird Commander, monitors state lists and provides his software customers with quarterly updates. According to his numbers, Illinois has 398 possibles. The man at the top of our state list is H. David Bohlen, who works for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and who compiled the standard checklist of Illinois birds. He has seen 365, 91.7 percent of the possibles on his list.
Larry Balch told me that Ted Koundakjian’s 764 species is no longer the top North American list. Benton Basham, the first man to see 700 in a year, is now up around 790 with his life list. It seems 800 is inevitable. Twenty years ago this would have been thought impossible.
