2012 might to me be a year of milestones. I for instance
turned 30, my dad turned 60, my safari and guide training business is entering
its 5th year… and the Tanzania Bird Atlas Project reached its goal
of 1 million records.
I’ve decided in celebration that I’m going to do a Big Year
starting Nov. 7th. Many people will know what a big year is from the
Hollywood movie that came out last year. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but my
girlfriend convinced me to watch this movie because it’s about birds. It might
also be a coincidence that is the second year that I organized the
on-the-ground logistics for a 23 day Tanzania endemic trip run by Birdquest in
the UK, where they routinely score 490±3
species of birds.
Now Tanzania is one of the most diverse countries in the
world, one that boasts 11% of the world’s bird species. If you have a bit of
experience with birds and try, you can easily get over 100 species in a day. Friends
of mine (Daudi Peterson, David Moyer, Jon Simonson, Mike Peterson), also mentors,
recorded 318 species in a day, and when I was 14, I used to challenge
myself to get over 60 species in a day just in the backyard.
Some of my friends and guests who have been on safari with
me think I know every bird, but that’s the way I feel when I go birding with
serious birders who know their LBJs. LBJs are Little Brown Jobbies or the
little brown and grey birds that are really hard to identify. If it were up to
me, I might have used slightly different language to describe those little things. As much as I love birds, I hit the wall with those LBJs and
there’s too much other stuff out there that is so intriguing that I’ve pursued
some of them instead of challenging the wall, but… maybe it’s time to face it
and break it.
It took me a while to find the world record for a world big
year, but apparently it stands at 4,372 species. The couple who hold the record
have their own blog http://www.thebiggesttwitch.com.
Now, I’m not going to sell my house to fund around the world trip, and I had to
promise my girlfriend I wouldn’t be the Bostiks guy. I haven’t spent hours
strategizing, I don’t have an audio playback system to call rarer birds in, I
really struggle with LBJs, but I do have a lot of friends who love birding and my work takes me to many different parts of Tanzania. My real
motivation to do a big year is for fun. It’s a challenge and I’m going to need
to focus (but not too much), but I’m not going to twitch (well I might a bit). I’m
going to hope to get a lot of help from friends around Tanzania who know where
to find local species… but ultimately I’m hoping to get a chance to learn a
whole lot.
So, if you’re keen, follow me on this celebration of Tanzanian biodiversity- here…
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| Martial Eagle (Piyaya 2008) |
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