This fall in Peru, students and researchers from the LSU Museum of Natural Science broke the world record for the number of bird species observed in one day. The four-person team identified 354 species in the 24-hour Big Day event.
The previous world record was set in 1982 by University researcher Ted Parker and Princeton graduate student Scott Robinson with 331 species in a national park in Peru. A non-American Birding Association-recognized record of 342 was set in Kenya in 1986.
A Big Day is a birding competition in which a team of at least two birders try to see or hear as many bird species as possible in a 24-hour period. The LSU team consisted of LSUMNS Ph.D. students Mike Harvey and Glenn Seeholzer, LSUMNS Research Associate Dan Lane and Peru native Fernando Angulo.
The LSU team started the Big Day at midnight in the Abra Patricia mountains in Peru and ended in the adjacent Mayo Valley. Most Big Days run on an honor system because there are no official judges or witnesses, but the LSU team made an effort to document as many species they could.
“If all four people don’t see the bird or hear the bird, it can’t count for the list,” Seeholzer said at his Dec. 2 Science Cafe presentation at Chelsea’s Cafe in Baton Rouge. “So we all pile out of the car and run down the road. It was pretty fun.”
The team visited multiple habitats in various elevations, looking for bird species. They traveled between locations in a van driven by guides.
“There was a lot of pointing things out, just from the window,” Seeholzer said. “Sometimes it’s just some vulture that we hadn’t gotten yet, and everybody would pile on one side of the van, staring out the back as we drive away.”
Through the 250 miles explored by the team, it observed 361 species, but only 354 were ABA-countable.
To be ABA-countable, the bird species must be a part of the ABA-recognized list for the area and must be seen or heard by all team members. The team beat the standing ABA-recognized world record by 23 species.
“Even before sunset we had broken the Kenyan record, and that was pretty sweet,” Seeholzer said.
LSUMNS expeditions in the most biologically diverse area of the planet, the Neotropical region in Central and South America, resulted in the discovery of 42 new bird species. The University team saw three of these species during their Big Day.
Seeholzer said he thought the team could break the record again.
“I think doing this route again, we could get to 400 with better weather,” Seeholzer said. “It was really sunny most of the day. If we had clouds and nice rain, mist, that would have made their activity a lot more throughout the entire day.”
The LSU team used their Big Day event to raise money for discovery based research in the tropics at the University.
“Every year the LSU grad students do a Big Day fundraiser here in Louisiana,” Seeholzer said. “The record is 221. Last year we got 216, and we feel that was as many as we could get.”