While many University students were enjoying time by the pool under the summer sun in June, one group of four raced through the back roads of the Amazon rain forest in Peru to win a birding competition against some of the most highly skilled birders in the world.
The University birding team, the Tigrisomas, were invited to compete in the Birding Rally Challenge, a bird-watching competition that puts the world’s greatest groups of birders together to see who can spot and identify the most species of birds throughout the jungles of Peru in an eight-day period. The Tigrisomas came out on top against five other teams, which traveled from Spain, Britain, Brazil and South Africa in the second installment of the rally, the first of which took place in November 2012.
University Museum of Natural Science research associate Dan Lane and ornithology Ph.D. students Glenn Seeholzer, John Mittermeier and Paul van Els made up the winning team.
“This is one of the most organized and really unique competitions of its kind,” Seeholzer said. “The whole idea is to                      maximize the number of species you get given the amount of time you spend at each location.”
Each team was assigned a van and driver to race them to different checkpoints along their route. The mornings started early and the days were long and hectic, as eyes and ears were constantly at attention to spot birds in every corner of the passing                    jungle.
“The rally was planned in such a way that we had to keep moving,” Seeholzer said. “We had so much ground to cover and there wasn’t a lot of time that we could spend going off and exploring. We just had to go to places we knew the birds would                     be.”
The group tallied 636 birds during the competition, identifying them from the side of the road and even from sticking their heads out of the window to save time, van Els said. The group used methods like spotting with binoculars or listening for the unique calls of each bird.
Seeholzer and van Els agreed the Tigrisomas were successful in the competition only because of the exceptional resources and large amounts of research done by the University Museum of Natural Science.
“This whole birding competition could not have happened without the decades of work that LSU and other museums had put into exploring the area to actually document what was there,” Seeholzer said. “We saw a bunch of species that had only been described in the past                                   decade.”
University researchers have spent years studying birds — especially in Peru helping to yield “the largest collection of bird DNA samples of any museum in the world, by far,” professor of natural science James Remsen said in an email.
While proud of winning the Birding Rally Challenge, Seeholzer and van Els agree that research and studying the unique bird species of the world in conjunction with the University Museum of Natural Science is the Tigrisomas’ real passion.
“This is one of the most organized and really unique competitions of its kind. The whole idea is to maximize the number of species you get given the amount of time you spend at each location.”