Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World by Noah Strycker

Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World Reviews

• 
  Gunnar Engblom

  I finished reading Noah Strycker’s Birding Without Boarders an obsession. Noah sets out to do a big year around the world in 2015 and records a mind-blowing 6042 species and shattering the old record.
  
  Yet another Big Year book for birders? I am wondering if the literary market is soon going to be saturated with Big Year travel stories. Is it really that interesting to follow someone traveling the world one bird at the time? Your average Joe will not get away with something like this. However, Noah Strycker has proven to be such a fine writer, so at least in this case the book has found validity also for people interested in reading a wonderful travel tale. He already has two books published before this one, and has built a tail of fans. 


The main text of the book covers 257 pages, and 326 in total including index and various appendixes, but not counting the foreword by Kenn Kaufman.
  
  I was amazed and flattered to see 33 pages dedicated to the adventures in Peru with me and the Kolibri Expeditions staff. That is 13% of the book. In fairness it should be said that of all 6042 birds that Noah recorded that year, 784 (13%) of them where found in Peru. It is proportional! Peru is that great. 


  
  Noah, has a way of making birding understandable. I recommend the book also to the non-birder, because the quest is interesting and gives a tremendous insight how traveling off the beaten track around the world can look like. You get inside the head of a birder. 
The stories that unfold are a selection of highlights and special quests. They are tastefully decorated with tidbits about conservation concerns, behavior peculiarities, ecology, evolution, dangerous roads, sleep deprivation and lots of interesting people. So in spite of being yet another book on a big year, this is a particularly well written account. The chapters are organized linearly and from the start of each chapter you are thrown into an action-packed quest. Sort of like a well written best seller novel, where you get sucked in at the start of each chapter. There are regressions in each chapter to what has happened in between the scenes and as mentioned many interesting tidbits are thrown in.
  
  A longer and more detailed version of this review shall be published on my blog shortly and I'll do a short chapter summary as well. I am also preparing an interview with Noah. Let me know if you have any questions you want to ask him.
  
  Here is the chapter summary for the Peru part. You can find a longer excerpt of this chapter on the Audubon website.
  
  Chapter 6. Gunning it.
  Yours truly and Kolibri Staff of Manuel Zamora - Kolibri Expeditions legendary driver - and Carlos Altamirano - young and enthusiastic bird guide put up a tough pace to pack in the birds of Peru in 21 days. Noah could easily done a book only on his Peru experiences alone. There is far more to the story than the book tells, since Peru produced more overall species (784) and more new species (488) than any other country visited and more unique birds for the Big Year (242) only surpassed by Australia (312). This chapter describes the quest for Black-spectacled Brush-Finch in the Satipo Road area, Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager at Bosque Unchog in Central Peru and Marvelous Spatuletail in Northern Peru. Our adventures in Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado did not fit. There is also a fair amount of on the spot trouble solving as it is rainy season and this made road conditions tough on the cars.
  
  Have a read! This book is not just another big year account. It is the best - and so much more
• 
  Wanda Pedersen

  I enjoyed this memoir much more than I anticipated. Late last year, I read this author’s
  Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica, which I enjoyed because I am a penguin fanatic. I have done a fair bit of travel in the pursuit of birds, so I picked up this volume with both hope and reservations.
  
  I needn’t have worried. Strycker is a much better writer than many of the folks who pen birding memoirs and I enjoyed seeing places, people and birds that I know through his eyes. I think that was part of the enjoyment for me—getting to revisit some places, remember some birds and say, “Oh, I met that person!”
  
  For those of you who aren’t obsessed with birds, a big year is a year devoted to seeing as many birds as possible in a certain area. There’s a certain competitiveness inherent in the practice which you can read about in
  The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (or try the movie of the same name, which I enjoyed). As I read TBY, I found myself snorting occasionally as I identified with many of the behaviours described. Strycker takes the Big Year concept a step further as he decides to take his Year global and try to see half of the bird species on Earth (5000 of an approximate 10,000). While having no desire to participate in such an activity myself, it was intriguing to see how Strycker proceeded with the endeavour.
  
  What I appreciated the most about this account wasn’t the list of birds. Obviously birds figure prominently in the account, but it was the connections with people, the difficulties faced during travel, and the time spent putting things into perspective—those made the tale worthwhile in my opinion. There was self-reflection here, plus no over-the-top environmental preachiness.
  
  I’m unsure how interesting non-birders would find such a book—if any of my non-birding friends choose to read it, perhaps you could let me know?
  
• 
  Katie/Doing Dewey

  I’ve always suspected I wouldn’t like travelogues, that they’d just leave me feeling jealous. I’m therefore surprised to report that what I really loved about this birding memoir was hearing about the author’s travels. As the author traveled the world to beat a birding record, he stayed with locals, who knew local birds and local customs. It was fascinating to learn about the different locations he visited from this intimate perspective. I generally enjoyed hearing about his interactions with people. The help he received was heart-warming and the birding culture was at least as interesting as the culture of any country he visited. The author did a great job compressing his adventures of a year, the highs and lows, to make a fast-paced read that made me feel like I was constantly getting to visit new places. My only complaint is that I would have liked more pictures of the birds he saw, but I suppose that’s what the internet is for. Highly recommended if you have any interest in birding, but also if you’re a fan of travelogues.
  
  This review first published at
  Doing Dewey
• 
  Cheryl

  Not just another birding memoir. First one I've read that makes a point of world travel, of going to the birds instead of aggressively seeking out the accidentals, the vagrant rarities. First one I've read that connects so very much with all the local birders, guides, drivers, and random strangers who rescued our boy from some, erm, predicaments.
  
  Ecotourism is a great way to make money, as one former logger discovered when he befriended a wild Giant Antpitta at his home in Ecuador. And for people in countries like Ghana and Myanmar, it's a great way to make a career out of doing what you love.
  
  Palm oil. The plantations on the tropical island of New Britain are representative of "one of the world's worst environmental scourges." And as we've learned elsewhere, the industry is killing Orangutans. But it's hard for us to stop using, as palm oil "is used in half of all supermarket products--including lipstick, soap, chocolate, instant noodles, bread, detergent, and ice cream--and is labeled under a host of names, such as vegetable oil, vegetable fat, glycerol, and Elaeis guineensis. Otoh, it's an efficient source, as "compared to similar crops (such as soybeans and canola), palm trees can produce ten times as much oil per acre."
  
  So, it's still a trade-off for those kinds of goods. Well, at least we can cut our intake of processed fatty foods and read labels to choose, for example, ice cream without any vegetable oil. After all, it's not like we need lipstick, instant noodles, snack crackers, etc.
  
  Anyway, the book was a joy to read, even though I've already read several birder and twitcher memoirs already. I liked Strycker's gentle enthusiasm, his philosophical bits, the tidbits of culture, geography, history that he lightly sprinkled in. I appreciate that he talked about money and fatigue, and that he included a few wonderful photos, a list of what was in his backpack, the checklist of birds seen, and the index.
  
  (But you know who really needs to publically appreciate Strycker's pathfinding trek? Arwan Dwarshuis. I bet he couldn't have accomplished what he did w/out learning from Strycker's field blog.)
• 
  Igor

  Усе, що ви ніколи не хотіли дізнатись про світ спортивного бьордвотчі��гу, але дізнались і це виявилось доволі цікаво.
• 
  Addie Motta

  Anyone who knows me know that I -LOVE- birds. I also love travel/adventure memoirs. Stories of people hiking long distance trails, visiting national parks, and in this case, birding around the world really draw me in. I have held on to this book for about a year and finally had a chance to dive into it with my phone in my hand the entire time to google image search all of the birds I had never heard of.
  Besides the birds, what really stuck out to me about this story is the generosity of human beings and the surprisingly strong community of word wide birders. At every turn, the author had someone to pick him up at the airport, trek with him up mountains and though valleys, and aide him on his quest to break the world record for most birds seen in a single year.
  I’ll end this review by saying my FAVORITE bird that this book introduced me to is the marvelous spatuletail, a little hummingbird that is indeed marvelous. I now feel incredibly inspired to look beyond my home state and even the US to find some birding hotspots I had never known about.
• 
  Victoria Peipert

  Fascinating story! As a very casual bird watcher and nature enthusiast the story in this book intrigued me. It was engaging and was hard to put down since I was dying to know how everything would turn out at the end of the year. -1 star for the editing - it could have been stronger.
• 
  Nancy Lewis

  Noah Strycker is not only an intrepid birder, he's also an engaging writer. He makes a round-the-world trip during which he traveled over 100,000 miles to see over 6000 species of birds sound like loads of fun.
• 
  Jacob Chauss

  Reads like a journal. I’m sure the blog posts about his journey would be more in depth but reading the highlights of his Big Year in 300 pages was exciting and kept me reaching for Google to see what the birds looked like. I loved living vicariously through his trip in this book.
• 
  Anna

  A delightful memoir of a challenging interesting journey. I loved that Strycker used local birders as his guides to the largest extent possible and that he was doing his own thing and not too worried about another person coming along and breaking his record.
• 
  Viva

  I'm a backyard birder and I quite looked forward to this book. Unfortunately it's hard to read. I feel bad for my rating, I commend this guy on writing a book on what he loves and I want him to succeed. But I don't think he's a natural writer and he might need a good editor.
  
  It says on the back "this is no travelogue or glorified checklist". Funny but I think it would have been better for the reader if it had been either as those were the parts I liked. His travel anecdotes were amusing and there is a species checklist with date and location on the back!
  
  For the rest, some of it was just boring and some meandering and it's not pieced together well. This book is best read piecemeal, looking up passages on the birds or countries you are interested in. In any case, my best wishes for him and his hobby. The 2 star rating according to GoodReads = it was ok and I felt this was an ok book for me.
  
  I got this book as a free ARC.
• 
  Sierra The Book Addict

  I went into this book completely blind, and I absolutely love this book. Noah took us on a absolutely wonderful journey of his wonderful Big Year of birding. not only dose this book provide you his wonderful detailed adventures, but also gives many people who know very little on the subject of birding a good since of how its down and what resources to use. But the moral of the story is he put his life on hold for a whole year to pursue his obsession and passion, an while doing that he met so many wonderful people who also shared his love and joy for the outdoors and birds. This book shows that the bird watching community is not just for older people, but for any age and that I have learned to appreciate more of the birding world, thanks to Noah Strycker.
• 
  Emily

  I read this book for my Travel Book for the Literary Life Podcast Challenge and I really enjoyed it. It was an easy, fun, heartfelt, and exciting read for a bird nerd like me!
• 
  Ashes

  I'm not a birdwatcher, but I love birds all the same and always stop to observe them whenever I get a chance (I'm the person who exclaims "oh look, a buzzard!" while in a car and who picks up a feather from the ground because "hey, that's a jay!"). But I never understood twitchers - running after as many bird species as possible with a checklist. And yet Noah Stycker's book changed my mind, if only partially, and I even started to appreciate it.
  
  Birding Without Borders is a solid ecotourist travelogue; it was interesting to read about all those different parts of the world from a birdwatcher's perspective. It was a bit of a "I've been here, here, here and here, and saw that, that, that and that bird [insert a number of bird names you've never heard about unless you're a serious bird enthusiast]", but not in an exhausting sort of way. One thing I did suffer from was the lack of photos - maybe just in my edition, but half the time I had to fight the urge to pause reading and google the bird he's seeing. Luckily, the descriptions were good enough for me to imagine them pretty accurately. Now I'm off to check
  Noah Stycker's World Big Year blog to see the gallery!
• 
  Alison

  In 2015 the author traveled through 41 countries and 7 continents on his quest to find 5,000 birds in a year long journey.
  I have definitely become an armchair birder as I love reading about peoples journeys to track birds, and also watch the ones that live around me. This was a really informative and fun book to read, as it gives us the mindset of a person with a passion to achieve a goal, and not only that of the author, but other birders with as much love of this recreational activity, and what made them get into it.
  Before the author left on his year long quest, he had a lot of preparations to do, from one way plane tickets, to searching out birders in each place that he was going, for the company and for the knowledge of the areas that these people could provide. He was so grateful for the interest of so many on making his trip memorable. One can feel what a tight group birders are. He had many exciting adventures along the way and he loved to stay as locally as he could to absorb the whole experience of the areas he visited.
  This is a book that even if you are not a birder you could appreciate, it is a wonderful travel memoir.
  I would like to thank NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC of this book.
• 
  Harrison

  A depth of commentary on par with, perhaps, an undergraduate meteorologist presenting the weather for their college TV station. Or maybe a minor league baseball commentator, or a B-level executive giving a talk at a shareholder meeting. One of the main conclusions that Strycker comes to after reflecting on this record-breaking feat is literally "The real life list is the friends we made along the way", which is strange given that we are offered nothing more than superficial details and ruminations about his birding companions' lives. Based on a glance through this account, I would assume that the relationships described in the book are those of coworkers, or maybe distant relatives. But I'm not necessarily looking for gossip– I would have loved a discussion about the social dynamics of this sort of trip, of travel, ecotourism, climate change, and so on, but these topics are only glanced at. Unhelpfully, many of the linguistic flourishes and framings are clearly drawn, problematically, from 19th century adventure novels.
  
  So, clearly Strycker has a truly singular focus in his life, but it's a focus that comes at the expense of any other personal texture, or it's foregrounded in such a way that, deliberately or otherwise, obscures any other significant dimensions of his life.
• 
  Carol Douglas

  If you love birds, you'll probably enjoy this book. Noah Strycker went to every continent in an attempt to see 5,000 bird species in a year. He actually saw 6,000. He got in touch with local birders every place he went, and they helped him. Clearly he was engaging and ready for anything, including days with no sleep and cars that stopped working at the top of desolate cliffs. He gives other birders a great deal of credit.
  
  I particularly enjoyed going to the Internet and finding photos of the birds he mentioned. It was a treat to discover beautiful birds I had never heard of, like the Magellanic woodpecker and the golden-tufted woodpecker. The variety of tanagers and hummingbirds in South America is staggering.
• 
  KaBbage

  Ok this book took me literal years to read but I FINISHED IT 😎 First things first: “Kassy, did you seriously read a book about a dude who birdwatchers?” Yes. And? What about it. Mad respect to this homie who traveled around the world to shoot birds with a camera and not a big cat with a rifle. I understand the obsession, I also think Big Years are cool, and is that because of the movie? Perhaps. Would Noah mansplain birding to me? Yes. Look, homie wrote a book. Homie is from Oregon. I begrudgingly give 3.5 stars for the birds and the carbon offsets.
• 
  Dennis Winge

  Noah wrote an excellent account of his big year in setting the record for most bird species seen in a single calendar year. He presents a nice overview on his strategy to set the record and then provides a compelling travelogue on his travels and importantly his uses of local birding experts to accomplish his goal. The role these various local guides provide in his quest is incredible and Noah gives them great credit for their guidance. It is impressive to read about an individual who sets a lofty goal and then follows a well-honed strategy to achieve it. Noah is an inspiration as he had to move through fatique and illness to achieve his goal. Although the books is about birds, it is also a testimony about the unfolding of one's passion toward achieving a goal. This was an outstanding read. I first learned about Noah when he was the featured guest at the Salt Lake Bird Festival and we heard his presentation on his big year. That captivated me to want to read his book and I enjoyed the book as much as his lecture. One notable aspect is his humility and clear acknowledgement of others. Great job Noah!
• 
  Dylan

  DNFing this one at about 40% of the actual 'narrative' content, not including the long list of birds that makes up ~100 pages of this book.
  
  This one started out pretty strong for me. I'm only just beginning to get into birding, but I've been interested in birds for a while and I was looking for some compelling bird-related non-fic, a book about a man's travels around the world to break the record for most birds sighted in one year seemed like a good choice. And like I said, it started out strong. I like Strycker's writing style, I liked his descriptions of the things he was seeing and it was neat to learn more about birding as a pursuit through his exploration of its history.
  
  Unfortunately, I began to grow tired of it pretty quickly, maybe four or five chapters in. The focus of this book is more on Strycker's journey rather than the birds themselves (and I mean, fair enough, the man saw over 5,000 bird species in one year). I mean obviously he mentions a fair few species and some of the more interesting species get some more time dedicated to what they looked like and the actual event of him seeing them, but still, a lot of the book is just him talking about his journey. And again, fair enough, the logistics of trying to see an absolute ton of bird species in 365 days to beat a world record is a pretty interesting subject, but man alive by the point in this book where I'm giving up he just spends so much time talking about all the negatives and it just sounds like a miserable experience. I mean, he keeps chipper and through his writing tries to show how he kept his spirits up, but I just lost my patience with him talking about how little sleep he was getting (which he does constantly) or bringing up the fact that he felt like he was missing out on certain experiences etc. I get it, it's not going to be a perfect experience and it's okay to talk about that, but the book just became too much of this kind of thing for me to enjoy, hence, the DNF.
• 
  Dorothy

  Taking a whole year to bird every day might seem like a bizarre thing to do for many people, but for those of us wbo would rather bird than anything, and actually do bird every day, it just sounds like a little bit of heaven. I understand his statement at the end, that he was not sad on finishing his Big Year, because on Jan. 1, every bird is new again on one's year list. That's why lists are so fun, whether it's a life list, a yard list, a Country list, a county list, or a year list. The birds never grow old, and they just represent moments of joy and discovery. Noah Strycker also shares eloquently the joys of birding with others as well as birding alone. He was able to find willing and capable birders in every corner of the world who volunteered their time to show him their country's birds. Birders love to share their time with an excited newcomer. Noah's goal was to exceed the world record for seeing the most birds in one year, and he exceeded that goal by a thousand species. He ended up seeing 6,042 different species of birds. His rule was each bird must be seen by not only him, but by one other person. This makes the sightings a little more verifiable in the honor system of bird reporting.
  
  I loved reading this book, and could have devoured it in a day or two, but drew out the pleasure by taking a month to savor it. I appreciate his sharing his experience of people, birds, and places in this book.
• 
  Stacey Lunsford

  I've read several books about birding that were more humorous than this one. At first I thought this seemed a little like a listing of, I went here, I saw these birds, I met these people, NEXT! I went here, I saw these birds, etc.
  
  It turned out to have some interesting stories about the countries he visited and the opportunities to see birds in their natural habitats, unlike the stories of people doing Big Years in North America, where they have to race around the country to see rare birds that are in places they aren't usually found. I would have enjoyed a few more photos of the birds, particularly the ones he mentioned specifically in the text as being exceptionally rare or significant in some way. I realize I could look them up online but it's nice to flip to the picture as you read about them, knowing that it was exactly that bird that he saw. But again, I've read several birding books so I have become a bit picky, I suppose.
  
• 
  Kim

  I wasn't sure about reading this right as the quarantine was starting, but it turned out to be a perfect selection for being stuck inside one's house. I just wish there were pictures - I kept having to stop to look up birds on my phone!
• 
  Barb Purvis

  Seriously good journey with Noah and his Big Year- I loved his attitude, forthrightness and believable account of his joys and travails. I learned quite a bit about birds ( of course) and culture and environments and the logistics of taking such a trip. Highly recommend!
• 
  David

  This review appeared in edited form in the June 2018 issue of Birding magazine. Copyright David W. Liebmann and Birding.
  
  Noah Stryker’s new book takes on four ambitious goals: immersing his readers in different landscapes around the globe, introducing us to fellow birders of many nationalities, detailing encounters with over 6,000 avian species, and sharing a world record pursuit. Any single goal could be its own compelling book, but the strength (and slight weakness) of Birding Without Borders is that Strycker, always up for a big challenge, takes on all four simultaneously.
  
  Strycker begins his quest on new year’s day aboard a bobbing Antarctic research vessel turned ecotourist cruiser. It’s a memorable way to begin a global Big Year, and it signals that not only will adventures be had, but there will be plenty of fun and some humor along the way. “Any global journey that skipped Antarctica,” writes the author, “wouldn’t be as cool.” Nice pun. Strycker and his comrades are searching for penguins in the midnight sun of a southern hemisphere summer, popping champagne corks in an onboard hot tub even while the bubbly instantly freezes. The penguins are nowhere to be found, but his initial bird, a Cape Petrel, is the first domino to fall in a line that will stretch out for another 364 days and take us across seven continents.
  
  From the frozen south, we’re off to Argentina. As Strycker chases his computed daily average of 13.7 new species, hoping to break 5,000 total, he explains his approach in ways appreciated by birders and non-birders alike: every bird has to be spotted by at least one other person; companions should be locals and coach-surfing is encouraged; the use of technology to find birds and connect with local birders is a requirement of modern birding.
  
  Strycker is a Millennial and turned thirty just after completing his Big Year, and I was struck as a Gen-Xer raised by Silent Generation parents by just how much age played a subtle but notable role in his story. Birding for me remains an offline, “let’s see what I can find” pursuit. I bird in the same slow, often solitary way I learned to do everything outside. Strycker’s embrace of tools like eBird and BirdingPal, which were nonexistent even fifteen years ago, reveal how different birders now approach the game. Technology was integral in Strycker’s quest. He spent months and months planning his route beforehand, connecting with strangers who became close birding comrades to help get him on particular species… and provide local intel or a place to rest his head, albeit briefly, as he dashed from ecosystem to ecosystem and country to country. Strycker birded and traveled ultralight, but his kit included two iPhones and a laptop. I acknowledge that those items aren’t the sole provenance of Millennial birders, but combined with Strycker’s footloose freedom and youthful ease, I vacillated between an irrational envy of his unencumbered pursuits and sentimental recollections of my days as a single guy who could carry almost all of his worldly possessions, including binoculars and field guides, in his backpack and do it all offline. As Strycker notes, “How we spend our days is an ongoing choice. Most of my own life still lies ahead, and I’m happy, at this point, to have pursued this dream when I had the chance.” No regrets for Strycker, who Thoreau-like, goes on to write of his Big Year, “It is worthwhile to do something intensely for a year, to really dig deep and get to the meat of it.” There is a sense that Strycker is aware of his youth and lack of responsibilities and commitments. So my envy aside, I admired Strycker for his willingness to take a big risk and embrace a big adventure. That sense of fun and excitement infused the entire book and made it a non-stop page turner that appeals to birders and non-birders alike.
  
  Add a fifth goal to Strycker’s project, one unavoidable for such a reflective person and writer: to think about why we bird at all, and what all those ticks on a list really amount to. Strycker could err on the side of youthful naivete, but he’s proven himself a better thinker and essayist than that (see Liebmann, D. 2015. More than Color and Intrigue [a review of The Thing with Feathers, by Noah Strycker]. Birding 47 (4): 65.). While youthful zeal infuses his Big Year, Strycker reliably takes on the larger issues at hand while not belaboring them. He writes to address the “why” of his project and does so in ways that reveal him to be self aware and a worthy intellectual companion.
  
  386 species into his adventure, Strycker sets an approach that continues for the entire book. He’ll take us to a new, exciting, often remote place like the Cerro Negro of Argentina. He’ll arrive with a small pack of gear. He’ll meet up with a local birder, often someone he’s never met before, a friend of a friend of a friend. And he’ll see scores of new birds, many of whose names are as shiny and little known as the far-flung corners of the world he is exploring. I reflected on the pattern and saw it as a necessary formula given the vast scale of the undertaking. Back in the late 80s, I spent six months in the backcountry of the Rockies. There would be no way to convey every experience or what I saw everyday or who I met. I quickly appreciated Strycker’s challenge, then, and admired the deft way in which he compressed 365 days, forty-one countries, and 6,042 species into a coherent narrative of 258 pages. The places and people and birds become a blur, as they were no doubt to Strycker, and would be to anyone in such constant motion. That the writer can recall with detail and clarity what he saw and who he met testifies to his poise as an observer and traveler. The book is raucous and exuberant in that way, a model of a tightly executed narrative even as it does many things at once.
  
  Recognizing his readers might not keep pace with his peripatetic journey, Strycker steps aside from his memories to provide excellent historical context for listing in general and Big Years in particular. Chapter 4, “Over the Years,” is one such diversion, sharing for readers of all experience levels quick summations of American ornithological history, field guides, bird quest literature, and listing. Strycker pauses on the literary catalyst of his Big Year, what he calls “that fateful footnote” at the conclusion of Roger Tory Peterson’s Wild America. If a monument to listing is ever built, a bronze plaque thereon should read: “Incidental information: My year’s list at the end of 1953 was 572 species….” As Strycker rightly observes, “In fine print, a gauntlet had been thrown.” Consciously or unconsciously, those thirteen words gave rise to the ABA, to Kingbird Highway, to a global Big Year, to birding’s Everest. What’s exciting for Strycker and for birders in general is the fact that the number is there at all. Can it be bested? By whom and how? For how long? In Strycker’s case, the world record he set on September 16, 2015 stood for a mere fourteen months when it was broken. And that latter record will no doubt be broken again.
  
  Strycker takes on the question of whether a record that includes dashing around the planet on jetliners is ethical in a time when global warming should be on everyone’s minds. He believes that through carbon offsets and the positive benefits of ecotourism and habitat protection that comes with it, his Big Year meets a reasonable standard. I would tend to agree with him, but I also think it might be thin ice. Perhaps it’s better to bird local and protect ecosystems closer to home. For a variety of reasons, my birding skews that way. But I have to admit that Strycker’s checklist, which runs a full fifty page appendix, lays out an enticing temptation: there are thousands of species I had never heard of and will likely never see in countries that I didn’t consider as great birding locales. And then I caught myself and saw his point. Strycker saw them and Strycker wrote about them, and maybe that nourishment for my imagination is, on balance, an acceptable trade off. Maybe Strycker’s birding abilities and facility with words and images makes his journey more of the stuff of inspiration and healthy dreaming than my world encompassed before I picked up his book.
  
  That giant list also solidified my appreciation for just how good a birder Strycker must be. I know when I’m in a new locale birding new species how rich and demanding that challenge can be. New birds, new field marks, new trees, plants, sounds, smells, light. Those are some of the many compelling reasons we bird away from home. But like travel in any new environment, all that newness can be mentally taxing if not down right exhausting. Strycker pushed through that day after day all the while learning new birds and allowing experience to lead him along. Like the London taxi drivers whose brains grow in certain regions in response to learning different routes around that city, I imagine an MRI of Strycker’s brain before and after his Big Year might tell us something. We all know “bird brain” is a rather poor and inaccurate turn of phrase. I’d wager all the more so in Strycker’s case. Any birding neurologists or neuroscientists out there want to pursue that research project?
  
  Strycker’s work deserves a place on the shelf of books that are exuberant romps: fun, well-written, and enriching reads about things and places most of us will never see. There is a need for books like that in a time when species and ecosystems are threatened and when the world is changing ever more quickly. They remind us of what is possible, where our imaginations lead, what is out there, and what wonderful places and people big dreams can show us. It’s the kind of book a child, seeing a Snowy Owl or Merlin for the first time, might some day come across and find inspiration in. Or an experienced birder might pick up and then find themselves asking, “Well, why the heck not?” In Birding Without Borders, there is something for all readers.
  
  David Liebmann
  
  – David Liebmann undertook his initial ornithological training at Chewonki in Wiscasset, Maine, where Roger Tory Peterson began his Field Guide to the Birds. Liebmann writes about birds and birds in literature on the occasional break from being Head of Glen Urquhart School, north of Boston.
  
  
  
  
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  Bookslut

  This was a fantastic reading experience. I had a friend once tell me that I wring the most I can out of every book. I thought they was a really neat idea. If there are books that are well-suited to be wrung, this one provides a particularly rich example. Noah Stryker designed an unbelievable modern-day heroic quest, and the main thrust of the book is following his journey. However, the book is not a simple travelogue, because it is replete with background information about a dozen interesting topics linked to his main idea. I got to learn about the history of birding, the intricacies of several ecosystems he visited, strategic travel, psychology, human-environmental relations in developing countries, and a lot about birds. I unrolled our world map almost every day while I was reading this book, and hugely improved my geography. I even tried looking up all of the birds on his Big Year list, but what he did in real life, I couldn't even keep up with on paper. Midway through South America, I realized trying to see all the birds was bogging me down. I can't imagine how grueling it was to travel for an entire year, and almost entirely in the developing world. He says, at one point in the book, that you're always thinking so much about 'can I use the water from the tap to brush my teeth, where will be my next access to clean water or electricity or toilet paper', and that was very much my experience traveling in the developing world for ten days--the marvels you see are bedfellows with wearying calculations of that kind. Compound that with the length of time, the sheer amount of travel, and the constant re-orienting in new locations, and this must have been so demanding. And you can tell this guy is the Real Deal, who just loves birds and the hunt. He broke the world record because he likes lists and records, but his clear primary satisfaction was reaching his own goal, and because he loves birds and travel.
  
  **spoiler**. Speaking of, there was some giant jackass that used all the hindsight of Strycker's triumphs and failures and gunned for his record the very next year, and he got it from him, just eleven months after it was set. Strycker did it in a way that had never been done before, and beat the previous record by almost TWO THOUSAND species of bird, and this guy just followed his blog posts like a map, made small alterations for improvement, and stole it right out from under him. I'd be bombing that guy's house, but Strycker was very gentlemanly about the whole thing. You could tell he was ticked, but he tried to see the positive side of it--that more people would see more birds because of what he'd done.
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  Anders

  I've always liked birding ever since a close friend of the family introduced me to the hobby when I was an impressionable youth. Back in those days I thought of it as pokemon but in real life. You didn't catch the birds and fight with them, but there was a whole system of techniques and traits to cultivate to improve your skills to find and identify birds. I had and still have a lot of fun with it. I read The Big Year in high school and it was a real romp but I never got around to seeing the movie.
  
  At any rate, this book was fun. You can tell Strycker has a lot of passion for the subject and his achievement is really impressive. In reading this, you get a real sense for how far birding has come as a hobby and how accessible it is to anyone of various income levels, in various parts of the world. And how globalized the birding community has become.
  
  The real flaw of this book, to me, is that Strycker isn't seriously competing with anyone that same year (A Dutch guy beats him by copying him the next year, so what), so there isn't much tension around whether he will make his goal (compared to something like The Big Year) aside from the several pratfalls he navigates through. The other one, is that there just isn't enough time in the short book to get into all the birds when there are people and places to talk about. Hell we don't even hear about some of the places. But this is all unavoidable. While I might say more birds, less people, you need a lot of those details to get Strycker's account of his year, which is what its about.
  
  There are lots of good things about the book, but the the real fantastic thing is the achievement itself. Strycker's commentary often helpfully puts things into perspective and its amazing how much the birding community stepped in, across the world, to help him out.
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  Anne

  More like 3.5 or 3.75, but I'll round up. If you like birds at all, this is a pretty fun book. Also if you like travel, though it's less about that - or at least less focused on that. Anyway, the premise is basically a guy who spends a year trying to see as many birds around the world as possible. The writing is not the best - there are some fairly cheesy spots, including a statement towards the end that is almost literally the words "but best of all were all the friends I made along the way," and a fair amount of statements attributed to people that just couldn't possibly be real - no one talks that way, stating what is basically exposition and context-setting, in real life. But aside from that, it's pretty fun and a quick read - although it's listed as 337 pages, the last 80 or so aren't part of the narrative - it includes the acknowledgments, the list of all the birds he saw and similar. I wish there had been a few more pictures of the actual birds (and maybe better pictures, some clearly seem to have been taken on an iphone, which is fine but maybe not print-quality) - I would have liked to have had some visual context for some of the species he described. Anyway, I'm a casual bird enthusiast, in that I like identifying them when I travel and I like reading about them, so I enjoyed this. It's not going to be for everyone.
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  Madelle

  Being a backyard and beyond birder and having heard Noah Strycker speak, I was anxious to read his book detailing the year in 2015 he spent traveling the world, trying to see half of the bird species in it. He surpasses his goal, seeing over 6,000 of the 10,000 bird species around the globe. He is a young man from Corvallis, Oregon and a fabulous speaker. He tells of his travels, the birds that he saw, the weather he encountered, and the difficulties that he faced. He did set a new record for a Big Year around the world, but what impressed me the most was the comment he made at the end of the book where he lists every place he stopped, every one of the over 6000 birds he saw and then the names of all the people he met. He did not use professional birding guides, but connected with birders in all of the countries he visited. Birders are a congenial group of people wherever we go, always anxious to share what they have seen with us. He said that while three years later, he doesn't remember all of the birds he saw, he does remember every individual he met, even when they did not speak the same language but could still connect with their passion for the environment and for birding. Great read!