Excellent birding book with a touch of adventure, or maybe adventure with a touch of birding. Either way, an inspiring journey. ( )

Noah Strycker decided to undertake what is known as a Big Year in Birder parlance, in this case a Big World Year. He would travel the world for a year and attempt to see 5000 different bird species, about half of the world's total bird species. He mapped out a rigorous itenerary starting on New Year's Day in Antarctica, spending a few months traversing South and Central America, some time in North America, then across the Atlantic to Europe (with a quick stop in Iceland), from Europe to Africa (with a stop in Dubai) before heading to India and other parts of Asia, and ending the year in Australia. The book is a travelogue of sorts, as well as a birding memoir. It's not a spoiler to say that he more than met his goal, and the appendix lists, for those who are interested, every one of the bird species he saw.

He does a decent job of not turning the book into a monotonous check list of birds he saw (though it does kind of devolve into that towards the end). There's a bit of birding history thrown in--it's a surprisingly hazardous occupation with a disproportionate number of birders dying in car accidents or plane crashes, or being kidnapped or murdered by hostile groups in the wilds of foreign countries. Strycker ended up visiting 41 countries on all 7 continents during his big year on a fairly cheap budget. I think the book would interest non-birders for a glimpse at what traveling the world off the beaten path can look like.

Recommended.

3 stars

First line: "On New Year's Day, superstitious bird watchers like to say, the very first bird you see is an omen for the future."
Last line: "In the morning the New Year would bring a fresh dawn chorus to one of Earth's most diverse forests, and I would be out there, looking for birds." ( )

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! ( )

Noah Strycker is an exceptionally gifted writer, and Birding Without Borders is a well-crafted book. All of it is well-written and parts of it beautifully so.

Years and years and years ago I never thought that I would actually like to read books about birding. Back then I thought... I’m a birder, I like to bird, I do so nearly every day so... why would I want to ever read about birding? By now I think that I have likely read most books on birding.

I think it was Dan Koeppel’s To See Every Bird on Earth, about his father’s obsession with birding, where I first really identified with the story (other birders / listers / Big Years). I could see a bit of myself in Richard Koeppel. Another was Don Stap’s A Parrot without a Name, not birding per se but ornithological research that characterizes how looking for birds is more of an adventure sport. A Parrot without a Name is a classic; if you don’t like that one then forget about reading about birds and birdfinding.

In any case, I’m content to read about birds and birding and while Strycker’s book is geared towards birders it is also written for the non-birder. Anyone should be able to enjoy this book. My only grievance is that it really wasn’t all that birdy. But when you take a year-long, round the world birding trip you have to winnow it down to something under a couple million pages so this is what you get.

I thought Noah did a great job of talking about his Big Year preparation, the logistics, the methodology, the daily birding, the countries, the people, the cultures, traveling in general, daily blogging and social media uses (birding in the 21st Century), big days and big years (state / regional / world), the history of birds and birding, world records... and, of course, the birds.

One caveat, if you are a birder then this might be the book you don’t want to read. Like my initial hesitancy to read about birding, I found myself getting frustrated; I kept thinking that I didn’t want to read about his Big Year, I wanted to live his Big Year. I wanted to be in the places he was in, and meet and bird with the people he met and birded with. Oh well, I suppose I could do my own Big Year, but unfortunately that is a younger man’s game, I certainly could not maintain the level of effort required to see half (or more) of the species of birds in a single year.

Good job Noah, and congratulations on a fine book. ( )

This spring migration I did my own very small version of listing, trying to get as many birds in Manhattan as I could in April and May. This made me eager to read a couple of books about better birders trying for bigger lists.

Noah Strycker tried for a Global Big Year in 2015, trying to see as many birds as he possibly could all around the world. Most books of this genre describe a breakneck pace of birders trying to spot as many rarities as possible in order to up their numbers. But, Strycker's attitude towards his own pursuit was refreshing:

"The world is the only scale that doesn’t reward rarity hunts. I liked the idea that, by thinking globally and birding locally, I was helping to reinvent the Big Year as a way to appreciate the most common birds in their proper habitats."

This book is a great addition to the genre. ( )