The team’s midnight-to-midnight marathon route through the woods, marshes, turnpikes, and shores of the Garden State earned the team the Edwin I. Stearns Trophy (for best out-of-state total—for the second year in a row) and a second-place finish overall, behind a New Jersey–based team who weighed in with 223 species.

Another equally important distinction: the $120,000 in pledges raised by their effort that smashed last year’s pledge total of some $90,000! This year’s amazing sum accounted for one-fifth of the approximately $600,000 garnered by all 59 teams competing in this year’s event.

"We had a killer route," says team captain Ken Rosenberg, the Lab’s assistant director of Conservation. "We followed the advice of World Series of Birding guru Pete Dunne and kept to the principle that ‘even for birders, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.’" This route led them to key, hard-to-find-in-Jersey species: Ruffed Grouse, Vesper Sparrow, Yellow and Black rails, and the team mascot, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

Their impressive second-place finish gave the Sapsuckers their highest big-day placing ever, and their 220-species total soared far beyond their previous record high of 205. This figure also places their count among the all-time, top-10, single-day counts anywhere in North America. "The weather was perfect, almost all of our target birds were where we’d hoped they’d be, and our scouting route was precise," says team member Steve Kelling, BirdSource project coordinator. "We had the most fun we’d ever had on a Big Day."

Other team members include Lab director John Fitzpatrick and Lab affiliates Kevin McGowan (associate curator of Birds and Mammals for the Cornell Vertebrate Collections) and Jeff Wells (director of Bird Conservation for National Audubon of New York State). The extended team includes the men and women who helped with scouting and behind-the-scenes logistics.

Support from team sponsor Swarovski Optik means that pledges made to the Sapsuckers will go even further to help fund the Lab’s education and conservation programs, such as the new Golden-winged Warbler Atlas Project. Cellular One also contributed by supplying top-of-the-line, on-the-road communications, an essential tool during the critical week of scouting.