Buoyed by your good wishes and generous support, Team Sapsucker pulled off a huge win at the 2006 World Series of Birding in New Jersey on May 13. We identified 229 species in 24 hours, from the first Eastern Screech-owl at midnight to the final bird: a Black Rail, at 9:52 P.M., it was a day in which everything fell into place. Enjoy these excerpts from a post-event interview about our "Triple Crown:" the Urner-Stone trophy for the overall win, the Stearns trophy for highest total by an out-of-state team, and highest total dollars raised for bird conservation!

Ken Rosenberg: It started with this awesome night: full moon, a light breeze, it was warm. If we can get screech owl, it's like a good luck thing, and within 10 seconds after midnight the screech-owl called! We drove into the marsh and got the King Rail, Yellow-breasted Chat, and Willow Flycatcher--all birds we could easily miss.

John Fitzpatrick (Fitz): That saved us time later in the day, so we were always ahead of the other teams at a specific location. For the first time we even got two rare northern owls (Long-eared and Saw-whet), then right around the corner we dropped into a place I don't think we've ever been before. In pitch black, we heard both Common Moorhen and the Pied-billed Grebe.

Steve Kelling: We took an approach that was a little bit different this year. We were much more flexible in our willingness to go to locations where birds were.

Fitz: Right. If you could trace our route this year, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti

Steve: We were able to tick off the breeding southern landbirds in 35 or 40 minutes, which in past years has taken us way over an hour. That gave us time at the mudflats for Chris to pull out a Stilt Sandpiper where other teams missed it, and to go out to the ocean and find a Western Grebe way out at sea.

Fitz: The northern jaunt went incredibly smoothly, and we missed virtually nothing. We got down to Interstate 80 at the Water Gap by 9:35 A.M. and we had 145 species already!

Chris Wood: We stayed very focused but we also joked around and laughed and sort of gave ourselves constant energy by not getting down when we missed birds. You sometimes can get this snowballing effect when you miss one bird--it takes you off your game a little bit for the next place, and it just kind of escalates. That never happened to us this year.

Cattle Egret. Photo by Jay McGowan

Brian Sullivan: There were peaks and valleys during the day. We went to Mannington, and we knew the Caspian Tern was there, but we just didn't see it. The next place we went, a Sandhill Crane had been reported, but we missed it. And before that we went to a place for Cattle Egrets, and missed them too!

Fitz: So that's three birds and we're talking the middle of the afternoon so we were feeling low and starting to think...

Ken: That's when I was starting to think about retirement.

Chris: But even when we missed birds, we ended up finding other birds at those locations. We missed Caspian Tern, but we found some Ring-necked Ducks that other teams didn't find. We didn't see Curlew Sandpiper, but we managed to find Stilt Sandpiper instead.

Steve: Plus, we were driving down the road at 40 miles an hour and Fitz was all the way in the back. He shouted "Stop!" I backed up about 300 yards...

Brian: Steve can back up faster than anybody...

Ken: Faster than most people can drive forward!

Fitz: And that's how we finally got the Cattle Egret.

Brian: At the end of day, we pulled into Cape May Meadows. Fitz was driving and I yelled, "The teal are flying!" Fitz just stopped the car dead. We all piled out, leaving the doors hanging open. We got the Green-winged Teal then ran all the way up to the ocean...maybe half a mile up and back.

Ken running to catch up. Photo by Kevin McGowan

Ken: You should have seen us old guys jogging...I had a minor stroke.

Fitz: But we got the Ruddy Duck and the Piping Plover on that run. It was a three-species stop toward the end of the day, so that was a huge high--we were all getting back in the car, just huffing and puffing.

Ken: We got huge boosts from our scouts: Tim Lenz, Mike Harvey, Scott Haber, and Glenn Seeholzer. They're all hot young birders who came down from Ithaca to help us. And then at the brunch on Sunday, the whole room gave us a standing ovation.

Chris: This is one of the few Big Day teams that I've been on where everybody really contributed a lot to the team. Everybody had a great combination of focus and enthusiasm and also birding skills. It was a lot of fun to be with these guys.

Team Sapsucker raised a record-breaking $180,000 for conservation! Congratulations also to Mary Ann Mahoney of Le Mont, Illinois, who won a pair of Swarovski binoculars. She came closest to guessing the species total and the time when the last species was identified.

Thanks so much for your generosity in support of bird conservation!