Cornell Team Wins World Series of Birding!

May 2006, Ithaca, NY—The goal: identify as many species of birds as possible in 24 frantic hours and raise funds for bird conservation. At the annual World Series of Birding hosted by New Jersey Audubon on May 13, Team Sapsucker from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology did that better than anyone else. At the end of the day, by sight or by sound, the team had pegged 229 species, surpassing other top teams and breaking their own previous record of 224 species. They were just shy of the all-time event record of 231 species. They took home the Urner-Stone trophy for best overall team, the Stearns trophy for best out-of-state team, and they raised the highest amount of money for bird conservation--the birding "trifecta."

Team Sapsucker 2006, with the Urner Stone Cup and the Stearns Trophy (l-r): Brian Sullivan, Chris Wood, Steve Kelling, Ken Rosenberg, and John Fitzpatrick.
Lab director and team co-captain Dr. John Fitzpatrick says, "I definitely went down saying, I want to win this thing and I am going to work as hard as I've ever worked which means constantly concentrating all day long. There's time to sleep later!"

That focus and concentration plus a week's worth of scouting ahead of time, helped the team score some key species, including their first-ever Saw-whet Owl. The day began at dawn with a screech-owl. The last bird identified was a Black Rail at 9:52 P.M. In between the team found two rare species for New Jersey, the Western Grebe and the Eurasian Collared-Dove. The Olive-sided Flycatcher was another coup.

Sapsucker Steve Kelling believes a new approach helped the five-member team do so well this year. "We were much more flexible in our ability to go to locations where we might find birds," he says. "We got so many species early on that we had time to spend in other key areas to get more birds."

The winning tally sheet with the magic   number: 229.

At the awards brunch on Sunday, Team Sapsucker got a standing ovation. With $786.02 pledged per species, the team raised $180,000 for conservation, funds that will be used to expand the eBird online reporting program into Central and South America. By collecting baseline data about birds that are declining, conservation plans to save them can be created.

All the money raised is used for conservation because the team's expenses are underwritten by its sponsor, Swarovski Optik. Mary Ann Mahoney of Le Mont, Illinois, won a pair of top-rated Swarovski binoculars for coming closest to guessing the team's overall species count and the time the last bird was identified.