The wing nuts

"It's so nice to be able to go birding again just for pleasure," says Jon Feenstra, pausing under a California live oak to watch a foraging ruby-crowned kinglet. His words seem odd given the circumstances. It's a little after 7 a.m. on a February morning, and it is cold and gray and raining steadily. But compared to the way Feenstra birded during 2003, this is a pleasant outing.

You see, 2003 was a big year for the Caltech PhD student. More precisely, it was a Big Year.

The whole thing started with a bet. In New Jersey visiting friends and family over Christmas 2002, Feenstra bragged about the huge variety of species near his home in Pasadena.

One thing led to another and soon he'd made a wager with an old birding friend that he could see more birds in a year in Los Angeles County than the other guy could see in three eastern states of his choice during the same period.

A shot at the record

At first, Feenstra's sole goal was beating his buddy. But by midyear, the friend had moved to Arizona and abandoned the challenge, and Feenstra was beginning to realize he might have a shot at something more: a Big Year.

The idea of a Big Year in birding is simple. A birder, usually a very serious and knowledgeable one, sets out to break the record for the most birds seen in a given geographic area in a single year. The area can be as small as a city or as large as the world.

The best-known kind of Big Year is one in which a birder attempts to break the record for the most birds seen during a calendar year in the American Birding Assn.'s listing area: Canada and the United States, except for Hawaii.

In Los Angeles County, the record Feenstra faced was 344 species, set by a South Bay birder named Kevin Larson in 1993. That's a daunting number.

The county has fewer than 300 native species, so to break the record Feenstra would have to see nearly all of them and pick up dozens of casual vagrants that had gotten off course during migration and ended up outside their usual ranges.

Feenstra quickly devised a strategy. The Los Angeles Basin is well-covered by devoted birders. Whenever they spot something out of the ordinary, they're quick to let others know by leaving a message on a phone service called "the bird box," by posting on the Internet or both.