Noah Keefer Strycker is an American birdwatcher. In 2015, he set a record for a worldwide Big year of birding, seeing 6,042 of the world's estimated 10,400 bird species in a continuous journey spanning all seven continents from January 1 to December 31, 2015.
Background
Born in Eugene, Oregon, he grew up on rural property in the forest outside the small town of Creswell, Oregon. There he watched and photographed birds, learned their habits and calls, and taught himself to find their nests. He is the son of Bob Keefer, an arts writer and photographer, and Lisa Strycker, a data analyst and former journalist. From 2005 to 2010, he wrote a column titled "Birdboy" for WildBird magazine. He has been Associate Editor of Birding magazine, the flagship publication of the American Birding Association, since 2006. He graduated magna cum laude in 2008 from Oregon State University with a degree in fisheries and wildlife and a minor in art. Since then, he has studied and observed birds around the world. In 2011, he solo hiked the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada.
Research
In 2019, Strycker joined the Lynch Lab for Quantitative Ecology at Stony Brook University in New York. His master's research focuses on population abundance and distribution of Adélie, Gentoo, and Chinstrap Penguins, to better understand the dynamics of ecological change on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Lynch Lab is leading the analysis of data coming from the long-term Antarctic Site Inventory biological monitoring program—the only research program doing regular vessel-based biological census work on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Books
In 2011, Strycker's first book, "Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica," was published by Oregon State University Press. It is a first-person account of a 10-week field job he worked in a remote field camp at Cape Crozier in Antarctica. His second book, "The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What they Reveal about Being Human," was published in 2014 by Riverhead Books. It explores the behaviors of different bird species, with connections to human behavior. Strycker's third book, "Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest and the Biggest Year in the World" is about his Big Year journey in 2015. It came out in October 2017 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "Birds of the Photo Ark," a collaboration with photographer Joel Sartore, came out in March 2018 from National Geographic. It features essays by Strycker about birds photographed in captivity by Sartore as part of his Photo Ark project. In 2019 the "Backyard Guide to the Birds of North America" came out from National Geographic. Co-authored by Strycker and by Jonathan Alderfer, it's a completely revised second edition of a field guide to 150 of the most common and interesting birds in North America.
The Big Year
Strycker began his worldwide Big Year on January 1, 2015, in Antarctica, aboard the Akademik Ioffe, a former Soviet research vessel then leased by One Ocean Expeditions for adventure tourism. The first bird he saw of the year was a Cape petrel, near Spert Island. From there he traveled up the South and North American continents, across to Europe, throughout Africa, and into Asia and Australia. The trip took him to 42 countries and all seven continents, and was done entirely with a backpack. On September 16, 2015, near Thattekad, India, he saw a pair of Sri Lanka frogmouths, his 4,342nd bird species of the year, which topped the previous world Big Year record set in 2008 by British birders Alan Davies and Ruth Miller. His final species of the year was a group of Silver-breasted broadbills seen on a return to India, in Assam, putting him at the record breaking total of 6,042 species. This record was later broken in 2016 by Arjan Dwarshuis. Strycker wrote a book about the adventure for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
