A birder’s quest to see 10k species

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Editor’s Note: Since this story ran in print (within the May/June 2023 concern of Outside), Kaestner’s life record has elevated to 9,856 species, as of May 11, 2023. He is now the world document holder.

The dry valleys outdoors Lima, Peru, evoke the sensation of being on one other planet.

Dust as tremendous as talcum powder washes the panorama in desolate browns, and bromeliads cling to the west aspect of rocky slopes, dealing with the course that mist blows in from the ocean. Columnar cacti the scale of phone poles resemble palms outstretched towards the sky—puffy, like surgical gloves full of water.

I used to be sitting within the center seat of a battered van snaking up switchbacks to the summit of Tinajas Valley, tires inches from the sting of steep drop-offs. Next to me was Peter Kaestner, one of many world’s most prolific birders. “I can see why I haven’t seen this bird before,” he mentioned, talking loudly because the van rumbled over grime and rocks. “It’s not the kind of thing you’re gonna bump into.” Kaestner is tall, with pleasant blue eyes, and provides off a sensible approachability. (He jokes that when he was youthful he resembled Robert Redford, however he knew that he’d hit a turning level in his life when folks began evaluating him to former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.)

We had been headed to a ridgetop to search for the elusive white-throated earthcreeper, a colorless brown chook with a curved beak like a T. rex claw. The chook prefers steep-walled desert washes at particular elevations within the central Andes, and can be a “lifer” for Kaestner. Birders name the whole tally of all birds they’ve ever noticed their “life list,” and every new species a lifer. A one that retains monitor of their life record is a “lister,” and somebody obsessive about itemizing on a world scale is a “big lister.”

I’m a lister myself, although I spend extra time researching birds than chasing them. For my PhD on the University of New Mexico, I studied hummingbird migration and speciation within the Andes. These days I work as a postdoc on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which runs eBird, the go-to platform for scientists and hobbyists to document chook observations.

On eBird, Kaestner is ranked primary, and he needs to be the primary individual on the planet to see 10,000 chook species. The 69-year-old’s life record is at present at 9,796. The couple hundred birds he nonetheless wants are among the rarest and most tough on the planet to spot. They’re usually present in locations which are principally inaccessible, off-limits due to political unrest, or threatened by deforestation and local weather change. But Kaestner’s quest to hit 10,000 is his private Dawn Wall, an obsession he’s sustained over many years, and he won’t cease till he reaches his objective—if even then.

He’d come to Peru on this 20-day journey in the summertime of 2021 to see a handful of the nation’s remaining species wanted for his life record, and the journey had began out a bit of tough. During his first night time above 15,000 ft, close to the Bolivian border simply ten days earlier, Kaestner thought he may die of altitude illness. On an in a single day bus to the town of Oxapampa quickly after, the driving force turned off the air-conditioning over a mountain move and the cabin grew to become sizzling and stagnant. COVID threat was excessive, and Kaestner mentioned the bus felt like a human petri dish. His journey wouldn’t get simpler: for certainly one of his prime targets, the Ayacucho antpitta, he wanted permission to navigate via an unstable space ravaged by Shining Path guerrillas. He anticipated the center leg, which I had joined him for, to be comparatively tame. “Boring” was the phrase he used.

As our van slid previous one other large car on the singletrack highway, tires knocking rocks down the cliffside, I held my breath and questioned about his commonplace for boredom. Then, as a truck got here nose-to-nose with our van, the clutch stopped working. We had been on a steep hill.

“There’s too much dust—it must be clogging the transmission,” mentioned Gunnar Engblom, information and proprietor of Kolibri Expeditions, who had organized our journey. A lanky Swedish rocker and marathoner who was 60 on the time, Engblom had come to Peru about 25 years earlier to begin his bird- and photography-tourism enterprise. He switched from English to frantic Spanish, addressing our driver from the passenger seat.

A look of annoyance appeared on Kaestner’s face. We’d departed late from Lima, then battled incessant visitors, and it was unclear whether or not Engblom’s run-down van would even make the summit. At greatest this meant that we’d arrive within the sizzling afternoon, the worst time of day for chook exercise, earlier than driving one other eight hours to our subsequent vacation spot. Engblom’s status as “Captain Chaos” was well-known within the chook world (one consumer described him because the “Crocodile Dundee of South America”) and Kaestner knew what he was moving into. Still, even for Kaestner, a former U.S. diplomat who constructed a profession managing high-stakes logistics, the state of affairs was attempting. After all he’d invested, he didn’t need to miss his goal—or “dip,” as birders say.