It’s 11PM on Saturday, April 24th. The rain that had been falling most of the day has blown through, and that’s good news.
After hours of planning, mapping, and scheduling, April 25th is almost here: the day that the nearly twenty-year-old Georgia record for a birding Big Day would be broken.
“I was too excited to actually fall asleep, but I tried to try to lay down and at least rest before it started,” said Josiah Lavender, a rising junior at the University of Georgia.
Lavender and three other young birders, Mac McCall, Patrick Maurice, and John Mark Simmons, set out to identify as many birds as possible in Georgia during a 24-hour window, hoping to break the previous record of 193 species.For a species to count, all four team members must either hear or see the bird in question.
When midnight hit on the 25th, their journey began.
“The best teams are able to utilize those hours at night in really creative and productive ways,” said Mac McCall, Lavender’s team member.
He said the early hours of the morning were spent looking for Barn Owls in Comer, and Horned Larks in Bostwick.
At 6am, just before dawn, the team drove to the State Botanical Garden of Georgia to take full advantage of songbird activity.
“I think there were a total of 70 or 75 species at the botanical gardens in that period, so we were off to a good start there,” said Lavender.
After two hours at the garden, Lavender said the group went to Fort Stewart, near Savannah, to find some unusual species like Red-cockaded Woodpeckers.
“We had those and we had Bachman’s Sparrow which is another unusual bird that pretty much only nests in longleaf pine forests," said Lavender.
The sun is setting and the team made it to St. Andrews Island. At this point, they’ve matched the record and were waiting to break it.
“We heard these faint, the best we describe it, it sounds like a small mechanical soundscape,” said McCall. “They were Common Nighthawks, flying across the marshes into Andrews Island at night. That was actually the bird that broke the record for us.”
They ended the day with 196 species, three more than the previous record.
