1000 birds to see before you die

Liliac-breasted Roller. Photo: David Salvatori.

by Gunnar on January 5, 2011 · 6 comments

in Birding News

I just initiated a short 6 day holiday with my family in Tarapoto, so this will be a shorter post -and as some of my collegues here on birdingblogs, I have dugg deep in the vault of my own blog.

Let me remind you:

  • Let’s face it, you and I, we are never going to see all the 10000 birds of the world.  Or 9000 or 8000.  I doubt I would even get close to 7000.
  • In the end it becomes a collection of numbers rather than a collection of cool sightings – and with the majority of these sightings so trivial you can’t even remember them.
  • Why should all the birds have the same value? Value 1? You just seen your first Wallece’s Standardwing, a Helmeted Vanga or a Guerney’s Pitta and all you get to do is to add 1. WTF!
  • Life tends to get in the way, there is something called family – and there is something called wife/husband.  It is virtually impossible to combine a normal life with Global twitching. Try to bring your family to a hotspot birding country and you shall be feeling so frustrated knowing all the LBJ:s in the forest you are missing because wifey insists you play with the kids in the pool or building sand castles. For Christs sake. Enjoy your kids while you can.

Here is the remedy: You can still make a family holiday to a great birding holiday if you concentrate on only the key birds you want to see. The coolest birds, the prettiest and most sensational. In fact, it is big chance also wifey and kids would think such birds are cool and they may join you.

But how can I decide which are the coolest birds?

This is where the idea to 1000 birds to see before you die comes in.  I asked in March 2009 for lists of  your 100 best birds worldwide you have seen or you want to see.  By merging the list I shall have a good tool for the 1000 best birds. I had meant to get started writing long ago, but it turns out that life came in the way (again) as my daughter Anahi was born in July 2009. And I still don’t have the minimum 50 lists to make a compilation from.

One of my New Years resolutions was to get started with this project again as soon as possible.   I shall take me 3 years if I do one bird per day. In the end by 2014 the book will list (with photo or drawing) 1000 spectacular birds that are far more fun to search for than your ordinary LBJs (Little Brown Jobs). Best of all, the book will be completely FREE! for download.

Here is all you need to do to participate and make sure that your 100 favorite birds are included in the overall final list.

Top photo Liliac-breasted Roller by David Salvatori by Creative Commons license on Flickr

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Tagged as: 1000 birds; world birding, Birding, Gunnar Engblom

Article by Gunnar Engblom

Gunnar Engblom, who was born in Sweden and lives in Peru, is BirdingBlogs.com's webmaster. He is a birder, runner, post-punkrocker and blogger and he is especially keen on social media for birders - which is how this project started in the first place. Gunnar Engblom organizes birding tours in Peru and the Neotropics with Kolibri Expeditions. Gunnar is passionate about new Peru tours that support community based ecotourism and conservation and has initiated several project this way. Gunnar blogs on his own blog - A birding blog from Peru

Gunnar has written 101 awesome articles for us.

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  • http://alpinebirds.blogspot.com DaleForbes

    Interesting idea.
    The Lilac-breasted Roller was probably the first bird I ever really wanted to see. On my first trip to a big game park (as a 9? year old), we thought we had found one. It looked kinda like the one in our book, but its tail was short and dumpy. And it had no lilac, just plain blue. Beautiful alone, but kinda boring compared to the lbr. And it was not in our “common birds of southern africa” guide book. It took a trip to the local info centre/book shop to look it up – my first European Roller.

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  • Henrik Møller Thomsen

    Funny idea. I´ve just started to put together my own top 100 list beeing angry about the Phillipine Eagle winning the contest, and as soon as I started out, I realised that this is most of all subjective, and at the moment I have about 242 to chose between. Beeing from farmland Denmark I would any day argue that the Skylark should be placed on that list, but it´s probably a very difficult idea to sell to people living outside Europe ;-) And btw. Phillipine eagle is not included on my brutto list.

    • http://www.kolibriexpeditions.com/birdingperu/blog/ Gunnar Engblom

      Yes, it is very subjective indeed. But I think the Skylark certainly would be in my top 1000 as well. It is a Nordic thing! Sned me your list when you are done Henrik.

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