Big Year 2025
319 species in one year.
A Big Year is a self-imposed challenge: see as many bird species as possible in a defined area in twelve months. Mine was Suffolk County, New York. The previous record was 304 — a number that had stood for seven years.
319
Species in Suffolk County, 2025
304
Previous county record
93%
Self-found, not chased
365
Days in the field
Why dedicate a year to this
A Big Year only really works if you give it the year. I knew going in that this was the trade-off: if I get a job, I can't go looking for vagrants and rarities. So I worked seasonally — a summer as a park ranger at Wildwood — and spent the rest of the calendar year in the field. Pre-dawn at Smith Point. Post-storm at Shinnecock. Whatever the next bird required.
The number that I'm proudest of isn't 319. It's 93 percent — the share of those birds I found on my own, rather than chasing somebody else's eBird alert. Big Years can become a phone game, a race to be second on a stakeout. I wanted to make this one mine.
Birds I'll remember
#316
Barn Owl
Found by crawling deer trails in Montauk after dark. I came home with two tick-borne diseases and one new bird.
#319
Thick-billed Murre
December 31, sunrise at Montauk Point. I made sure I was the easternmost person in Suffolk County for the last sunrise of the year. Shortly after the sun came up, the murre passed by.
Rare
Cassin’s Sparrow · Purple Gallinule · Black-headed Gull
Three vagrants that have no business being on Long Island. Each of them was the kind of bird I’d watched other people chase for years.
Pelagic
Band-rumped Storm-petrel · Leach's Storm-petrel · Sargasso Shearwater
Birds you only see by going far enough offshore. Pelagic trips are weather-dependent and rare on Long Island, which is part of why this record is hard to hold.
Six years earlier
The same bird, when I was 17.
In 2019, Newsday photographer John Paraskevas caught me on Port Jefferson Harbor with a borrowed scope, hooded against the wind, looking for a thick-billed murre. The murre I closed the Big Year with was the same species — six years and one record later.
I think his record will stay for a very long time. 319 is crazy.
Will the record hold?
Honestly — I'm not super confident. A lot of what got me to 319 was pelagic birding, and 2025 had unusually good offshore conditions. Records exist to be broken. If you want to break this one, start now, keep notes, and find your own birds.
Want to hear the long version?
I'm giving the Big Year talk at the Eastern Long Island Audubon Society on May 4 at 7 PM, and at programs across Suffolk County through the spring.
See upcoming programs