• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

ABA Big Year 2017 (1 Viewer)

Sounds odd . . . so as of next year, they'll have Thayer's on their 2017 yearlist but not on their life list. That just doesn't make sense!

Actually Thayer's won't be on the 2017 list either. As I stated, the annual checklist update goes into effect with the November publication.

Traditionally the big year in North America is treated as a snap shot of the current state of bird knowledge. You can only count what is still on the list by the close of the year, and can't keep in reserve future splits/introductions, nor is it influenced by future lumps and extirpations. The only exception being ABA first records which may not get voted on until after the year comes to a close.

Why this exists is because:

Tradition: strict rules for ABA big years were never laid down in an organized manner, rather early participants (Sandy Komito and others) created the rule.

Archival: I would imagine many big year participants with significant years have already passed away or our otherwise out of birding. There is no official "record keeper" for these past attempts who can continually update those lists. It's also likely that even if there was, I am skeptical that notes and journals may always be sufficient to correctly identify split taxa. Thus, by allowing them to be snapshots in time, there are stable numbers that can be compared over the years. It would be a huge pain in the butt if ABA had to go and update each list every year, especially since people doing big years only have to provide a number, not a list of taxa and dates/locations.

Knowledge: Finally, I suspect the actual ease in identifying different forms to be split is something that has grown incredibly easy with the aid of the internet. I am not sure how readily available that data was, or even if it really existed. We know way way way more about bird identification and phylogeography nowadays than we did then. Birders might have never recorded sufficient knowledge or gone after an easier to ID population because they didn't realize they had to.
 
Very interesting post Mysticete. Thinking about it, would a better way of comparing the exploits of past 'Big Years'
to the present be a % of total recorded species for that year? For example, John Weigel recorded 780 species, or 95% (??) of the total number of species in 2016.

How would this compare to Sandy Komito's or Neil Hayward's efforts? While it may be complicated for some older records, at least this has the benefit of only needing to be calculated once.
 
Very interesting post Mysticete. Thinking about it, would a better way of comparing the exploits of past 'Big Years'
to the present be a % of total recorded species for that year? For example, John Weigel recorded 780 species, or 95% (??) of the total number of species in 2016.

How would this compare to Sandy Komito's or Neil Hayward's efforts? While it may be complicated for some older records, at least this has the benefit of only needing to be calculated once.

Probably a better measure. Hopefully some of the data crunchers can provide that.

although even then I think the idea of comparability across years is perhaps an unobtainable goal.
 
Jeff Thomas, an occasional contributor to the 2016 thread, came up with a system for comparing Big Years. It isn't a percentage of possible species (which I'm sure Jeff could easily do, as he's kept track of all the ABA changes), but a formula for comparing birding years. Jeff calls it the X-factor. He gets full credit for this: X = C - M
C is the number of Coded Birds (Codes 3, 4, 5 & 6).
M is the number of missed Code 1 and Code 2 (regular) species.
Jeff's sheets, even more comprehensive than mine, also keep track of X. I don't think he's up to speed yet this year, but he'll get there.

If you look at my sheets you'll see some numbers in bold at the very bottom. That indicates that a birder "closed out" either the Code 1 and/or Code 2 species for the year. As we all know, Olaf and John had unprecedented success last year; they are also the only two birders to get all the Codes 1 & 2 in a single year.
Their X-factor is easy to calculate: John is at 112 (109+3) and Olaf at 107 (105+2). The previous record was Sandy Komito in 1998, who had a 91. He had 96 coded birds and missed five regular birds. Laura Keene had a C of 92 (89+3) and missed two regular birds, for an X-factor of 90. As many of us have discussed, Laura's year was incredible from an historical standpoint. And Sandy's two years rank as #3 all-time (91 in 1998) and #5 all-time (82 in 1987). Christian nailed all but one regular bird, so his X-factor is 81 (C=82 - M=1).
For the moment, I'm still counting the Condor as a 6; Jeff counts it as a 2, which is what the code was back in the day.
Anyone can figure out the rest from my "By Code" sheet, but Neil Hayward had an 80 and John Vanderpoel a 79; there's a drop-off after that.
Again, all credit goes to Jeff! (well, and the Big Year birders)
Joe
 
Last edited:
I wonder if the best measure might simply be to determine the percentage of birds seen during the big year as a ratio of what was reported. That data would probably be harder to generate, but should factor out taxonomic changes and countability changes, while also providing a correction factor for year to year differences in number of vagrants reported. Some years are just plain better and have larger number of vagrants show up, and presumably there is also an observer bias, with vagrants probably getting reported and identified at higher rates than they would have decades ago.

Still won't completely even things out, but I suspect it might work better than a pure percentage of the list or the "x-factor"
 
That would seem tricky to pull off. I don't trust eBird to be complete, especially if you go back a few years. How would you suggest finding the list of yearly birds? However, I completely agree that the percentage of identified species (as eBird does now) would be an interesting way to compare Big Years. I'm just not sure how you do it. For example, in Illinois, eBird counts European Goldfinch as a species, but it's not on the state list.

Joe
 
Ebird coverage is PROBABLY complete enough that you could probably get good numbers extending far back as maybe John Vanderpoel's attempt? Ideally you would need to output the data as a list of species, remove taxa that are not on the list, and use that.

Older than that, you could probably go through back issues of North American Birds and go through the quarterly reports for rarities. It would be very laborious, and not something I for one would be eager to do. :)
 
For the ABA area, a big year now seems less rewarding, given the ability to leverage millions of birder reports.
An African or Asian big year would be more of a pioneering effort and might help improve awareness of the biological riches that are currently being wasted.
 
Two new members of the 700 Club!
Atlantic Puffin was #700 for Ruben Stoll and Red-billed Tropicbird was the magic species for Victor Stoll.
As of now it's:
Ruben 701
Victor 700
Yve 678
We know from Facebook that she's higher than that, and Nome is the next stop, so this puppy could tighten right up!
Joe
 
How would you suggest finding the list of yearly birds?

One can use annual reports of accepted rarities going back for decades. That should be doable, and a number of species observed in the ABA area year after year might be interesting itself.

I agree, a percentage of the list of birds observed that year would be most fair comparison of birders skills. It would also eliminate all the confounding effect of splits/lumps, exotics admitted/not admitted, shifting borders and suchlike.

For the ABA area, a big year now seems less rewarding, given the ability to leverage millions of birder reports.
An African or Asian big year would be more of a pioneering effort and might help improve awareness of the biological riches that are currently being wasted.

I will echo my idea of making All Americas Bird Year. Latin America has lots of beautiful endemics, services tuned to ecotourism and is already reasonably visited by the U.S. birders.
 
Last edited:
I heartily encourage anyone who wants to take on the task of figuring out which species were seen in the ABA for all the years! I'm still plugging in all the 700+ Big Years, starting with my basic sheet then transferring the data to the By Codes sheet. I'm currently plugging in Bob Ake's 2010 Big Year and I have a number of Big Years to do after that. My goal is to have all the 700+ Big Years entered (plus Vardeman's already-entered 699, which I consider the first modern Big Year). Some are easy to plug in, as I have the lists, but some have required entering the species from the text of their books. Not difficult, but time-consuming.

Joe
 
Should be noted that the Tropical Mockingbird is not currently on the ABA checklist; The last record was from Texas and was ultimately rejected based on uncertain providence. I suspect the same thing will happen to this bird (Although I would have still gone an seen it!)
 
You're right, I should list it this way, as all three have the Black-backed Oriole and the Tropical Mockingbird:

RS-701+2
VS-700+2
YM-677+2
 
See post #9

;)

Thanks! Missed that somehow, even on 2nd reading, had to look 3 times!

He'll have to hurry if he's to get Golden-winged back - and I don't suppose he'll dare leave his brother (?) to do a dedicated trip in case Ruben gets something else new . . .
 
They haven't yet done the Kirtland's trip; Yve got her Golden-winged up there.

Also, I've finished adding Bob Ake's 2010 Big Year to the sheets. I've gotten a good start on another end of the project, too: "graying-out" the boxes for species that weren't possible for the given birder that year because the bird wasn't yet on the ABA list. I haven't done it for all the Codes 4 & 5 species, but I considered it more pertinent for the Code 1, 2 & 3 birds. Let me know if I missed something along those lines.
Lynn Barber's Big Year is next!

Joe
 

Attachments

  • BigYears2017.xlsx
    84.6 KB · Views: 73
  • BigYears2017ByCode.xlsx
    571.4 KB · Views: 88
Last edited:
In honor of the convergence of Yve Morrell and Lynn Barber I've added in Lynn's 2008 Big Year. It gets slower after this as I need to pull species from books at this point...

Joe
 

Attachments

  • BigYears2017.xlsx
    88.1 KB · Views: 83
  • BigYears2017ByCode.xlsx
    576.8 KB · Views: 83
Last edited:
Warning! This thread is more than 6 years ago old.
It's likely that no further discussion is required, in which case we recommend starting a new thread. If however you feel your response is required you can still do so.

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top