 | ||
Born February 9, 1986 (age 31) ( 1986-02-09 ) Eugene, Oregon, U.S. | ||
Noah Keefer Strycker (b. Feb. 9, 1986) is an American birder and writer. In 2015, he set a record for a worldwide Big Year of birding, seeing 6,042 of the world's estimated 10,400 bird species in a continuous journey spanning all seven continents from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31.
Contents
Background
Born in Eugene, Oregon, he grew up on rural property in the forest outside the small town of Creswell, Oregon. There he watched and photographed birds, learned their habits and calls, and taught himself to find their nests. He is the son of Bob Keefer, an arts writer and photographer, and Lisa Strycker, a data analyst and former journalist.
From 2005 to 2010, he wrote a column titled “Birdboy” for WildBird magazine. He has been Associate Editor of Birding magazine, the flagship publication of the American Birding Association, since 2006.
He graduated magna cum laude in 2008 from Oregon State University with a degree in fisheries and wildlife and a minor in art. Since then, he has studied and observed birds around the world.
In 2011, he solo hiked the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada.
Books
In 2011, Strycker’s first book, “Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica,” was published by Oregon State University Press. It is a first-person account of a 10-week field job he worked in a remote field camp at Cape Crozier in Antarctica.
His second book, “The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What they Reveal about Being Human,” was published in 2014 by Riverhead Books. It explores the behaviors of different bird species, with connections to human behavior.
The Big Year
Strycker began his worldwide Big year on Jan. 1, 2015, in Antarctica, aboard the Akademik Ioffe, a former Soviet research vessel now leased by One Ocean Expeditions for adventure tourism. The first bird he saw of the year was a Cape Petrel, near Spert Island. From there he traveled up the South and North American continents, across to Europe, throughout Africa, and into Asia and Australia. The trip took him to 42 countries and all seven continents, and was done entirely with a backpack.
On Sept. 16, near Thattekad, India, he saw a pair of Sri Lanka Frogmouths, his 4,342nd bird species of the year, which topped the previous world Big Year record set in 2008 by British birders Alan Davies and Ruth Miller. His final species of the year was a group of Silver-breasted Broadbills seen on a return to India, in Assam.
He is under contract to write a book about the adventure for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.