BIRDS ON THE BRAIN
An Ontario man criss-crosses the province to count 346 birds in 365 days, including rare and endangered species.
Jeremy Bensette was about to break a record.
He parked his car and sprinted into Hamilton’s Confederation Park, where his friend had a telescope set up to look at a northern gannet. The ocean bird is renowned for dive-bombing into water for prey, at speeds of up to 120 km/h.
A sighting would bring Bensette’s bird count for the year to 344, beating the previous provincial high by one.
Bensette, then 27, had already chased the species unsuccessfully before, in Ottawa with his friend Tim Arthur. The two were in Kingston when they got the latest tip and raced to the park, more than a three-hour drive away.
Bensette looked in the telescope and saw the gannet, in the water 1,500 metres off the beach.
His friend Josh Vandermeulen, until then the record holder, was already in the park looking for the gannet, and walked over to join him. Bensette looked around and saw another friend, Sarah Lamond, approach from the parking lot.
“I thought, this is the best moment of my life,” says Bensette, a Leamington native, of that day in November when he broke the record, surrounded by friends. “It was the number one moment of the whole year, when it all came together,” he says. “I wasn’t aiming to break it but it ended up being a massive milestone.”
That pinnacle came near the end of Bensette’s “Big Year,” a term given to birders who devote12 months to seeing as many species as possible in one geographic area. The term gained currency after the release of a book and then the movie The Big Year, a 2011 comedy, which portrays the true story of a sometimes ruthless competition among three birders.
Bensette’s experience was intense, but sporting. By year end, he had logged more than 100,000 kilometres in his Ford Escape, taking off — usually with Arthur — whenever a rarity was sighted. He would follow email alerts like bird calls and drive down highways at rates he jokes were just “under felony speed.”
Arthur, a wildlife and portrait photogra- pher in London, Ont., says it was “a crazy year,” and that he’s lost track of how many all-night drives they did and how many times they slept in cars.
“It was amazing to explore so many beautiful areas of the province that I never would have seen without doing something like this,” he says.
Bensette only turned to birding eight years ago, one of the many attracted to a sport that has become more popular, drawing one in five Canadians during 2011, according to a Canadian Nature Survey released the following year.
Before then, he’d never even picked up a pair of binoculars, despite living around the corner from Point Pelee National Park, where hundreds of migratory species stop in the spring and fall.
Now, he’s done a couple of “Big Days” in the park — a similar premise to a “Big Year” — where he’s gone without food or sleep to spot as many as 160 species in 24 hours.
(Given that, he says of his final total of 346 species, it just “shows just how much
“I spent dozens of nights just driving through the night and not sleeping, through every and any weather condition, any terrain.” JEREMY BENSETTE
work the other 200 or so must have been.”)
Bensette was 20, and bored with video gaming, when he and a friend bought digital cameras and started taking nature photos. Soon, they were identifying the birds they’d captured with their lenses.
That led to contract work for the charity Bird Studies Canada, surveying wetlands to estimate the number of breeding birds and frogs. Bensette also does photography for Vortex Canada, a company in Guelph that makes binoculars and scopes, and which sponsored him during his Big Year. He lived on that money as well as savings from his job, and estimates he spent about $15,000.
In his fieldwork, Bensette learned to identify all the forest birds by sound, without having to look at a single one.
Birding has become instinctive. He says it’s now more natural to notice movement out his car window than to sit down and read a book. On a two-hour drive to London, say, he might mentally catalogue the different markings of the 25 redtailed hawks he saw on the way and then discuss them later with another birder.
Soon after Bensette, who has a degree in psychology, took up the hobby, he realized he wanted to do this for the rest of his life.
Inspiration came from close friends such as Vandermeulen, who he met in 2012 when Vandermeulen was doing his Big Year, and the late Alan Wormington, one of Ontario’s top birders. Wormington saw the most species in the province dur- ing his lifetime, 447 out of a possible 495.
“They were hands down the best mentors I could have asked for,” says Bensette.
Wormington, 61, died of cancer in September 2016.
The two had driven in a 6,400-kilometre circle around Texas in 2016 so that Wormington could nail down three or four species that he’d never seen before. They spent two and a half days scanning a flock of 15,000 sandhill cranes in a giant field to find one common crane after reports that the bird, typically found in Eurasia, had gone off-course and was over-wintering with its cousins.
“We’d been talking for more than a year that I would be doing the Big Year,” says Bensette. “As difficult as it was, (Wormington’s death) ignited a fire in me.”
Part of the planning included ranking all of the province’s bird species and prioritizing the uncommon ones. “The rarer the sighting, the more likely the bird isn’t supposed to be there,” he says.
Bensette started his quest on Jan.1, 2017, before sunrise, driving toward Long Point Provincial Park near Port Rowan, on Lake Erie’s northern shore. He hoped to get a glimpse of a Smith’s longspur, a songbird typically seen along Hudson’s Bay. The bird had been spotted by locals near the park but it usually spends winters in the central United States.
As he drove, he identified more than a dozen birds as the sun came up, including a house sparrow — a bird so common most of us probably see one daily — crossing the road. Although it’s not necessary to take photos of every bird he listed, he has evidence of about 320 species by photo or audio recording.
He used his mother’s house in Leamington as his base, and his car was always packed and ready to go.
“Birds having wings, if you want to confirm you see something rare, you don’t think twice, you just go,” says Bensette.
Although most birders are the semiretired or retired type, the physical demands of competitive birding make it more likely that they are a bit younger than that.
Some of his trips were unsuccessful, such as a late April drive to Thunder Bay through an ice storm to see a tricolored heron, typically seen on the Gulf Coast.
But he was also lucky. He’d be on his way to Ottawa, and almost there, when he’d get a call from a friend that a grey partridge or a boreal owl had been spotted in the area.
He was taking a break for a couple of nights camping on the east side of Algonquin Park when he got news of the first wood stork spotted in Ontario since 1991. The wood stork, a wading bird from the southeastern U.S., had been upgraded from endangered to threatened in 2017.
The species was at the top of Bensette’s list and often, after a day of birding with friends at Point Pelee, he’d tell them halfsarcastically, “If you find a wood stork, make sure you call me first.” When they did, he drove home at “undisclosable speeds.”
He was four kilometres away when a friend called and told him the bird was gone. Bensette was out searching the next day in the park before the sun was up, but by 10 a.m. he hadn’t spotted it and was ready to give up. He decided to have one more look around, at the urging of a friend, when he met two women out for a walk along the path who told him there was a “pretty bird” up ahead.
He turned and saw the wood stork right beside the path.
“My email to Ontario’s bird alert” — says Bensette — “may have been the first time that a certain swear word had ever been used on that email service.” It was also the first time the species had been spotted at Point Pelee, which Bensette considers his home park.
On another trip, he and Tim Arthur drove 26 hours to Rainy River, near the Manitoba border, and spent three nights identifying nocturnal species when a tip came in about another tricolored heron, this time in Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto.
He and Arthur drove overnight to the Leslie St. spit and walked four and a half kilometres to see the bird.
“I spent dozens of nights just driving through the night and not sleeping, through every and any weather condition, any terrain,” says Bensette of the year. “I was pretty amazed with what I was capable of.”
Arthur says the whole birding community seemed to follow Bensette’s progress and support him. “Everywhere we went in the province people who we had never met came up and asked about his Big Year.
“He’s very focused and determined, and really does care about conservation,” says
Arthur. “He makes a special effort to help and encourage young birders.”
In September, the two were at the spit again, this time in a crowd of 100 or so people who wanted to see a fork-tailed flycatcher, about the 10th recorded sighting in the province of the species, which is from the southern part of South America.
On one occasion, Bensette himself took to the air. Vandermeulen used his Aeroplan points to get them both to Thunder Bay and back on the same day. It was to see a female violet-green swallow, which had moved into a tree swallow’s nesting box in the middle of town. What it was doing so far from its normal migration routes through the western U.S., and where it went afterwards, is anyone’s guess.
“That’s kind of a big part of it, too — the wonder,” says Bensette. “We don’t know when they leave or where they go.”
When Bensette broke the record on Nov. 20, he and Arthur made it to Confederation Park just before sunset.
“It was absolutely fitting that Jeremy’s closest friends just happened to be there to share the moment,” says Arthur.
Bensette took a break to do interviews but he was back at it soon after. Number 345: barn owl. Number 346: tufted duck. Big Year records and life lists are kept by members of the birding community.
On the last day of the year, he and Arthur skied the length of Tommy Thompson Park in pursuit of a gyrfalcon, the largest of the falcon species, but didn’t catch sight of it. Later, they went back to Colo- nel Sam Smith Park at the bottom of Kipling Ave. in Etobicoke, to search for a purple sandpiper that they’d chased a couple days before. They finally quit at sunset.
“It was a really nostalgic thing to finish the last day pushing it right to the very end,” says Bensette.
Bensette, now 28, wants to continue doing fieldwork, and leading birding tours. He’ll likely find a receptive audience.
Although the year was all about birds, what he learned most involved another species.
“The biggest thing that I gained is so little to do with birds and so much to do with life in general — the unconditional outpouring of support from community and friends and family members,” says Bensette.
“It confirmed my belief that we live in an awesome world really full of awesome people. And I proved to myself that I am mentally and physically capable of anything I want to do.”
“It was a really nostalgic thing to finish the last day pushing it right to the very end.” JEREMY BENSETTE ON ENDING HIS QUEST AT SUNSET DEC. 31