A RARE BIRD
Baltimore birder finds a record 10,000 species around the world
The bird man had a plan. Peter Kaestner, a 70-year-old birder and Cockeysville resident, was on the cusp of doing something no one had ever done before: observing 10,000 different bird species in the wild in his lifetime.
He’d decided which bird ought to be at the finish line, and he knew where to find it. It was the only bird in the lower 48 United States that Kaestner had never laid eyes on, but it wasn’t really elusive.
Called the “tufted puffin,” it’s a North Pacific seabird that spends the spring and summer months along the California and Oregon shorelines.
Finding his 10,000th bird in the U.S. would be perfect, Kaestner figured. Maybe friends and family could join him for the occasion at the Oregon tourist destination Haystack
Rock, where there was a breeding colony.
But it was not to be. In its final months Kaestner’s lifelong quest to traverse the globe and reach a singular achievement in birding suddenly became a dramatic footrace. And naming a victor proved controversial in the birdwatching world, where species listing is self-reported and there is no true referee.
As a result, when Kaestner, a retired U.S. diplomat who grew up in the Baltimore area, found his 10,000th bird species earlier this month, he was nearly 9,000 miles from home on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.
Called the “orangetufted spiderhunter,” it’s a small bird with a thin, curving beak that feeds on nectar from flowers. While
“Once I had seen it, I was desperate to get a photograph of it, since it was such a momentous bird. We played a tape recording of its call, and it popped right out into the sun and gave us a nice view.” — Peter Kaestner, a 70-year-old birder and Cockeysville resident, said of spotting the spiderhunter
looking on the island, Kaestner cast his eyes to a clump of heliconia flowers, and out popped a spiderhunter, he said.
“Once I had seen it, I was desperate to get a photograph of it, since it was such a momentous bird,” Kaestner said. “We played a tape recording of its call, and it popped right out into the sun and gave us a nice view.”
Kaestner and his local guides purchased ice cream bars after the feat — his traditional celebration after finding a unique bird or reaching a milestone. But he wasn’t feeling particularly celebratory. At the time he believed that he was the second to reach 10,000.
At the beginning of the year Kaestner sat alone atop the bird-listing rankings. But the tide changed in January, when another global birder named Jason Mann updated his online bird list, showing he was about 50 birds away from 10,000 — and therefore hot on Kaestner’s tail. It was a massive jump from Mann’s previous posting in October, which placed him around 9,600, Kaestner said.
For Kaestner — and some others in the tight-knit community of competitive birding — it was a startling revelation. Compared with Kaestner — who had been vocal for years about his desire to reach 10,000 and who wrote magazine articles, led birding tours, spoke at events and shared his exploits on social media — Mann wasn’t as well-known.
In the birding community it amounted to high drama. Locating rare birds has become easier with the advent of the internet, but it was surprising to see someone amass their list so quickly and so under the radar, said Frank Izaguirre, an editor at the American Birding Association’s Birding magazine, who followed the saga closely.
“It’s very hard to imagine someone getting that high on the global listing scale and not being a known presence within the global birding community,” Izaguirre said.
As skepticism abounded, Kaestner jumped into action. He quickly planned a trip to Taiwan, where he could knock more species off his list. With those under his belt, he figured he could hit 10,000 on an alreadyplanned trip in March to the Philippines.
But as Kaestner completed his trip in Taiwan in early February, he learned Mann was in Colombia, where he could conceivably rack up enough birds to hit 10,000 first. As soon as Kaestner returned home, he discussed Mann’s progress with his family.
“[They] said: ‘You’ve got to go immediately and catch this guy. You can’t let him beat you after working so hard for so many years. You can’t let somebody just come out of the woodwork and find 10,000 birds,’ ” Kaestner said. “So I took their advice.”
Within 36 hours Kaestner boarded a plane to the Philippines.
But by the time Kaestner took to his Facebook page to post a photo of himself with the spiderhunter in his camera viewfinder, word had hit the internet that Jason Mann had found his 10,000th bird in Colombia. A nature tour company posted the news on its website, touting Mann’s discovery of a dusky starfrontlet in the Western Andes Mountains.
Would-be sleuths, skeptical about the eleventh-hour appearance of Mann’s lengthy list, started poring over the records.
“I pulled it up and started looking through it, and I just started circling inconsistencies,” said Ross Gallardy, a 35-year-old birder living in Pennsylvania whose list includes about 8,000 bird species, and who knows Kaestner.
For one thing, Mann had listed several birds that hadn’t been sighted in decades. His list seemed impossible, Gallardy said.
On birding forums and social media sites, a furor ensued.
In the end, amid the backlash, the Colombian nature tour company took down its post about Mann, and replaced it with a new post, saying that Mann had ceded the “First to 10,000 Birds” achievement to Kaestner.
In an online forum post, a commenter who called himself Jason Mann said he’d mistakenly entered some of the species while manually inputting his list online. He maintained that
he was close to 10,000 — or possibly beyond it — but said Kaestner should have the victory.
“I also hope that this major milestone inspires others to get outside to enjoy and protect the land, birds, and other natural treasures for generations to come,” Mann told The Baltimore Sun in an email, acknowledging Kaestner’s historic first.
At a young age Kaestner was inspired to start birding by his older brother.
“My brother started birdwatching when he was 10, and he’s 8 years older than me, so I was 2, and obviously I was not aware enough of the world around me to count,” he said. “But as I became sentient — as I became conscious — I immediately was counting.”
After graduating from the Friends School of Baltimore, Kaestner attended Cornell University. He originally imagined becoming an ornithologist. But his competitive spirit, and a dream of global birdwatching, pushed him toward a career in international relations.
As a diplomat, Kaestner lived in a dozen countries, including India, Malaysia and Brazil. And in his free time he birded.
Along the way, he earned international acclaim. In 1986 Kaestner appeared in the Guinness Book of Records as the first person known to have spotted a representative of each bird family (then 159 different categories). In 1989, while stationed in Colombia, Kaestner spotted a new bird species, which was later named in his honor: the grallaria kaestneri.
In early childhood Kaestner’s list began as a handwritten inventory in the back of a birding field guide. In 1993 Kaestner bought his first laptop, and the list found its first digital home.
Now the list appears in different forms on several bird-counting websites. On eBird, which is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Kaestner’s list is actually just below 10,000. That’s because Cornell uses a different species list. Kaestner’s list is above 10,000 on the International Ornithological Committee’s World Bird List, which allocates bird species differently.
For about 50 of the 10,000 species, Kaestner said he only was able to hear the bird’s call. But the remainder he saw and very often photographed.
There’s a process underway to harmonize the two species lists, Kaestner said. He believes the process could reduce his total below 10,000 again. So he’s still saving the tufted puffin, he said.
In the meantime, Kaestner surely isn’t birding at the same frenetic pace as his final sprint, but his efforts continue.
“I never tire of seeing even common birds. It doesn’t matter,” Kaestner said. “I am enthralled by birds, by their beauty, by the wonder of their flight and migration, some of the wild behaviors and things that they do.”
“For me, birding is a 24/7 thing,” he said.