In rare ‘big year,’ teen breaks Chicago-area birding record
For some teens, getting a license means offering rides to friends, taking trips to the mall, freedom. For one Evanston, Illinois senior, it was mostly about the birds.
Isoo O’Brien, 17, recently broke the Cook County record for individual bird species spotted in a year, clocking 282 species by the end of October.
With a little more than a month left before 2021, O’Brien is still working to check off a few final species in the hopes that his record holds for years to come. Topping the record was a big deal for O’Brien, and for other birders, who banded together to offer tips so O’Brien could drive — or sometimes sprint — to a yet unseen bird.
O’Brien initially hoped to hit 270, maybe 275 species this year.
“But in the back of my mind all I really wanted to do was to break the record,” which was 281, he said. “The record was so high that I just was like, I don’t want to set that expectation for myself and be disappointed it doesn’t happen. But it ended up happening.”
O’Brien got into birding through his grandparents. Swapping stories of birds was a way to stay in touch. Then came field guides, databases, apps and a club for fellow fledgling ornithologists.
“This might be kind of shocking,” O’Brien said. “But there are actually enough young birders in Illinois that there’s a club called the Illinois Young Birders.”
In the last year, O’Brien finally had his driver’s license. And he had only one year left before college. So he decided to embark on what is known as a “big year” — a challenge for birders that entails finding as many species as possible in a specific geographic area.
“Let’s say a rare bird shows up,” O’Brien said. “You have to drop everything and get in the car and go get the bird.”
Undertaking a big year requires a serious commitment, said Carl Giometti, a board member of the Chicago Ornithological Society.
“You need the birds to show up,” Giometti said. “And you need to be lucky enough to get there in time. The key is just to always be birding.”
Giometti said one birder’s quest for rare birds can inspire the larger community, and “Isoo covered every corner of Cook County imaginable.”
“Yes, it’s one person’s achievement, but it’s really only achievable — especially in a place like Cook County — if everyone chips in and reports rare birds quickly and gives good locations and helps out,” Giometti said.
When Giometti saw a prairie warbler one day in Grant Park, he was happy to pass along the tip.
“I texted him right away, like, ‘Hey Isoo, we’ve got a prairie warbler right here,’” he said.
Dozens of people from the birding community have helped in some way, O’Brien said.
“And also my family as well,” he said. “They let me take the car a lot and they’ve really understood that this is a passion.”
The key to breaking the record was putting in the work for rare birds, O’Brien said. There’s a limit on the birds likely to fly by, and O’Brien expected to hit the majority of the species he might see in the first half of the year. By the end of May, O’Brien had counted just over 250 species.