A Birder's Big Year

When she began her yearlong bird-spotting adventure, Tiffany Kersten was lost and lonely. After crisscrossing the country, she wound up in a whole new emotional state.

- By Will McCarthy

Tiffany Kersten drove east through Kansas at a perilous speed, nervously tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. Over the past two days of driving, starting in Colorado, she'd watched the Rocky Mountains recede in her rearview mirror; now she passed through a sea of sere plains. She'd made it all the way to the outskirts of Wichita-and slowed down considerably-when she noticed a county sheriff's patrol car tailing her.

Kersten slowed her rental SUV, hoping the officer would speed past. For a moment, it seemed he would. But he flicked on his lights. Kersten's stomach rolled.

Pulling over to the shoulder, she took a deep breath. She couldn't afford to get a ticket. What worried her more was that only a few hours of daylight remained. If she were going to see this thing through, she had to go now. The police officer approached her window.

"Are you looking for the flycatcher?" he asked.

In fact, she was. After flying from her home in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to Denver, Kersten had driven 250 miles to Kansas in search of a rare species called the fork-tailed flycatcher. She hoped to check it off her Big Year list a bird-watching term for the effort to spot as many species as possible in a calendar year. Kersten was chasing a sighting that someone had posted earlier that day on eBird, an online database, indicating that a flycatcher might still be hanging out along this stretch of highway. To her surprise and relief, the officer explained that he too was a birder. He'd even been the one to post the sighting. Instead of writing her a ticket, he gave her detailed instructions to the exact location where he'd seen the flycatcher and wished her luck.