Avid bird-watcher Noah Strycker of Eugene records seeing 5,000th bird species this year

 By The Register-Guard

OCT. 27, 2015

Eugene native and avid bird-watcher Noah Stryker, profiled in an Aug. 22 Register-Guard article about his quest to set a world record by recording having seen 5,000 bird species in a calendar year, reached that milestone on Monday in the Phillipines, according to a social media post.

The 5,000th species? A flame-crowned flowerpecker.

Strycker’s father, retired Register-Guard arts reporter Bob Keefer, provided the news via Facebook.

There are an estimated 10,000 bird species worldwide — so Strycker has seen roughly half of them in fewer than 10 months.

The idea for a global bird-watching trip came into focus as Strycker hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in 2011, during which he learned how to pull off an elaborate travel project, Strycker wrote from Tanzania in an email interview with The Register-Guard in August.

Strycker has been bird watching on every continent. He began his expedition on Jan. 1 in the Antarctic.

After visiting South America, Mexico, the United States — including Oregon — and Europe, Strycker made plans to visit Africa, India, Asia and Australia before returning home next year. To track his sightings, Strycker uses a free Web-based program called eBird, operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which runs as an app on his iPhone and updates to Cornell’s database of bird populations.

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