In the world of birding, Peter Kaestner stands alone. No one has seen and identified more birds than Mr. Kaestner, a retired U.S. diplomat who aspires to become the first birder to spot 10,000 of the planet’s roughly 11,000 avian species. With 9,697 on his eBird list so far, he is getting close.
Yet for all the birds he has looked for and found, there remain a few that he has looked for and not found. He doesn’t forget them.
There was the Congo peacock — a rare multicolored pheasant of the Central African rainforest — that he missed in 1978, when his traveling party was stymied by a crash on the remote airstrip that they planned to search. There was a black-browed albatross he pursued off the German coast in 2015, some 300 miles and a four-hour ferry ride from Mr. Kaestner’s home in Frankfurt at the time.
“I made four 10-hour trips to twitch it, to no avail,” Mr. Kaester wrote in an email. “Once, I missed it by 20 minutes!”
Through such trials birders develop what they call “nemesis birds,” birderspeak for the species that bedevil them again and again, despite their best efforts. As birding surges in popularity, the hobby’s unique parlance requires explanation. To “twitch” is to drop everything to chase a rare bird found outside its proper range. A “spark bird” is what birders call the bird that piques someone’s interest in birding. A “nemesis bird” keeps you going back and remains tantalizingly out-of-reach.
“It’s a species that eludes you after multiple attempts, especially if the bird was or should have been there,” Mr. Kaestner said. “There is a connotation that something supernatural is getting between you and seeing the bird.”
Peter Kaestner, with a southern yellow-billed hornbill in Namibia.Credit…Peter Kaestner
An article in Audubon in 2017 by Dan Koeppel defined a nemesis bird as “one common enough that a dedicated birder should have spotted it, but that nevertheless remains unseen.” Mr. Koeppel, an author and science writer, has since broadened the definition slightly, noting it can mean different things to birders of different skill and interest levels.
“If it’s a bird that drives you crazy, you can call it a nemesis bird,” Mr. Koeppel said. “It could be a bird your mom has seen, but you haven’t.”
What causes a person to be driven crazy by birds? By now, the positive health benefits of birding are well-documented, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that about 45 million Americans identify as birders. But what causes a person to obsess over one particular bird? That is something altogether specific and personal.
“The concept of nemesis birds is one of the things my nonbirder friends are most confused, then amused, by,” Danielle Khalife, a public health researcher from Brooklyn, said. “Somebody asked if it was birds that you hate. Not exactly.”
Sometimes a bird’s novelty makes it a nemesis. Since getting into birding during the pandemic, Ms. Khalife has…
2023-08-26 08:32:29
Post from www.nytimes.com
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