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Cundinamarca Antpitta - New species discovered by Peter Kaestner
The dry valleys outside Lima, Peru, evoke the feeling of
being on another planet.
Dust as fine as talcum powder washes the landscape in
desolate browns, and bromeliads cling to the west side of rocky slopes, facing
the direction that mist blows in from the ocean. Columnar cacti the size of
telephone poles resemble hands outstretched toward the sky—puffy, like surgical
gloves filled with water.
I was sitting in the middle seat of a battered van snaking
up switchbacks to the summit of Tinajas Valley, tires inches from the edge of
steep drop-offs. Next to me was Peter Kaestner, one of the world’s most
prolific birders. “I can see why I haven’t seen this bird before,” he said,
speaking loudly as the van rumbled over dirt and rocks. “It’s not the kind of
thing you’re gonna bump into.” Kaestner is tall, with friendly blue eyes, and
gives off a smart approachability. (He jokes that when he was younger he
resembled Robert Redford, but he knew that he’d hit a turning point in his life
when people started comparing him to former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.)
We were headed to a ridgetop to look for the elusive
white-throated earthcreeper, a drab brown bird with a curved beak like a T. rex
claw. The bird prefers steep-walled desert washes at specific elevations in the
central Andes, and would be a “lifer” for Kaestner. Birders call the complete
tally of all birds they’ve ever observed their “life list,” and each new
species a lifer. A person who keeps track of their life list is a “lister,” and
someone obsessed with listing on a global scale is a “big lister.”
I’m a lister myself, though I spend more time researching
birds than chasing them. For my PhD at the University of New Mexico, I studied
hummingbird migration and speciation in the Andes. These days I work as a
postdoc at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which runs eBird, the go-to platform
for scientists and hobbyists to record bird observations.
On eBird, Kaestner is ranked number one, and he wants to be
the first person in the world to see 10,000 bird species. The 69-year-old’s
life list is currently at 9,796. The couple hundred birds he still needs are
some of the rarest and most difficult in the world to spot. They’re often found
in places that are basically inaccessible, off-limits due to political unrest,
or threatened by deforestation and climate change. But Kaestner’s quest to hit
10,000 is his personal Dawn Wall, an obsession he’s sustained over decades, and
he will not stop until he reaches his goal—if even then.
He’d come to Peru on this 20-day trip in the summer of 2021
to see a handful of the country’s remaining species needed for his life list,
and the journey had started out a little rough. During his first night above
15,000 feet, near the Bolivian border just ten days earlier, Kaestner thought
he might die of altitude sickness. On an overnight bus to the city of Oxapampa
soon after, the driver turned off the air-conditioning over a mountain pass and
the cabin became hot and stagnant. COVID risk was high, and Kaestner said the
bus felt like a human petri dish. His trip wouldn’t get easier: for one of his
top targets, the Ayacucho antpitta, he needed permission to navigate through an
unstable area ravaged by Shining Path guerrillas. He expected the middle leg,
which I had joined him for, to be relatively tame. “Boring” was the word he
used.
As our van slid past another huge vehicle on the
single-track road, tires knocking rocks down the cliffside, I held my breath
and wondered about his standard for boredom. Then, as a truck came nose-to-nose
with our van, the clutch stopped working. We were on a steep hill.
“There’s too much dust—it must be clogging the
transmission,” said Gunnar Engblom, guide and owner of Kolibri Expeditions, who
had organized our trip. A lanky Swedish rocker and marathoner who was 60 at the
time, Engblom had come to Peru about 25 years earlier to start his bird- and
photography-tourism business. He switched from English to frantic Spanish,
addressing our driver from the passenger seat.
A look of annoyance appeared on Kaestner’s face. We’d
departed late from Lima, then battled incessant traffic, and it was unclear
whether Engblom’s run-down van would even make the summit. At best this meant
that we would arrive in the hot afternoon, the worst time of day for bird
activity, before driving another eight hours to our next destination. Engblom’s
reputation as “Captain Chaos” was well-known in the bird world (one client
described him as the “Crocodile Dundee of South America”), and Kaestner knew
what he was getting into. Still, even for Kaestner, a former U.S. diplomat who
built a career managing high-stakes logistics, the situation was trying. After
all he’d invested, he didn’t want to miss his target—or “dip,” as birders say.
Kaestner has taken a nontraditional path to reaching 10,000.
The pursuit is often considered a rich person’s pastime, like climbing the
Seven Summits: many obsessive listers and bird chasers take months or years off
work, spend personal fortunes, retire to chase birds full-time, or turn to
vanlife. Kaestner is an exception. He birded his way to about 9,500 while
working for the Foreign Service for 36 years on a modest government salary. He
and his wife, Kimberly, a diplomatic specialist, fought for tandem placements
so they could work together overseas, and he often achieved his birding goals
through creative scheduling. While living in Kuala Lumpur, Kaestner left the
house at 3 A.M. on Saturdays to drive more than two hours each way in search of
the rusty-naped pitta, returning to the Malaysian city by noon to play with his
young daughters. “It took me over two dozen trips to get that bird,” he says.
“But I wanted to be home to spend the afternoon with my family.”
“He does go off on his birding trips where it’s just
birding, but he always makes time for family,” says Kimberly. “He’s always been
good that way.”
Rotating through embassies as a diplomat allowed Kaestner to
get ahead as a big lister. He’s lived all over the world: the U.S., Central and
South America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.
During his career, he’s studied 13 languages. He once spoke six—English,
Portuguese, Spanish, French, Hindi, and German—with professional fluency, plus
a handful of “birding languages,” as he puts it, with proficiency adequate for
getting by on birding trips: Swahili, Bahasa, Arabic, Punjabi, Dari,
neo-Melanesian, and Afrikaans.
Kaestner’s quest to hit 10,000 is his personal Dawn Wall, an
obsession he’s sustained over decades, and he will not stop until he reaches
his goal—if even then.
In 1986, Kaestner became the first person in the world to
see a representative of every bird family in existence, 159 back then. But the
birding event that most changed his life was his 1989 discovery of the
Cundinamarca antpitta, a species new to science. Kaestner had traveled outside
Bogotá, Colombia, for work and was exploring a forested area up a newly
constructed road. Suddenly, he heard a call he didn’t recognize.
He recorded it, then played the call repeatedly to lure the
bird in, waiting for over 45 minutes. At one point, the bird popped up and
called behind him. He crawled through the undergrowth and reached a clearing.
Then Kaestner saw it. It wasn’t a known Colombian bird; he was sure of it. But
back then, the references he needed to verify whether it was a new bird for
Colombia, or a new species entirely, didn’t exist. Upon returning to Bogotá, he
confirmed that it was a species previously unknown to science; it was formally
described by biologists in 1992. His recordings and dictated field observations
are now archived in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library. For
Kaestner, who has always been driven to contribute to the scientific record,
the discovery was monumental. Antpittas remain his favorite birds.
The days of stumbling upon a new species in the forest are
essentially gone; it’s now far more common for scientists to use genetic and
molecular tools to identify species no one previously knew existed or could
confirm. Species identification has become knottier as a result, and
systematists, who study relationships among species, may use DNA evidence to
split known species into multiple ones. In 2020, for example, biologists argued
that the rufous antpitta—a bird that looks like a caramel-colored truffle with
popsicle-stick legs—was not one but sixteen distinct species, though they look
almost indistinguishable. These splits have enormous implications for someone
like Kaestner, who needs every single species he can get to reach 10,000.
Kaestner had seen the rufous antpitta, for example, many times in different
parts of the Andes. Previously, it counted as just one species for his life
list. But with the split distinguishing sixteen separate species, many of
Kaestner’s past sightings—thanks to his careful record-keeping—would bump up
his total. (Platforms like eBird calculate these tallies automatically.) For
Kaestner, these free “armchair ticks” are like a bag of Halloween candy falling
into his lap.
The recognition of new species—sometimes dozens each
year—also raises the question of how many bird species there are in the world.
The number is a subject of heated debate among biologists. There are four
master checklists of the world’s birds, each with its own set of taxonomic
rules. The lists agree on roughly 85 percent of species; the rest are
considered “good” species by some lists but not others. Depending on the list,
the world’s bird species can number between 10,906 and 11,189. Kaestner and many
other competitive listers prefer the International Ornithological Community’s
World Bird List, because it’s more generous than the Clements Checklist used by
eBird.
Some listers try to anticipate species coming down the
pipeline, designing trips to see “bank birds” that they hope will one day be
ruled new species. Kaestner was partly pursuing this strategy in Peru. The
taxonomic splits of the rufous antpitta thrilled him. He had come to chase
these splits and to see five new species before they were recognized by
taxonomic authorities. He’d bagged four so far, including two in one day
(Oxapampa antpitta and Junin antpitta), and would target another after I left.
In the dry Tinajas Valley, the semi inched closer to our
van, pushing us downhill as we struggled with the faulty clutch. When the truck
finally slid past, our driver found that he could shift again, and we lurched
forward.
We reached the top of the valley under a blazing noon sun
and jumped into action, grabbing cameras, binoculars, and speakers. We hadn’t
eaten lunch, but hunger could wait. We walked along the road, scanning dirt
embankments where earthcreepers are known to roost, while Engblom played the
bird’s vocalizations.
A yellow-billed tit-tyrant called. Groups of long-tailed
mockingbirds hunkered down inside tangled cacti, waiting out the heat.
An hour passed with no luck, and we split off in different
directions. Spiny shrubs and cacti dotted the steep slopes, and their thorns
and stickers collected in my socks.
Eventually, Kaestner circled back to me. It was dead silent
until a robin-size brown bird scurried across the ground in front of us,
disappearing in a flash. Our hearts leaped—but it wasn’t the earthcreeper.
“C’mon, baby,” Kaestner said to himself, scanning the brushy
slopes.
It was 1 P.M. and we had a long drive ahead of us. Engblom
suggested alternate plans, but Kaestner wasn’t ready to give up. A short path
nearby led to a sloped wash where the habitat looked good, and Kaestner wanted
to follow it. We walked down the path and played the earthcreeper’s call.
Miraculously, within minutes, a bird responded.
“That’s it, that’s the bird below us!” Engblom yelled.
“Uh huuuhhh!” said Kaestner, grinning and giving me a
thumbs-up.
The bird slunk around in the low brush before hopping to
perch on a rock right in front of us. We snapped photos to document the
sighting for eBird.
Back in the car, Kaestner slapped his knees excitedly. “OK,
Gunnar, great bird!” Our success had temporarily erased the stress of the
morning’s trek.
But we couldn’t waste time celebrating, and immediately got
back on the road. By 3 P.M. we’d dropped below Lima’s fog layer to the gray
city outskirts, where it was at least ten degrees cooler than the summit we’d
just left. We were now six and a half hours from the city of Nazca, our next
destination, where, in between antpitta sighting attempts, Kaestner wanted to
tick off a few other target birds in the frigid Pacific.
We drove toward the small fishing town of Puerto de Lomas,
whose main allure for birders is its proximity to deep-sea canyons, where
Humboldt Current upwellings attract some of the world’s most prized seabirds.
En route we slept for a few hours in the town of Palpa before waking at 3:30
A.M. to finish our drive. We cruised past the Nazca Lines, a UNESCO World
Heritage site known for its geoglyphs. No one in the car noticed. Kaestner
blasted music from his portable speaker to help our driver stay awake: Adele,
ABBA, then Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” He didn’t seem to register that
he was playing the Titanic theme as we catapulted toward the open ocean, where
we’d spend the day in a rickety fishing boat. I asked Engblom if there would be
a bathroom on board. “A bucket, and everyone looks the other way,” he replied.
“It’s best to take care of that beforehand.”
We arrived in Puerto de Lomas under an overcast dawn sky.
The small marina, no more than an inlet, was filled with dozens of petite,
colorful fishing boats secured to one another like a giant life raft. Belcher’s
gulls squealed and begged for food, jostling for space among the people.
To reach our boat, we had to walk across three others. The
first two were steady in the water, but the last was much smaller and rocked
like a seesaw in the current. I grabbed a fisherman’s outstretched hand, slimy
from the catch he’d just gutted, to keep my balance as I stepped onto our
vessel.
A split second later, Kaestner joined me on deck. The boat
was bright blue, about 20 feet long and 5 feet across, with a 40-horsepower
Yamaha outboard motor. It had no sun cover, no bathroom, no railing, and no
backup motor. We found three life vests tied together neatly—a good sign they
weren’t often used.
Soon our boat driver, Zorro, began navigating out of the
marina. Within a few minutes we hit our maximum cruising speed of five miles
per hour.
Our goal was to reach the edge of the continental shelf and
its adjacent deep-sea canyon, located roughly ten nautical miles offshore.
There we would have the best chance of seeing Kaestner’s two targets: the Ringed storm petrel and the Markham’s storm petrel.
Storm petrels, called “seaswallows” in Spanish, are
robin-size birds that skim the water with a fluttery, bat-like flight in search
of crustaceans, small fish, and oil droplets. They spend nearly all their time
at sea, only returning to land to nest in stinky underground holes in the
Atacama Desert. They have tiny legs that dangle above the water, making them
look as if they are pitter-pattering across the ocean’s surface. Sailors long
believed that storm petrels were bad-luck “witches” that could predict storms;
some thought that the number of storm petrels in a flock was a sign of how
severe a storm would be. Biologists still know very little about them, and the
two species we were after are typically only seen miles away from the South
American coastline.
The wind picked up the farther we got from shore. The boat
roiled in six-foot swells, and Kaestner and I clung to two wooden poles near
the hull. We were a foot from the edge, and each violent lurch brought the
ocean closer. Both of us had taken Dramamine that morning, but seasickness
seemed unavoidable. It was best to avoid talking about it, so I focused, as if
hypnotized, on the horizon.
“I take back everything I said about boring,” Kaestner
announced, keeping his eyes forward and scanning for fast-flying seabirds.
“This is easily the most unseaworthy vessel there ever was.”
I smiled thinly and looked around. Engblom sat behind us on
an outstretched cushion, neon toe shoes dangling over the edge as he casually
ate cereal. Our driver sat on the back wall of the boat, tiller-steering,
completely at home.
A little while later, we encountered a pod of dusky
dolphins. Kaestner remarked that dolphins normally swim with a boat, riding in
its wake or along the sides, but we moved so slowly that they completely
circled us before we advanced. As we moved into deeper, colder water, the bird
community began to change: sooty shearwaters, named because they skim so close
to the surface that they sometimes cut the water, bombed across the horizon,
and a tiny Elliot’s storm petrel appeared and disappeared like an ocean ghost.
Suddenly, when we were about nine miles offshore, a massive shape appeared on
the horizon.
“Black-browed albatross!” yelled Engblom. Its nearly
seven-foot wingspan sliced the sky like a knife. An albatross this close to
shore was a good sign: it meant we’d reached a productive spot. The swells were
modest and the wind was favorable, so we decided to chum.
Zorro killed the engine and placed a big yellow bucket on
deck, filled to the brim with entrails and shark livers. With his machete, he
cut off pieces to throw into the sea. Across from him, Engblom squirted fish
oil onto the water’s surface, then emptied a box of cornflakes into the ocean.
Seabirds have an excellent sense of smell, and we hoped the chum would attract
visitors: the cornflakes for Kaestner’s target storm petrels, the meat for
bigger birds like albatrosses.
Kaestner doesn’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t
birding. His eBird profile features a photo of him at age three or four with a
pair of binoculars around his neck. Though many birders have a “spark bird”
that first piqued their interest, Kaestner’s introduction was different. His
elder brother, Hank, had a memorable encounter with a vermilion flycatcher in
Mexico City in 1955 and got hooked. Kaestner looked up to his brother and
piggybacked off him; if Hank was into birds, he was, too.
Kaestner grew up in Baltimore with nine siblings.
“Everything in the family was always very competitive, including birding,
eating, identifying cars,” he says. “The competitive side is something that’s
ingrained in my personality.” In the Kaestner household, the first person to
finish eating got extra dessert. Every so often, their dad threw a pocketful of
change on the floor of the TV room, and the siblings would fight over it—like
Lord of the Flies.
“I was a birdwatcher, and we were so similar, it was like,
‘OK, bird-watching, that’s what we’ll do,’” Hank says.
Kaestner attended Cornell, intending to become a
professional ornithologist. But over the course of his undergraduate studies,
he changed his mind, deciding that he would enjoy life more—and see more
birds—by having a non-ornithological occupation. After earning his degree in
biology, he joined the Peace Corps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo) in 1976, and two years later he began his career as a diplomat.
“My relationship with birds is multifaceted,” Kaestner says.
He loves them aesthetically and scientifically; he enjoys their beauty,
behavior, and the sense of amazement they give him. Even the sight of the same
European robin singing its heart out in the Frankfurt cemetery on Kaestner’s
old walk to work would bring him joy. Though he mostly birds alone, he
appreciates the social aspect of birding: explaining, teaching, and sharing his
passion with others.
Birds also push him out of his mental and physical comfort
zone. In April 2021, he hiked to a remote section of the Sierra Nevada de Santa
Marta in Colombia in search of the blue-bearded helmetcrest hummingbird, a
species lost to birders and scientists for nearly 70 years until its
rediscovery in 2015. He dropped 50 pounds to prepare for the quest and hiked
more than 12,000 vertical feet in three days.
“If I had not needed to see a blue-bearded helmetcrest, I
would not have done that,” he said. “To get up there, when your legs are aching
and your feet have got blisters on them and are screaming to stop and hop on
the mule—that’s all about birds.” At the summit, masked and slightly out of
breath, he recorded a selfie video that he later posted to Facebook,
exclaiming: “Just got my first view of the helmetcrest! Now we just gotta get a
picture.” His joy was palpable.
“It’s not all about competition,” he told me. “Competition
is important, but the beauty of birds, the wonder of birds, the science of
birds, traveling the world to see birds—all that is equally important.” Then,
laughing, he added, “And the numbers. I love numbers.”
Kaestner has a fascination, perhaps an obsession, with
numbers—particularly round ones. If he’s out birding and he’s seen 89 species,
he will work hard to get to 90. If he’s changing the volume of the car radio
and it stops at 13, he moves the dial up to 15 or down to 12 to avoid stopping
on a prime number. “Ten thousand is a great number,” he says. “It’s the
ultimate milestone, a one with four zeros!”
Kaestner is a gifted storyteller. Hearing him recount
birding adventures is as soothing as listening to an experienced baseball
announcer. After a few days in the car together, I felt like I could recount
his tales, too. During his second Foreign Service tour in Papua New Guinea, for
example, he traveled to a remote outpost of an evangelical missionary group—a
village of 30 or 40 houses that was a ten-day walk from the nearest road—in a
tiny “whirligig” helicopter. To Kaestner’s delight, the village had arranged
for a local guide and translator to take him into the forest. When the guide
arrived, he was wearing what appeared to be the front part of a human skull
around his neck—the translator explained it was probably from a vengeance
killing. During the team’s walk through the forest, they spotted a dwarf
cassowary, a large emu-like bird that is increasingly human-shy due to
overhunting. To this day, it remains the only dwarf cassowary Kaestner has
seen.
Even Kaestner’s wedding day in Orchard Lake, Michigan, is
marked by a bird memory: Peter and Hank had planned to undertake an ambitious
drive that morning to chase the rare Kirtland’s warbler, returning in time for
the ceremony. Kimberly said, “Absolutely not.” Peter says it’s the only time
she’s ever forbidden him to bird. About a year later, Kimberly chose to name
their pet cat Kirtland, because for a long time the Kirtland’s warbler was one
of the only birds she’d seen that he hadn’t.
Just 30 seconds after we chummed, storm petrels began
arriving from downwind of the scent. Soon hordes encircled the boat, dancing
across the water to scoop oil droplets off the surface. Bigger seabirds hawked
chunks of meat out of the water, clawing at each other for liver bits.
We waited, watching the pitching sea. Dozens of storm
petrels—all Elliot’s and Wilson’s—danced in the water around us. A waved
albatross, which can live for 45 years, made several passes around us, then
disappeared into the gray of the horizon. Suddenly, guanay cormorants erupted
everywhere and streamed across the sky, carpeting the ocean as far as the eye
could see. We watched them for nearly five minutes, estimating that they
numbered over 100,000. The traffic and diversity of seabirds were exciting, but
we all avoided thinking the obvious: Where were Kaestner’s targets?
Finally, Kaestner shouted, “Ringed storm petrel! Ringed
storm petrel! Right here, three o’clock!”
Unlike the more common storm petrels around our boat, the
ringed storm petrel was much larger, with a bright white belly, dashing sooty
collar, and white chin. Its wings had silver crescents that made them pop
against the waves. Kaestner was elated—one down, one to go.
Sensing that the bird activity had died down, we moved
upwind of our chum. Engblom added more fish oil and cornflakes to the water.
Zorro tossed shark liver overboard, then lowered a string of entrails on a rope
into the water. They roiled in the churning waves as frenzied seabirds ripped
at chunks, gawking, clawing, and squealing their way to the meat.
We waited an hour and a half, carefully scanning for storm
petrels. We saw four species of albatross and a few other unusual seabirds, but
no Markham’s. The fatigue from the cold, wind, and seasickness set in; my
eyelids drooped.
At 11 A.M. we pulled the plug. Kaestner stomached his silent
disappointment with the stoicism of an Olympian realizing they won’t finish a
race. I asked him if he would come back again to try for a Markham’s. “Maybe,”
he said. He could get it in Chile, but he would only go if he could combine it
with other targets. Repeating this trip would be too costly and too much effort
for one bird alone.
Joining the big-lister club requires tremendous sacrifice.
Fewer than 60 people have ever seen more than 8,000 bird species, and fewer
than 20 have gotten above 9,000. It demands exceptional, almost singular,
devotion to the pursuit, often to the point of forsaking family, friends,
hobbies, and a “normal” life.
Kaestner has followed in the footsteps of many of these
birders, including the legendary Phoebe Snetsinger, the first person to see
more than 8,000 species and a former world-record holder. Snetsinger died in a
car crash in 1999 on the way to see her 8,399th lifer, in Madagascar. She’d
become a competitive birder after being diagnosed with terminal melanoma,
famously missing her daughter’s wedding for a birding trip to Colombia.
Kaestner and Snetsinger met only once, but Kaestner impressed Snetsinger, who wrote
in her autobiography that she admired his skill and philosophy of “work like
hell and be helpful to people.”
Birders have been marooned, kidnapped, and raped while in
pursuit of birds. One was eaten by a tiger in India but got pictures of it
before his demise. Kaestner has gotten lost climbing Mount Kolombangara in the
Solomon Islands and shipwrecked in the Amazon. He also claims to have an
“electric butt”—he’s been tossed off horses more times than he can count.
At press time, there is only one known person in the world
with more species—by just two—on their life list than Kaestner: Claes-Göran
Cederlund, known as CG, who is dead but still racking up species from the grave
as taxonomic authorities update world bird lists. Kaestner once received an
email about a guy who’d supposedly gotten to 10,000—Kaestner reached out
directly to verify, but the report turned out to be false. (Competitive birding
has no official scoreboard, and it isn’t overseen by any governing body, so
keeping track of the leaders and players can be challenging.)
Kaestner’s biggest competitor, Ross Gallardy, is currently
far behind him. Gallardy’s life list totals 7,670 species, but he’s only 34
years old—and he’s ambitious and scrappy. Gallardy works as a logistics and
operations consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, but when possible he takes
the vanlife approach to competitive birding. In 2020, Gallardy and his wife,
Melissa, bought a souped-up Toyota Hilux, planning to spend ten months birding
through Africa. Their goal was to “bird their asses off,” as Gallardy put it,
to see as many species as possible and shatter the record for the highest
number of species seen in Africa in a single year. (Their trip and record
attempt were interrupted by COVID-19, but they returned in 2021 to finish.) The
couple runs the website Budget Birders, where they promote world listing on the
cheap. They don’t typically hire guides or go on organized tours, relying
instead on their own know-how and “gen”—short for general info, like beta for
birders—from others.
Gallardy aims to be the youngest person in the world to see
9,000 species. But, unlike Kaestner, he says he doesn’t care about numbers.
“Honestly, I don’t,” he told me. “I just like birding, and I like seeing a lot
of birds. At the end of the day, the numbers happen, but I’m not competitive at
all when it comes to birding.” Later, he added, “I am not casual about missing
birds—that is a whole other thing. My wife always jokes that I get ‘bangry.’
When I’m missing a bird, I get angry.”
In July 2021, Gallardy blogged that he may have discovered a
new species of sunbird from a remote section of the Rubeho Mountains in
Tanzania. If verified, Gallardy will be credited with finding a new species at
about the same age that Kaestner was when he found the Cundinamarca antpitta.
After Gallardy posted about the find on Facebook, Kaestner commented,
“Outstanding!!!! Congrats.” Gallardy jokingly replied: “It’s no antpitta, but I
guess it’ll do.”
During Gallardy’s overland Africa trip, Kaestner texted
Gallardy with advice about where to find the critically endangered Taita apalis
in Kenya, in a patch of habitat with dense vine thickets. Kaestner’s gen
worked: Gallardy got the bird. I started to ask Kaestner if he feels conflicted
about giving Gallardy advice, but he interrupted before I could finish: “No,
it’s not that kind of competition. I would help him with any bird he needs, and
he would help me with any bird I need.”
Still, Kaestner thinks he has a relatively narrow window to
beat his contemporaries and stay ahead of Gallardy. “Ross is very good, he does
his homework, and he spends a lot of time trying for night birds. And he
doesn’t spend any money, he’s doing it all on a budget,” Kaestner says. “People
like Ross are taking advantage of tools I never had 34 years ago. I’m not yet
number one, and I know Ross is my successor.”
When Kaestner started birding seriously, he didn’t have
eBird or other online resources. In those days, field guides with photos and
written descriptions of birds didn’t exist for many countries. Birders
maintained their life lists differently. Phoebe Snetsinger used meticulously
organized, color-coded index cards, writing, rewriting, and reshuffling them by
hand when taxonomies changed. Kaestner used to read biologists’ academic papers
to find spots where they’d studied certain species. When Kaestner discovered
the Cundinamarca antpitta, he couldn’t compare the bird’s vocalizations with
others uploaded online. Now sites like eBird and iGoTerra automatically update
birders’ life lists for them.
Kaestner believes that it’s much easier to get to 10,000
today than ever before. Though some species have become rarer due to habitat
loss and climate change, the tech resources, road access, and tools that now
exist have made finding birds significantly less challenging. But the game
remains far from easy. “The only question is whether I have the drive and funds
to continue doing it,” Kaestner says.
Stopping short of 10,000 seems unlikely. Kaestner doesn’t
waste time, and age hasn’t slowed him down. In our six days together searching
for 12 rare birds, we took two flights and drove over 1,500 miles on winding
mountain roads. We spent more than 50 hours in the car, sometimes nearly 11
hours per day. More than half our meals were skipped or eaten in the car. We
slept less than four hours on three of the six nights, arriving at our
destinations in the dark and leaving well before sunrise.
“Sleep is for the faint of heart,” he told me half-jokingly
in the car one day. “It’s sort of like SEAL training—stay up for 48 hours and
see how you solve problems.”
Toward the end of our trip, we traveled across greater
Cuzco, traversing from high peaks to humid lowlands. It was late afternoon as
we snaked along the Urubamba River en route to the jungle town of Kiteni, and
everyone was feeling sleepy.
“Holy shit,” Kaestner said abruptly.
“What?” we all replied.
He looked up from his phone. “The IOC update is due out
soon,” he said. “The last time I checked, they were proposing 46 splits. Now
they’re proposing 107.”
Because Kaestner has seen so many birds, he typically gets
about half of the new species recognized each time the taxonomy is updated.
That year’s 107 splits could mean upward of 50 new species for his life list.
A few weeks later I confirmed: the trip to Peru put Kaestner
in a good position. He’d bagged 15 lifers, and after the IOC update in mid-July
2021, his list shot up by 55 additional species.
Since our trip to Peru, Kaestner has birded in Germany,
Italy, the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Panama, Ecuador (twice), Colombia,
Suriname, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, the Seychelles, Azerbaijan, and Svalbard. In
the fall of 2022, he visited northwest Argentina and then spent a few weeks
guiding a birding tour to southern Argentina and Antarctica. As of press time,
Kaestner was on a ten-week birding trip in Southeast Asia. Though he doesn’t
have his path to 10,000 charted blow by blow, he told me that he has a plan for
his next few hundred species through 2025, and he knows where he needs to go
and when.
It’s unlikely that reaching 10,000 will mark the end of
Kaestner’s birding. One morning as we passed through the village of
Ollantaytambo, I caught him marveling at a gnarled tree growing through a
cobblestone street. “The thing I most admire about trees is sustained effort
over a long, long time,” he said. It was 4 A.M., and he didn’t seem tired.
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