I SPY: A Buller’s shearwater (Puffinus bulleri) like this one pushed birder John Weigel beyond the prior American Birding Association record, set in 2013.© GREGORY "SIOBIRDR" SMITH/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
It’s been three years since Neil Hayward, a Boston-based biotech consultant on a sort of sabbatical from working life, broke a 15-year-old North American birding record. On December 28, 2013, with just three days left in his so-called big year, Hayward spotted a great skua out over the Atlantic Ocean, making the bird the 749th species he had seen and photographed that year—one more than revered birder Sandy Komito tallied in 1998.
It was a spectacular eleventh-hour finish to a year spent crisscrossing the continent. But this year, it would take only seven months for birders to best Hayward’s record. In July, a gray partridge in Washington State and a Buller’s shearwater in California gave birder John Weigel, an American expat turned Australian, his official ...
