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Hello and welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Birding Association.

I am your host, Nate Swick.

There are, depending on your preferred taxonomy, approximately 11,000 extant species of bird on the planet.

And for many of birders, seeing even 10% of that total in one's lifetime is a formidable and certainly proud accomplishment.

But birder Peter Kessner has done the seemingly impossible this week becoming the first

birder on the earth to cross the lifetime 10,000 species

scene mark when he saw and photographed an orange tufted spider hunter in the southern

Philippines. Kaisner, a retired U.S. diplomat who took advantage of his professional

assignments to bird around the world in places like

Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Brazil, New Guinea, and elsewhere, wrote about his quest in a recent

issue of birding magazine. It's posted online. I'll link to it in the show notes. In it,

he talked about how he planned for number 10,000 to be tufted puffin, a bird that he had kind of inexplicably

not seen yet among friends and family later this year, but a new challenger's recent

announcement caused him to push up the plans and head to Asia to reach the milestone.

That challenger, Jason Mann, has since recounted his claim of 10,000, leaving Kastner alone at the top of the

mountain. The whole thing has been a little bit odd, actually, with Mann's list containing some species

...