Birdwatch News Archive

World lister Tom Gullick celebrating his 9,000th tick. Photo courtesy of Birdtour Asia.

Top lister reaches landmark total

Birdwatch news team
Posted on: 30 Aug 2012

Leading world lister Tom Gullick has become the first person ever to see 9,000 bird species. The extraordinary milestone was reached on 19 August when the endemic Wallace’s Fruit-Dove on Yamdena in the Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia, entered his notebook as the landmark ‘lifer’.

Mopping up more species on the same trip, organised by Birdtour Asia, Tom went on to finish on 9,047 species, the company reports, after visiting Seram and logging most of the endemics there, including the rarely seen Purple-naped Lory.

From Britain but now resident in Spain, Tom Gullick has been the top world lister since 2008. In the latest American Birding Association Big Day and ABA List Report, published last month, he is reported as ending 2011 on 8,942 species – 117 species ahead of rival globe-trotting British birder Jon Hornbuckle. He also finished last year as the leading lister in South America (2,939 species) and Africa (2,081). The ABA’s list totals are based on Clements taxonomy, which at the end of 2011 assessed the total number of world bird species as 10,700.

For years the field was led by Phoebe Snetsinger, who famously passed the 8,000-species mark while fighting cancer, and who allegedly spent a family inheritance in the process of amassing ticks on an unprecedented scale. At the time of her death in an accident on a bird tour in Madagascar in 1999, her total of some 8,400 species was reported to be about 2,000 ahead of her closest rival.