The earliest known continent-wide Big Year record was compiled by Guy Emerson, a traveling businessman, who timed his business trips to coincide with the best birding seasons for different areas in North America.
[4] In 1953, Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher took a 30,000 mile road trip visiting the wild places of North America.
In 1956, a 25-year-old Englishman named Stuart Keith, following Peterson and Fisher's route, compiled a list of 594 species, a record that stood for fifteen years.
[citation needed] In 1971, 18-year-old Ted Parker, in his last semester of high school in southeastern Pennsylvania, extensively birded the eastern seaboard of North America.
That September, Parker enrolled in the University of Arizona in Tucson and found dozens of Southwestern U.S. and Pacific coast specialties, ending the year with a list of 626 species.
1987 marked the second time that there was a competition during a single year, with Sandy Komito's 722 species topping Steve Perry's 711.
In the end Komito kept the record, listing 745 species[7] birds plus 3 submitted in 1998 and later accepted by state committees for a revised total of 748.
In 2008, Lynn Barber, at the time the Texas big year record holder, became the first woman to break the 700-species barrier with a total of 723.
A South Dakotan doctor birding as "Olaf Danielson" launched his "Bad Weather Big Year", reaching 700 species in May.
[18] 2017 broke new ground, with five birders surpassing 700 species in the Continental ABA Area by September, and three breaking the 750-species barrier.
[19] Also noteworthy in 2018 was the fact that Koeltzow and Dan Gesualdo became the 4th and 5th birders to identify 700+ species in the Lower 48 states.
A trip to Alaska at the end of August 2019 allowed David and Tammy McQuade to become the 4th and 5th birders to reach 700 species during 2019.
At age 21, Ben Sanders was the youngest birder to reach 680 for a Lower 48 (Contiguous) Big Year, and did it without a single airplane trip.
Since the Bat Falcon was not yet listed on the ABA Checklist, she officially set the new record on December 23, with Northern Lapwing.
On July 22, Ruben and Victor Stoll had both Nelson's and Saltmarsh Sparrows at Maine's Scarborough Marsh, breaking Tiffany Kersten's record for the Contiguous 48 States; they ended the year with 751 species.
19-year-old Ezekiel Dobson reached 700 in the Contiguous 48 States with a Flame-colored Tanager, becoming the first birder to join the 700 Club before the age of 20.
Brenda and Jim Carpenter topped 700 in the ABA and US regions for the second year in a row, ending with 719 species.
In 2015, Oregon birder Noah Strycker launched a worldwide big year with the goal of seeing at least 5,000 species—roughly half of the world's species—as he traveled around the globe.
On September 16, in India, he broke Davies' and Miller's existing record when he saw a Sri Lanka frogmouth for his 4,342nd species of the year.
[21] Strycker's record faced an immediate challenge in 2016 when Dutch birder Arjan Dwarshuis launched an effort to break it as well as raise money for the Birdlife Preventing Extinctions Programme.
[22] On November 4, 2016, Dwarshuis saw a tody motmot in Panama, breaking Strycker's previous record total.
Traditional big year birders have drawn criticism from environmentalists for failing to consider the ecological impact of their travel.
Several birders have attempted "green", or alternative big years to raise awareness for both birding and the environment.
[23] They started in their home province of the Yukon Territory, rode down the Pacific Coast, looping back around Arkansas to catch the Texas spring migration, then eastward to Florida.
In the end, they covered more than 13,000 miles by bicycle and tallied 548 species, raising more than $25,000 for bird conservation in the process.
In his rather extreme instance, Dorian Anderson bicycled 17,830 miles around the United States, amassing a self-powered, petroleum-free 618 species during his 365 days on America's roads.
He shunned all motorized transportation for the entire adventure, refusing even ferries that would have saved him sometimes hundreds of miles of riding around various bodies of water.
[25] In 2021, Niky Carrera Levy and Mauricio Ossa, a couple of publicists and photographers made the first Big Year in Colombia, the country with the largest number of birds recorded in the world.