Noah Strycker

• Name — Noah Strycker • Born — 9 February 1986 • Birthplace — Eugene, Oregon, U.S.

Born in Eugene, Oregon, he grew up on rural property in the forest outside the small town of Creswell, Oregon. There he watched and photographed birds, learned their habits and calls, and taught himself to find their nests. He is the son of Bob Keefer, an arts writer and photographer, and Lisa Strycker, a data analyst and former journalist. From 2005 to 2010, he wrote a column titled "Birdboy" for WildBird magazine. He has been Associate Editor of Birding magazine, the flagship publication of the American Birding Association, since 2006. He graduated magna cum laude in 2008 from Oregon State University with a degree in fisheries and wildlife and a minor in art, and summa cum laude in 2021 from Stony Brook University with a degree in marine sciences. He has studied and observed birds around the world. In 2011, he solo hiked the entire 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada.

Noah’s master’s research at Stony Brook University focused on population abundance and distribution of Adélie, Gentoo, and Chinstrap Penguins, to better understand the dynamics of ecological change on the Antarctic Peninsula. He is the first author on two peer-reviewed papers on chinstrap penguins: A Global Population Assessment of the Chinstrap Penguin published in Scientific Reports, and Fifty-Year Change in Penguin Abundance on Elephant Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica: Results of the 2019-20 Census published in Polar Biology.

Strycker began his worldwide Big Year on January 1, 2015, in Antarctica, aboard the Akademik Ioffe, a former Soviet research vessel then leased by One Ocean Expeditions for adventure tourism. The first bird he saw of the year was a Cape petrel, near Spert Island. From there he traveled up the South and North American continents, across to Europe, throughout Africa, and into Asia and Australia. The trip took him to 41 countries and all seven continents, and was done entirely with a 40-Liter backpack. On September 16, 2015, near Thattekad, India, he saw a pair of Sri Lanka frogmouths, his 4,342nd bird species of the year, which topped the previous world Big Year record set in 2008 by British birders Alan Davies and Ruth Miller. His final species of the year was a group of silver-breasted broadbills seen on a return to India, in Assam, putting him at the record breaking total of 6,042 species. This record was broken in 2016 by Arjan Dwarshuis. Strycker wrote a book about the adventure for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.