CONSUMED BY COUNTING
Peter Kaestner has been birding since toddlerhood, when his older brother introduced him to the hobby. He started a life list by age 7 and took his first international birding trip at age 10. At age 14, he flew to the Bahamas without adult supervision. The Maryland native, now 65 no longer remembers how he paid for anything or got around, yet he vividly recalls the birds he saw, such as Thick-billed Vireo and Bahama Woodstar.
After college, Kaestner joined the U.S. Foreign Service, in large part because it enabled him to travel the globe looking for birds. In 1986, he became the first person to spot at least one species in every bird family, and in 1989, he discovered a new species of antpitta in the Colombian Andes. (Its scientific name is Grallaria kaestneri in his honor.) He has been birding in about 150 countries and supposes he’ll still be birding on his deathbed. “I love watching birds, I love twitching birds, I love studying about birds, and I love studying about their biology,” Kaestner says. “I get enjoyment from so many different dimensions of birds that it’s absolutely inevitable that birds would be a very important part of my life.”
It’s the counting of birds, however, that truly drives him. As of
