Daniel Schwem via Wikimedia Commons

Every October, birdwatchers across the nation sit and watch large circles of park land for 48 hours. The goal: find as many bird species as possible.

Over the weekend, birders competed in the Big Sit!, a national birding competition hosted by the New Haven Bird Club. Competitors set up areas measuring 17 feet in diameter and record the bird species that come into view from the area within a 48-hour period. Whoever records the most species wins the competition.

The New Haven Bird Club was the first to host such an event in 1992 in small circles around New Haven. Once the event grew nationally, its operation was handed off to Bill Thompson, the founder and publisher of Bird Watcher’s Digest magazine. The competition returned to the New Haven Bird Club’s management in 2022, club administrator Craig Repasz ’00 said.

For many competitors, birding is all consuming.

“At this point, it’s my life,” Matthew Bell, a three-time Big Sit! competitor, said.

Bell has been an avid bird watcher since he was a teenager. He began birdwatching with his high school’s birding club and has continued birding since, he said.

Today, Bell works at the Connecticut Audubon Society and has found some of his closest friends through birding.

A large part of the appeal of the Big Sit! is the community, Repasz said.

“I personally find the event to be a great day out from dawn to dusk with friends,” he said.

Since members of the group must stay in their designated area at all times, members get to bond and connect over the thrill and excitement of the game.

“We are looking through binoculars and scopes trying to squeeze any warbler or sparrow out of the brush and to pull hawks and eagles out of the sky. There is a lot of anticipation and holding our breath,” Repasz said.

Bell competed with a group of friends who have been participating in the Big Sit! for the past five years. This year, his circle faced a few complications.

“Saturday was also the first day of duck hunting season, so there were quite a bit of gunshots in the early morning as well that I’m sure scared some birds off,” Bell said.

Regardless of the disturbances, Bell and other Connecticut birdwatchers were able to find and record several rare bird species.

“We had ended with 73 or 74 species,” Bell said. “I know they started off strong in the morning with great horned owl and barred owl along with American bittern and then once dawn got there, we had a nice rush of some ducks like a greater scaup, Greenland teal, some songbirds.”

The early winter is a great time for birders to spot rare birds in Connecticut, Celeste Echlin, the treasurer of the New Haven Bird Club, wrote to the News.

“I even found a rare bird with a couple of Lapland Longspurs on Saturday at Long Beach in Stratford! This Larkspur is an early winter visitor who migrates to our part of the world every year from the northern arctic tundra,” she wrote.

Local competitors had their fair share of rare bird sightings this year.

In Guilford, Repasz said his group “heard a distant great horned owl while a nighthawk flew over our heads.”

The results of the competition will be released in the coming days as the New Haven Bird Club collects and compiles the data to determine which circle recorded the most species, Respasz said.

The winner would typically receive binoculars from a sponsor from a conservation project, but the New Haven Bird Club could not find a sponsor this year.

The Big Sit! was founded in New Haven by John Himmelman and Frank Gallo.