People & Culture
A tale of joy and persistence: Logging Bruce Di Labio’s birding “big years” almost 50 years apart
As a teen in 1977, Bruce Di Labio tried to see more birds in Canada in a calendar year than any birder before him. He revisited that epic challenge almost 50 years later in 2023 in his retirement. This is a tale of both birding joy and birding persistence. The challenges Di Labio faced on these quests changed dramatically over four-plus decades, but the song remains the same.
Were it not for the birds, Bruce Di Labio would have been a pretty typical 18-year-old.
He grew up in the west end of Ottawa, the third of five boys. He was a classic hippie: he loved rock music and road trips, and had long hair often done up in a bandana. But when he was looking for birds, it became clear that he was not your average teenager.
In the 1970s, birdwatching was still a niche hobby. Ottawa, however, was home to a thriving birdwatching community, with a significant contingent of them being teenage boys. This group was known as “the bike gang” — a term coined by Peter Whelan, the bird columnist at the time for The Globe and Mail, for the group’s habit of using bicycles to traverse the city in search of birds.
Di Labio was one of the leaders of the bike gang despite being one of the youngest in the group. He was nicknamed “Question Man” for his tendency to ask a barrage of questions to the more experienced members of the group. This constant questioning, and countless hours in the field, helped Di Labio to develop a deep knowledge of Eastern Ontario’s bird life.
Soon, he began contributing to this local knowledge himself. Most notably, he and two other bike gang friends discovered a population of yellow rail, a rare marsh bird, 250 kilometres from the nearest known colony. He was barely 18 when they made that discovery.
Soon, though, Di Labio set his sights further afield. He had heard about Kenn Kaufman, a 16-year-old American birdwatcher, who had done a “big year” across North America, where he aimed to find as many bird species as possible in a year. After he finished high school in 1976, Di Labio decided he would do his own big year, but within the bounds of Canada.
To his knowledge, no one had done a Canadian big year before, so Di Labio wasn’t sure how high the number could go. He decided to aim for 400 species. He bought a rust-covered ’64 Mercury Comet convertible with an open hole in the passenger side floor for $300 and launched his quest. These are a few of the key experiences and places he recalls from that eventful year.
On January 1, he and his birding friend Charles Francis went for a spin around Ottawa. The goal? To start the “big year” off well by logging a “big day” of local birds. They particularly wanted to find some boreal species, such as Canada jays and black-backed woodpeckers, that occasionally wander into Ottawa in the winter.
Unfortunately, the car had other plans. As they drove to their first destination, the Comet disintegrated mid-drive in the span of a few seconds. The brakes gave out, the muffler broke off and the engine mounts and drive shaft went. It was immediately clear the car was a write-off. “That was the start of my big year,” Di Labio recalls, laughing. He would be relying on public transit and hitchhiking for the rest of the year.
Di Labio arrived in Nova Scotia with one thing on his mind: a tiny seabird known as a dovekie.
He had taken a bus from Ottawa to Halifax, then hitchhiked his way up the province to see this rare black-and-white bird. He had cobbled together a plan based on what information he could glean from the books Birds of Nova Scotia and Birds of Canada. Dovekies, he learned, are difficult to get from shore, so the best way to find them was from the ferry to Channel-Port aux Basques, Nfld. And because these birds left each spring, you had to do it in the winter.
With no other good leads, he decided to give the ferry method a shot. Early in the morning on January 27, he boarded the ferry in North Sydney heading for Channel-Port aux Basques. The seas were calm, but the cold was unrelenting. He found a vantage point on deck and began scanning.
As the ferry progressed into deeper waters, he began spotting them: tiny, black-and-white football-shaped birds, zooming along above the water’s surface or diving below for fishy prey. Dovekies.
In the end, he spotted 17 dovekies during the ferry crossing.
After birding his way around Nova Scotia, Di Labio took a train trip to Vancouver to spend a few weeks birding along the coast to find some Pacific specialties. Then, in need of money, he got a job with a steel gang, laying track through the Rocky Mountains for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
He was working six days a week. It was hard, physical labour, but it paid well and involved moving throughout the interior of British Columbia and southern Alberta. For Di Labio, that meant a chance to search for a number of new birds on his days off. He even logged a few “year birds” right from the job site, including a yellow-headed blackbird and a Franklin’s gull.
On Easter weekend, the team had a full four days off. Di Labio used it to the fullest, hitchhiking around the shrubby steppe and old-growth forests of the Okanagan Valley. He managed to connect with nearly all of his targets, including some localized birds like dusky grouse and pygmy nuthatch.
While hitchhiking could be frustrating, getting a ride was relatively easy in the 1970s, and it let the teen save his money for later in the spring. A diet of mostly peanut butter was cheap and filling. Comfort, decent food and convenience were sacrificed: If you’re going to do a big year, “you just focus on, ‘Where am I going to find the next bird?’” he recalls.
Back in Ottawa that spring, Di Labio was looking to hit a birding hotspot in time at peak migration. He stood in a line of people at the beginning of then-Highway 17 with their thumbs out, looking for a driver to take them south. His destination was Point Pelee National Park, the southernmost point in Canada. The park is a birders’ paradise, where nearly 400 species of birds have been recorded, and Di Labio needed to get there for his big year to be a success.
Since birding was still a niche hobby, drivers were often surprised to hear what he was up to. Often, he says, the reaction was skeptical — “You’re not birdwatching; you’re just out there smoking dope in the forest,” was a common attitude. That skepticism evaporated at Pelee. Pretty much everyone there in May was a fellow birder.
It was Di Labio’s third time visiting in four years, and the excitement of finding rare birds occupied his every thought. “I remember trying to sleep at night, and all I hear is birds singing in my ears,” he says. In 1977, the park still received relatively few human visitors in the spring — anyone who was there was likely pretty intense about their hobby.
When birders did spot a rarity, they would share the information and their fellow birders would then give chase. One of the highlights that year was a southern species, a nocturnal bird called a chuck-will’s-widow, roosting calmly on a log. “You could find the area it was because all the grass had been flattened in a circular area,” Di Labio remembers.
Over multiple visits to southern Ontario that year, Di Labio racked up more southern specialties, including a Henslow’s sparrow, northern bobwhite and prothonotary warbler. He was quickly approaching 300 species with more than half a year to go.
As the spring wound down and summer began, a major challenge arose. Di Labio hadn’t been working since the end of April, and living on peanut butter and hitchhiking can only get you so far. He was running out of money.
He decided to go back to basics — living in hometown Ottawa, focusing on local birds and birding cheaply. He returned to the marsh south of Ottawa where he and some bike gang friends had discovered the yellow rail population the year before. He also hitchhiked all the way to Erieau, Ont., to chase a burrowing owl. When he arrived, there were only seven people watching it.
He did still splurge, also taking a more ambitious hitchhiking trip to Nova Scotia with friend Tom Hince. Their targets were coastal breeding birds like Atlantic puffin and roseate tern, which they got relatively easily. The latter species is no longer so easy to spot in Nova Scotia — a 2023 assessment by COSEWIC noted that roseate terns now only breed regularly on four islands in the province.
The beginning of July was when things started to fizzle out. “It came down to finances,” Di Labio says ruefully. “You had to have money to pursue a Canadian big year.” He kept birding around Ottawa, adding whatever species he could to bump up his count.
Then, his parents agreed to sell him their old car for cheap.
Suddenly, a choice arose. He wanted to continue his big year, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to limit himself to Canada anymore. There were a lot of birds he wanted to see south of the border, too.
Before long, he and his bike gang friends Brian Garvin, Bob Gorman, Simon Gawn and Jim Harris began planning a road trip down to Florida. The big year was essentially abandoned.
“I was 19 years old,” Di Labio says. “Life changes.” Ultimately, he reached 352 species that year in Canada. It would be nearly 50 years before he gave it another shot.
Fast-forward almost 50 years to New Year’s Day 2023. Di Labio’s life at 64 years old continued to be as defined by birds as ever.
After working as a museum technician and interpretive naturalist, Di Labio had settled into a career as a birding tour guide. He started locally, but soon branched out, guiding across Canada and as far afield as South Africa and Australia. He also became a fixture of the Canadian birding community and a mentor to countless new birders.
He was a retired father of two and grandfather of one enjoying life in Gananoque, Ont. But that one big challenge still beckoned. “In the back of my mind, I still wanted to do a proper big year.”
By then, the record was 457, set by Neil and Andrea MacLeod in 2018. Di Labio had tried to break it once in 2020, but COVID shut the big year down. He tried again in 2022, but only started seriously trying partway through the year and came within three species of the record. When he realized how within reach the record was, “the deal was sealed” — 2023 would be his year to go for the record in earnest.
This time, January 1 didn’t feature any automobile issues. He enjoyed a morning of calm, local birding. He knew full well the calm wouldn’t last much longer — eight days later, he got on a flight to Nova Scotia, where the real big year started. These are a few notable memories from that journey.
Di Labio was enjoying himself out east. Thanks to a network of birders sharing rarities via bird alerts and group chats, he had seen a whole host of rare birds, including a shorebird called a common ringed plover, a very rare visitor to the Maritimes. After a few days in Nova Scotia, Di Labio flew to Newfoundland to see his old friend Bruce Mactavish, a key fixture of the Ottawa bike gang in the 1970s – when they were teenagers, Di Labio used to sit on Mactavish’s handlebars while he pedaled.
The two began birding around the Avalon peninsula, connecting with a few key waterbirds like the purple sandpiper, king eider and dovekie. Then, as the pair cruised along the highway to their next destination, a snipe flew over their car.
They spun the car around and followed it to try to make an identification. They eventually found the bird in a drainage ditch. Upon closer inspection, they realized it was the Eurasian common snipe. This was one of the very few recorded sightings in Canada.
Di Labio and Mactavish were elated. “It was so exciting,” Di Labio says. “It was still like I was a beginner again.”
In late March, Di Labio decided to make his way to the town of Cartwright, Labrador for a very special bird. Nestled up on a tiny subarctic inlet, the town has a population of just 439 — plus, for that winter, a vagrant Eurasian blackbird.
The bird had appeared the previous December at a feeder in town and had stuck around through the winter. So, on March 31, Di Labio headed to Montreal, where he joined his friend Alvan Buckley on a tiny 20-seater plane headed for Blanc-Sablon, Que.
The flight was a milk run, stopping at eight airports on the way up the St. Lawrence. The stops were quick and intense, and the pilot “drove it like he was driving a Ferrari,” Di Labio remembers.
After many take offs and landings, they arrived at Blanc-Sablon, where birder Vernon Buckle picked them up for the five-hour drive to Cartwright. The ride was uneventful, until 30 minutes outside of town, when a polar bear dashed out into the road. It scampered up the embankment, stopped and turned to look at the car, its intense black eyes focused on the three birders. After a moment, it lumbered away, disappearing into the boreal forest. They were truly in the far North.
The next morning, the three men arrived at the house where the blackbird had been seen. Then, they waited. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. “It felt like a lifetime,” Di Labio says. “You’re hoping a boreal owl didn’t eat it overnight!”
Finally, after nearly an hour wait, the bird appeared in the front yard, a dark thrush with a brownish speckled belly. Di Labio added it to the list and headed back.
Di Labio spent much of the month of May at Point Pelee, Ont. Every morning he started at the tip, looking for rarities among the migrants that had just arrived. The promise of a rare sighting attracted throngs of fellow birders, all of them up at the crack of dawn and with binoculars at the ready.
When a rare bird is spotted, chaos breaks out. Phones start ringing, messages in group chats start flying, and people start gathering. A single rarity — like the chicken-like Arctic bird known as a willow ptarmigan that appeared at the tip — can have hundreds of observers jostling for a better view. “It’s shoulder to shoulder,” Di Labio says of the annual Point Pelee birding experience.
Since Di Labio had been coming to Pelee nearly every spring for 50 years, he knew many of the people in the crowd. “Sometimes it takes me forever to get to the tip because I’m meeting all these friends of mine,” he says.
He enjoyed birding but equally remembers the fun of running into some of his old bike gang friends, former mentors, and people he had mentored. Di Labio’s son Ben was even there, leading the Pelee birding tour that Di Labio once led every year.
Di Labio picked up a handful of southern rarities on this visit, including a marsh bird known as a limpkin that he saw on the way home, and enjoyed the large diversity of migrants that grace southern Ontario every spring. At the end of May, he was sitting at a whopping 354 species.
Even 20 years ago, Kirtland’s warbler was very difficult to find in Canada. Suited to the jack pine forest, it used to breed in Ontario but had been pushed out by habitat loss in the 1940s. But, thanks to conservation efforts throughout the Great Lakes region, the warbler has recolonized a few areas, including spots near Petawawa, Ont., and Barrie, Ont.
But there had never been one seen in Ottawa. So, when he knew his son Ben was out birding on June 10, Di Labio asked him to keep an eye out for a Kirtland’s warbler.
Two hours later, he was out shopping with his wife, Laurie, when he got the call from another birder — a Kirtland’s warbler had just been spotted south of Ottawa. “Laurie looked at me and said, ‘Okay, the shopping’s over. You’ve got to go because I won’t be able to live with you,” he recalls. He drove up to Ottawa as fast as he could, calling Ben on the way to give him the news.
When asked later how he knew this was the day that this rare bird would be spotted, he just laughs. “I looked into my crystal ball,” he says, before adding in a spooky voice, “Kiiiiirtland’s Waaarbler.”
He got the call when he was home. Jim Harris, one of his best friends from the bike gang days, was in the hospital with stage four lung cancer.
Harris and Di Labio had known each other since the start of the bike gang in the fall of 1971. Di Labio describes Harris as quiet, but easy to talk to, and an extraordinary birder.
Harris suffered with schizophrenia. As he grew older, the disease made it impossible for him to live on his own, so his father moved him into a group home. He and Di Labio remained close. Harris became a regular fixture around the Di Labio family dinner table at Christmases and Thanksgivings. Despite his deteriorating mental state, Di Labio says, when the two old friends started talking about birds, “it was like there was nothing wrong.”
Di Labio went to see Harris in the hospital on July 28. Little more than a week later, Harris died. Ron Pittaway, a mentor of Di Labio’s in the Ottawa birding community, died that same day.
These deaths came on the heels of the passing of his nephew, Greg Dilabio, in July.
As he struggled to deal with the accumulated grief, Bruce Di Labio came very close to ending his big year early. “I kept going. I did. But I had lots of thoughts in the back of my mind. You just assume every day is fun and exciting, but there’s always the unknown. You just never know.”
Torrential rains hammered the car as Bruce and Ben Di Labio drove towards Hurricane Lee. The massive storm was set to make landfall in Nova Scotia, and the two birders were set on being there in its wake. Di Labio was sitting at 457, tied with the record. He was sure he would break it with this storm.
When hurricanes form in southern waters, they trap seabirds within them. As they continue north, those seabirds are dropped along the way, showing up in places they would never otherwise be seen. Storms are one of the best ways to ensure sightings of southern seabirds that suddenly find themselves blown to Canada.
As climate change has made storms stronger, hurricane birding has become a more popular activity. But it carries with it some real risks — and not just to the birders braving the wind and rain. “What if you’re out there and something happens and you have to call 911?” Di Labio asks. “You’re putting first responders into potential danger trying to save you while you’re out looking for birds.”
Fortunately, as Lee became less powerful, it seemed like conditions would be safe enough to observe the storm’s passage. On the morning of September 17, father and son set up their scopes at Baccaro Point, mainland Nova Scotia’s southernmost point, and began scanning. At first it seemed like the hurricane was a dud in birding terms —the volume of seabirds just wasn’t there.
Then, a large tern appeared on the horizon. It was a gull-billed tern, species number 458 for the year. Di Labio had broken the record.
The birders took a celebratory photo then got back to scanning, hoping to raise that number even further.
By the end of October, Di Labio had logged nearly every expected bird in Canada. He kept birding locally, hoping to add a few rarities to his count.
On November 12, Ben called. He had found a northern hawk owl just outside of Ottawa. “I get the call and I’m like ‘What!? Where!?’,” Di Labio says. Once Ben gave him the precise location, he and Laurie hopped in the car and “broke every land speed record” on the way. When he arrived, Ben had the bird in the scope, ready to be seen.
“That was one of the most exciting moments,” Di Labio recalls. “And to have my son find it.” His voice is full of pride.
Di Labio’s manic rarity chasing continued into December. In one week, he drove thousands of kilometres to add three rarities to his list, blasting 1970s road music the whole way — Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin, and the Eagles. All that driving pushed his year list to 480 species.
He returned to Ottawa on December 17 for the Christmas Bird Count, an annual community event where birders disperse throughout the city to count birds. Di Labio has participated every year since 1971.
He planned to take part in the count, then squeeze in a trip out west to look for a pinyon jay — and maybe a few more species if he got lucky.
He started the day in Ottawa at the Britannia Conservation Area with his friend Chris Traynor. As the two birders walked into the woods, Di Labio took a step onto a patch of ice. He felt his feet fly out from under him and he slammed into the ground hard.
The pain was instantaneous and excruciating. He could barely breathe. Every contortion, every turn, every attempt to get up made the pain worse. Di Labio remembers a voice in his head, saying, “you have done some damage this time.” He had Traynor call 911.
To keep himself distracted as he waited for the paramedics to arrive, he counted birds. He got seven species as he lay waiting.
A few days after the accident, I visit Di Labio in the hospital. His ribs had broken in three places, and he had suffered a punctured lung. It could have been a lot worse, but he looked weak and grimaced when he moved.
When I ask him about how he felt after his fall, he replies, “It’s funny. I’ve lived my whole life like I was 18, and this is the first time I feel 65.”
Di Labio rang in the New Year at home in Gananoque. Thanks to the punctured lung, he was under doctor’s orders not to fly, so the pinyon jay went unseen.
His total of 480 species was the new record for Canadian birders to aspire to.
Di Labio is content with his total. Still, he says he knows it could have been higher if every star had aligned — the spring migration could have been better, a stronger hurricane could have arrived, he could have not fallen. I ask him then if he thinks someone will break his record any time soon.
Di Labio laughs. “I hope so,” he said. “Records are made to be broken.”
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