Season 4, Episode 1: Josh van der Meulen’s 2012 Ontario Big Year

The Big Year Podcast April 1, 2026

It is April 1, 2026, I’m Robert Baumander and welcome to season 4 of The Big Year Podcast.  My 4th season?  Really?  So glad to be back again.  Miss me?  It’s been an exciting journey and this season promises to be the best ever.  Maybe. Or not.  I’ll let you be the judge, when it’s all said and done, but boy am I looking forward to some of the guests I’ve already lined up.  In addition to Big Year birders, you’ll get to hear from a real live astronaut, who is involved in bird conservation and a paleontologist who will educate us on which of the dinosaurs that survived the great meteor impact became the birds we know and love today.

Last time you heard my voice, I was settling in for winter, and beginning work on my book, The Trans-Canada Jay Highway.  I was planning to stay local for the winter, focus my ADHD brain on just writing, and this podcast, but word of an amazing rarity in Montreal Quebec hit the birding world in January.  It was a very unlikely visitor from across the pond, a European Robin.  Wowzers.  That was a bird I wanted to see.  I waited a few days; one, to make sure it was sticking around and more importantly, for a good weather forecast that wouldn’t have me driving through a blizzard or looking for the bird in minus 40 temperatures.

After a seven hour drive, including a slow trek through Montreal construction traffic in the rain, I arrived at a quiet, snow covered neighborhood, to find a small group of excited birders who had just found the robin.  Everyone in the neighborhood was welcoming to all of us who came to see their celebrity bird, including one woman who was putting seed out for the weary traveller.  When another birder showed up shortly after I arrived we both looked at each other, with the merest glimmer of recognition, but couldn’t quite place from where.  It was Josh Gant who figured it out.  Josh was a guest on this very podcast, talking about his New Jersey state Big Year.  He also drove 7 hours to get to Montreal.  We arrived within minutes of each other and got to celebrate this amazing once in a lifetime bird, together and with other birders who had made the trek to Montreal.  None of us, however, had travelled as far as the European Robin.

European Robins are not related in any way to our American Robins.  European Robins, I discovered, are in the Old World Flycatcher family and American Robins are thrushes. Our robin’s name was given only because of their similar red breast