Keynote – Peter Kaestner

Peter will tell the amazing story of how he became the first person in history to observe 10,000 species of birds — a feat that he has repeated two more times!  The story starts at the beginning and follows Peter’s life through almost 200 eBird countries and territories, as he defies death around the world. Peter will also speak to how birding has changed over the years, and how international birders can contribute to conservation. 

Peter Kaestner is an American retired diplomat and amateur ornithologist who most recently served as the chief of the Consular Section at the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt, Germany.

An avid birder, he has taken advantage of his position as an international diplomat to follow his hobby. By October 1986, he had become the first birder to see a representative of each bird family in the world, as recognized in Guinness World Records. In 1989, while on a birding expedition near Bogotá, Colombia, where he was a U.S. consular officer, he discovered a species new to science, the Cundinamarca antpitta (Grallaria kaestneri), which was subsequently named after him.

With a life list of more than 10,002 birds, Kaestner, in April 2023, weeks before turning 70, beat the world record of bird species seen in the wild. In February 2024, with his sighting of an orange-tufted spiderhunter on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, Kaestner became the first person to see 10,000 bird species anywhere in the world.