Noah Strycker

Given his driving passion for birds and adventure, Noah was nicknamed the “Birdman of Razzmatazz” by Newsweek magazine. In 2015, he set a world record as the first person to see 6,042 species of birds—more than half the planet’s bird species in a single year.

When he isn’t spending his time birding, Noah is competitive tennis player, he has also run 5 marathons and, in 2011, hiked the 2,650-mile (4,265 km) Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada.

Noah first picked up binoculars at age 10 and was named Young Birder of the Year by the American Birding Association in 2004. Recently, he has worked as an onboard naturalist on expedition cruises to the Arctic and Antarctica, and has studied birds in the remote Australian outback, the Galapagos, the Farallon Islands, Hawaii, Maine, Florida, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Ecuadorian Amazon. He writes and photographs regularly for a variety of publications, is an associate editor of Birding magazine, and is the author of five books: The Thing with Feathers, Among Penguins, Birding Without Borders, Birds of the Photo Ark, and Backyard Guide to the Birds of North America.

For his graduate research at Stony Brook University in 2020, Noah conducted the first census of Chinstrap penguins on Elephant Island in 50 years, and established a global population estimate of Chinstraps in Antarctica. He previously studied a colony of 300,000 Adélie penguins at Cape Crozier on Ross Island, Antarctica.

Noah loves watching polar guests get hooked on the awesomeness of birds.