Liam Hutcheson, a recent graduate from Avanti High School, has been making strides in the birding field with record-breaking species counts and a dedication to moving his career forward through efforts to document rare bird species. Originally a student at Olympia High School, he decided to make the switch to Avanti to better balance his birding pursuits with academics.
Since childhood, Liam has been fascinated by birds. “I started looking at birds and noticing birds when I was very young, around 5 or 6 years old,” he describes. “I remember hummingbirds in-town. We had hummingbird feeders and a western tanager landed in our apple tree in our yard once. I thought that was very cool.” This was his earliest memory of watching birds, although he only began to allocate the majority of his time and effort into the activity towards the end of middle school in 2022.
Liam highlights how support from his family and access to key resources has helped him quickly grow into a prolific birder. “I was very lucky that my mom was supportive, willing to drive me around to places and invest in my interest, which not everyone has and, without it, would not have allowed me to be anywhere near where I am now,” he says.
Liam Hutcheson Jump-Starts Birding Career by Breaking Washington Records
In 2023, Liam broke the Washington state record for most bird species seen in a year. The record had stood since the late 2000s, besides slight adjustments in the years prior to Liam’s attempt, but he officially broke the final number by 2 species. “It’s kind of cool, but I don’t really think a lot about it,” he shares. “It was a launching point for my career and got me recognition, so it was almost more of a tool than an accomplishment.”
Last year, Liam and his team of three others broke the state day record, which is the greatest number of bird species seen in a single day. “That’s a much more appealing record to me,” Liam adds. “It’s much more skill-based, whereas a big year-thing does have skill still, but it’s also just having a lot of time and resources to be able to spend on it.”
The Challenges of Birding for an Olympia Teen
Intuitively, birding might be thought of as a solo sport, but it turns out to be the complete opposite. Liam cites the largest difficulty he’s faced so far as being other people, emphasizing, “Over all, it’s a super social thing,” he says. “We have networks all over the state and everybody knows everybody and, you know, we’re all out looking for stuff so it doesn’t really matter if somebody else finds something really interesting—everybody’s going to go see it too, so you have to be on good standing with people and foster mutual respect.”
Also, much of the process for finding birds is concentrated in towns and neighborhoods as opposed to more rural areas. This poses another challenge because it involves having to explain his work to many passerbys. “Like in the late fall, if I’m going to find rare species from the east coast that are getting lost here, I’m going to go to coastal towns and walk through neighborhoods and bird there,” he says. “Nobody really knows what you’re doing, so you have to explain that a lot.”
An expected challenge that Liam has found ways to take advantage of is the weather. Species that can only be seen farther out across the shore are blown in by rough storms, so even if the weather may seem terrible for typical day-to-day activities, there are upsides he appreciates when it comes to birding. “It can be really bad and miserable, but that just means you have a higher likelihood of finding something interesting that you didn’t before. Weather, I view it as shaking things up,” Liam says. The worst weather for him is actually when it’s hot and sunny, since birds don’t come out as much.
Documenting Birds Across Washington
Naturally, a big part of birding is the birds themselves. According to Liam, though, many birders unfortunately don’t pay attention to this and can get quite caught up in numbers and data collection. He brings up how there is a somewhat competitive aspect to the activity, as in any field, even though the priority of birding is to document the animals and their behaviors.
On that note, he tries to be aware of the fact that numerous species are at risk of being endangered and the importance of paying attention to sensitive species. He says, “You can’t go birding without birds and, even in my lifetime, I’ve noticed things that used to be more common that are no longer as common,” he says. For him, the most valuable part of the process of seeking out birds is to provide scientific value to the community and capture images of those on the rarer end of the spectrum, so he emphasizes the urgency of preserving endangered species amidst a constantly changing environment and world.
Moving forward, Liam will either be attending Cal Poly Humboldt or Western Washington University, where he plans to study wildlife management. Right now, he works as a guide for Washington Birding Guides. He isn’t yet sure how much the degree he obtains will be relevant to his future goals, but he feels more inclined to attend higher education in Northern California due to the greater opportunities that exist birding-wise. “The bird life down there and the scene is much more exciting, and some of the people in that area are really good at it, and I’ve been lucky enough to know them and get to bird with them,” Liam explains. “It’d be great to spend more time there, so I think that’s where I’ll end up.”
Liam’s work can be found on eBird, a database that birders around the nation use to reference one another’s findings. Anyone is able to make an account to join the conversation around birding, as they are the main entity that people submit sightings and information to. The platform provides an extensive catalogue of bird findings, one of the largest projects to focus on biodiversity and conservation.
