watch The Big Year (2011) Box Office trailer

Each year, January 1st, a handful of people give up their daily life to join one of the most eccentric of the world of sports competitions. With few rules and no referees, there is only one goal: to see and identify the most bird species in a single year. The few people who committed all year - known for its participants as a great year - will spend one year exhausting and exhaustive travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars. In a good year, offers competitive passion and betrayal, fear and courage, a desire to see and conquer base mixed with an irrepressible desire for victory. In a bad year, draining the savings account and let people first.

In the great years: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession (Free Press, release date: February 4, 2004, $ 25.00), an award-winning journalist Mark Obmascik Chronicles North American big year in 1998, the greatest - perhaps the worst - birding competition all the time. Engaging with the sharp wit and humor, Obmascik captures the enthusiasm of birders themselves as readers of a rowdy 275 000 miles Odyssey, because each of the three largest competitors to fight for the championship title.

watch The Big Year (2011) Box Office trailer


Three competitors were perhaps improbable number of competitors ever meet. A wise-cracking industry, an entrepreneur from New Jersey, recently retired executive vice president and a multi-million dollar business in Aspen, and painfully divorced software engineer, who continued to work full time for the nuclear in Maryland, while pursuing his great year, they were all passionate about birds.

As they traveled on the grueling, 365-day potholed road to glory, they faced the back of the deserts, oceans moving, bug-infested swamps, rising debt and a disgruntled mountain lion. The island of Attu, Alaska to Florida, from the deserts of Arizona to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of northern California, they crossed time zones, and sometimes the trails on their missions, see once-in-a-lifetime rarities that could mean the difference between the winner and second place. Perhaps the most intense competition ever ornithology, by December 31, one of the candidates had set a record, so gigantic - the identification of 745 different species of extraordinary official year-end account - c is probably never will be surpassed