County listing, keeping track of all the species you've seen in a given county, has been going on for probably as long as there were two or more birders in an area. In Kansas, county listing became "formalized" in November of 1999 when Lisa Edwards issued her first call for county lists. The first list, on November 30, 1999, had a total of 85 county life list records. That number is now over 4,000 county life list records. I doubt that anyone foresaw this explosive growth in county listing. Lisa continued to compile the monthly updates through January 2010 when she handed the database over to Mark Land. In January 2018 Mark handed off the list keeping responsibilities to Kevin Groeneweg. The county life lists are published bimonthly on KSBIRD-L, the Kansas email bird list.

Regularly, questions are asked about who has the "most". Since that can be defined in many ways, following are a series of tables. Where the  report of county listing is updated bimonthly, this list will not be updated bimonthly. It will be updated once or twice a year as Chuck has time and or feels that enough changes have taken place to justify updating it. All of these tables are based on the database that Kevin keeps on the reported county list totals. Official county lists refers to the number of species on a county's check-list in the County Check-list Project. This differs from eBird county list because eBird often does not include all historical records that are included in the County Check-list Project lists.

Listed in all 105 counties

Listed in 75 or more counties.

The 300 Club - Birders who have seen 300 or more in an individual county.

Top individual county lists based on percent of official list total, minimum of 90%.

It should be pointed out that county listing is not for everyone. Many birders choose not to keep track of each and every bird that they see in every county or perhaps not at all. This is an individual choice that we support. For those who do enjoy keeping track of county records we encourage you to also consider utilizing the eBird online sightings program sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. While a great deal of resources can be spent on county listing, there is also a great deal of value we have gained from these citizen scientists in the thousands of new county records that are collected. We have improved our knowledge of bird distribution in the state thanks to the hundreds of people who have submitted new sightings in pursuit of building their own county lists.

To achieve the kinds of numbers shown above requires a heavy commitment of time and money. The potential environmental impact, i.e. gasoline consumption, has been mentioned by many sources and should not be ignored. While competitive birding does have a certain appeal to some birders, there are other options: a big county list/year, a big yard list/year and there have even been "green" big years (BIGBY - Big Green Big Year) where birders only count birds that they've seen by walking or biking to birding destinations.  - Chuck Otte, KSBIRDS Webmaster

Updated January 2026

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