It was never meant to last this long, but 1,533 days later, avid twitcher James Lambert has no plans to end his marathon birdwatching streak.
Through birthdays, Christmases, hotel quarantine during the height of the pandemic, a severe bout of COVID, and a move from Singapore back to Australia, Mr Lambert hasn't skipped a single day of slipping on his binoculars and looking to the sky.
That's more than four years.
"I got half an hour's birdwatching in wandering the lounge, looking out and putting in a record at the Singapore airport," the Darwin resident said.
"When I had COVID I did it from my balcony. I've got some of the worst lists I've had sitting there."
Unlike records for spotting the most bird species, or out-travelling everyone else across scores of countries, evidence of uninterrupted birdwatching streaks is hard to come by.
But in a worldwide ornithological network called eBird, Mr Lambert isn't aware of anyone else that stacks up against his number – even if it is on a technicality.
"I know a couple of guys who have been doing it longer, you know, maybe 100 days or 200 days longer … but unfortunately, these guys, both of them travelled overseas, going through America," he said.
"And when you take that flight, of course, you lose a day and so the bird app goes back to zero."
The streak started on a holiday after Mr Lambert was convinced to start tracking his bird sightings in one of the largest online biodiversity data resources, which helps scientists better understand where birds are flocking and how they exist in the world.
He got to 35 days, and then 50.
"After 100 days of birding, I thought well, I may as well try to go for one whole year … And sure enough, I got to that," he said.
"I didn't really want to stop. It's like, what's the point now if I break the streak, it'll go back to zero. And then I just start all over again. So I just keep doing it."
Pilot and fellow twitcher Josh Moody, from Darwin, once attempted his own birdwatching streak.
It lasted an impressive 41 days.
Sustaining any kind of daily habit is a tough grind, but when it involves being outdoors during northern Australia's most testing months of heatwaves and debilitating humidity, Mr Moody said the effort was "phenomenal".
"[James] goes to some extents to get them done," Mr Moody said.
"I wouldn't even begin to think how much of an effort he does to get up and [go bird watching every day]. Some morning's he's up at 5am, some days he's out until 9pm.
"In this heat, I'm like, mate how do you do it?"
A global network of citizen scientists
Not long ago, Mr Lambert ticked off a wish-list bird — a rare sighting on the Casuarina Coastal Reserve in northern Darwin, where he often treks before work at Charles Darwin University where he works as a researcher engagement officer.
As he trained his binoculars towards the buff-sided robin, a tiny bird that hadn't been spotted in the region for nearly 10 years, he pulled out his smartphone, not to make a call, but to feed vital information into the network.
There's now so many twitchers globally, scientists have changed the way they record and study birds.
"The way [scientists] used to record migrating birds was to catch them and band them, and then try and catch them again at the other end," Mr Lambert said.
"Nowadays, you don't need to do that … all of us bird watchers are citizen scientists inputting data, which then is helping in bird conservation."
