In 2013, Boston birder Neil Hayward traveled almost 250,000 miles by plane, car, boat, and kayak, as well as almost 10 feet vertically up a tree (where, you’ll be glad to hear, he successfully navigated his way back down). His quixotic quest: to see birds. His peregrinations took him to the corners of this vast continent: Barrow in the leaden, frozen north; the Dry Tortugas, dangling off the Florida Keys to the south; Newfoundland, poking out to the east; and tiny Adak, an island adrift in the volcanic Aleutian chain of the west. And a place they call New Jersey. By the year’s end, he’d netted some 749 species of bird and broken an historic record many thought was unbreakable.

Neil Hayward is a lifelong birder with a passion for science and travel. He grew up in the UK, where birding ranks high among soccer, tea, and sarcasm as national pastimes. After gaining a Ph.D. in genetics at Cambridge University, he joined a start-up biotech company and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the managing director for the US business. He also brought his binoculars and quickly started using them. In 2011, he left his job to set up his own biotechnology consulting company. Neil will speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Monday, July 18, and will sign copies of his new book Lost Among the Birds. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.