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SWFL Woman Completes Birding Big Year

Yve Morrell
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Instagram
A Mistle Thrush in Miramichi, New Brunswick on Dec. 13, 2017.

A big year, at least amongst birders, is an unofficial competition to see who can see or hear the most species of birds within a given geographical area. This can be done within a state, country or, even, the world.

For one Naples woman, completing her Florida big year with 326 species spotted in 2016 wasn't enough. So, Yve Morrell ventured out across North America to complete an American Birding Association big year.

Now that she's done traveling the equivalent distance of five times around the world, Morrell joins Gulf Coast Live to talk about how her big year went and just how many birds she was able to tally.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.