A week before World Series day, members of the Philadelphia-based Lagerhead Shrikes team drive slowly along backroads in the northwestern corner of New Jersey, past white-frame farmhouses with homemade signs out front reading "Fresh Eggs For Sale." Rolling pastureland spreads beneath the long ridge of Kittatinny Mountain, where dogwoods bloom in the newly greened forest, mayapples unfold their umbrella leaves, and skunk cabbages stand knee-high in the spruce bogs. The woodsy incongruity of all this is such a local cliche that it ought to be on road signs: "Welcome to Sussex County—Where It Doesn't Look Like New Jersey."

Team captain Paul Guris chats and listens out his van window simultaneously, which means his conversation is punctuated with "Hear that? Scarlet tanager," and "Blue-headed vireo off to the right." Guris is explaining the great irony of the World Series of Birding: Nobody—at least nobody with a chance of winning—does any actual birdwatching during the competition. "On the big day you don't want to be birding," he says. "You want to be counting the birds you already found."

For days, even weeks, before the event, teams scout locations and plan a route, trying to pin down the spot where a yellow-bellied sapsucker regularly taps its bongo-drum rhythm, looking for a lingering loon or a reliably loquacious bobwhite. An ideal strategy never requires a team to get more then 50 feet from its vehicle, making the typical World Series day about as much of a wilderness experience as a suburban mail route. The drill: Stop at a site where scouting has located a needed species. Hop out. See or hear the bird. Drive on. Repeat for 24 hours.

"The biggest problem for teams trying to move up to the next level is time management," says Guris—not coincidentally, a software designer. Inexperienced teams spend an extra five minutes here, an extra ten minutes there, trying for birds that don't appear promptly—and at the end of the day, they run out of time. "We compete through route discipline," Guris says, "because we're up against teams that are better birders than we are." The Shrikes' disciplinarian (less politely, "list Nazi") is Bert Filemyr, an affable retired schoolteacher who doesn't mind the job of keeping the team focused and on schedule. "You've gotta have somebody who'll be a pain in the ass," he says. Whatever ornithosadism Filemyr practices must work: The Shrikes have won the World Series six times.

Not in 2006, though. That year, the Sapsuckers—the team representing the prestigious Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology—won with 229 species, ten better than the second-place team. In baseball terms, this would be equivalent to taking the World Series four games to zip, and in fact the Sapsuckers' big win has created the tiniest bit of tension in this friendly little birdwatching game.