The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Read online

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  Copyright © 2004 by Mark Obmascik

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  Designed by Helene Berinsky

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Obmascik, Mark.

  The big year : a tale of man, nature, and fowl obsession / Mark Obmascik.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. 251). 1. Bird watchers—Anecdotes. 2. Bird watching—Anecdotes. 3. Birds—Counting—Anecdotes. I. Title.

  QL677.5.O27 2004

  598′.07′234—dc22 2003062421

  eISBN 978-1-43910-745-4

  To Merrill

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1. January 1, 1998

  2. A Birder Is Hatched

  3. The Early Birds

  4. Strategy

  5. Bodega Bluff

  6. Whirlwind

  7. El Niño

  8. The Wise Owl

  9. Yucatán Express

  10. The Big Yak

  11. The Cradle of Storms

  12. The B.O.D.

  13. Doubt

  14. Forked

  15. Conquest

  16. Cape Hatteras Clincher

  17. Two in the Bush

  18. Nemesis

  19. Honorbound

  20. December 31, 1998

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  The first time I met a real birder, I couldn’t tell a tit from a tattler.

  I was a cub newspaper reporter, stuck on the graveyard shift and scrambling for some way, any way, to get off. If I wasn’t chasing some awful car accident, I was hustling to find the relatives of a homeless man slashed in a railyard knife fight. Nobody was happy.

  Then one night, an anonymous call came in to the Denver Post newsroom.

  There’s a man right here in Colorado, the caller told me, who is one of the world’s foremost experts on birds. He’s a law professor and he’s old, and you should write something about him before he dies. His name is Thompson Marsh.

  A chance to work among the living? I grabbed it. I called Professor Marsh the next day.

  Professor Marsh, however, never called back. This really bugged me. In my line of work, even grieving widows returned phone messages. Surely a man who was one of the best in his field would want to talk, even if his field was a bit goofy. I decided to chase the story.

  Slowly, from some of his friends, a picture emerged: Thompson Marsh was a birdwatcher possessed. To chase rare birds, he would rise before dawn on weekends. He would take expensive vacations on desolate Alaskan isles and pray for foul weather. He would wait for phone calls in the middle of the night, then rush to the airport for the next red-eye flight. Only five others in history had seen more species of birds in North America.

  He managed to do all this while becoming a lawyer so sharp, so demanding, that many of his former students still felt intimidated by him. When Thompson Marsh was hired by the University of Denver in 1927, he was the nation’s youngest law professor. Now he was eighty-two and the nation’s oldest, having worked the same job for fifty-eight years. Some days he still walked the four miles from his home to class. A few years back, he conquered all fifty-four of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains.

  But the old coot wouldn’t pick up a phone to call me.

  To hell with him, I decided—until his wife unexpectedly called and arranged a meeting at their home.

  I rang the doorbell on time, and his wife sat me down on the couch and poured tea. Behind her, in a room facing the garden, I spotted a tall, thin man with a shock of silver hair—the birdman himself.

  I stood and offered a handshake, but it wasn’t accepted. The master legal orator looked down at the floor and said nothing.

  His wife apologetically explained there would be no interview.

  “He is a bit embarrassed by it all,” Susan Marsh told me. “For some reason, he thinks it’s a little silly. Why, I don’t know.”

  Actually, she did know. The professor was a proud man who had been thinking about his newspaper obituary, and he didn’t want to do anything now to change the story. Or, as his wife eventually confided, “He wants to be known as an attorney, not a birder.”

  Thompson Marsh, browbeater of future judges, was struck mute by a bird.

  I returned to my newsroom and wrote a general story about the quirky world of competitive birdwatching and then moved on to covering murders and politicians and other typically depressing newspaper subjects. But my memory of that famed law professor, fidgeting horribly before a twenty-three-year-old reporter, still nagged me. What was it about birdwatching that gave a man such joy and discomfort?

  I couldn’t let the question go. Over the years I learned more about birds and their lovers, and I wrote the strange stories with glee. There was a Baikal teal that caused an international stir by wandering from its native lake in Siberia to a creek behind a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop outside Denver. There was a biologist who implanted microchips in geese so he could track the spring migration from New Mexico to the Arctic by computer from the comfort of his home. There even were twitters about a new species of grouse—North America’s first new bird species in a century!—having sex in the sagebrush somewhere in the Utah high country.

  Slowly but certainly I realized I wasn’t just pursuing stories about birdwatchers. I was pursuing the birds, too. Marsh’s obsession was becoming mine. My relentless pursuit of a rare subspecies of law professor had tapped a trait repressed deep in my character.

  I needed to see and conquer.

  This is not a unique craving. In the course of civilization, others have responded to that same fundamental urge by sailing uncharted oceans, climbing tall mountains, or walking on the moon.

  Me, I watch birds.

  Today I stroll in the park and I no longer see plain birds. I see gadwalls and buffleheads and, if I’m really on a hot streak, a single old squaw. A road trip finds me watching the sky as much as the pavement. It gets harder to pass a sewage treatment pond, that notorious bird magnet, without pulling out my binoculars. When somebody cries, “Duck!” I look up.

  No longer is it accurate to call me a birdwatcher, a term the pros use to dismiss the spinsters and retired British army colonels who wait passively for birds to come to them. I have become an enthusiast, a chaser—a birder.

  If Thompson Marsh were still alive—he died in 1992, at the age of eighty-nine, from injuries in a car accident on a birding trip—he might even talk to me. He was, after all, my first truly tough bird.

  Today I can say without hesitation that there are seven kinds of tits (Siberian, bridled, bush, juniper, oak, tufted, and wren) and two tattlers (gray-tailed and wandering), but I can’t say this knowledge impresses anyone, certainly not my wife.

  Why this happened to me, I can’t easily explain. It’s never been very manly to talk about feelings, especially when these feelings involve birds. But put me on a mountain stream with our two sons and give us a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse, of a bald eagle, and it’s hard to tell who’s more excited—the four-, seven- or forty-year
-old. I watch a hummingbird dive-bomb a feeder outside our kitchen window and marvel at its grace and energy; I pull out a birding field guide and learn that this finger-sized creature probably sipped tropical blossoms a few weeks ago in Guatemala, and I’m awed by the miracle of migration. On the prowl through the pines in the middle of the night, I hoot a few times through my cupped hands and wait. From the trees above, I detect wingbeats, then a returned hoot. It’s an owl! Move over, Dr. Dolittle. I’m talking to the animals.

  Birding is one of the few activities you can do from the window of a Manhattan skyscraper or the tent flap of an Alaskan bush camp; its easy availability may explain why it can become so consuming. There are one-of-a-kind birds living on the streets of St. Louis, below a dam in Texas, and amid the suburban sprawl of Southern California. One of the earth’s greatest avian populations—with 3 million birds passing through each day during spring migration—is in New Jersey, just off the Garden State Parkway.

  Birding is hunting without killing, preying without punishing, and collecting without clogging your home. Take a field guide into the woods and you’re more than a hiker. You’re a detective on a backcountry beat, tracking the latest suspect from Mexico, Antarctica, or even the Bronx. Spend enough time sloshing through swamps or scaling summits or shuffling through beach sand and you inevitably face a tough question: Am I a grown-up birder or just another kid on a treasure hunt?

  During certain periods of our lives, the world believes it’s perfectly acceptable to collect rocks or seashells or baseball cards.

  The truth is that everyone has obsessions.

  Most people manage them.

  Birders, however, indulge them.

  By the time you find yourself compiling lists and downloading software to manage, massage, and count birds, you—well, I—have become a hopeless addict.

  As I spend another winter night by the fire, fingering David Sibley’s 545-page birding guide and trying to memorize the field marks of thirty-five separate North American sparrow species, I’m jarred from self-absorption to self-doubt: Am I weird? Am I crazy? Am I becoming Thompson Marsh?

  There is, I decide, only one way to fully understand my condition. If birding is an obsession that takes root in a wild crag of the soul, I need to learn how strong it can grow. I need to study the most obsessed of the obsessed.

  I need to meet the birders of the Big Year.

  The Big Year

  ONE

  January 1, 1998

  SANDY KOMITO

  Sandy Komito was ready. It was an hour before sunrise, New Year’s Day, and he sat alone at an all-night Denny’s in Nogales, Arizona. He ordered ham and eggs. He stared into the black outside the window.

  At this stage in his life, he knew men who lusted for a new wife or a Porsche or even a yacht. Komito had no interest.

  What he wanted was birds.

  For the coming year he would dedicate himself to a singular goal—spotting more species of birds in North America than any human in history. He knew it wouldn’t be easy. He expected to be away from home 270 of the next 365 days chasing winged creatures around the continent. There were ptarmigans to trail on the frozen spine of the Continental Divide in Colorado and hummingbirds to hunt in the heat of the Arizona desert. He would prowl the moonlight for owls in the North Woods of Minnesota and wade the beaches of South Florida at dawn for boobies. He planned to race after birds by boat in Nova Scotia, by bicycle in the Aleutian Islands, and by helicopter in Nevada. Sleep was not a priority, but when it came, he would be tossing in the army bunks of Alaska and turning on the rolling waves of the Dry Tortugas.

  This was, after all, a competition, and Komito wanted to win.

  He ordered his second thermos of coffee and spread paperwork across his place mat. One sheet was an Internet printout of a North American rare-bird alert from Houston. The other was a regional alert from Tucson. Komito smiled. There were more rare birds spotted last week in southeastern Arizona than anywhere else on the continent.

  His gut told him that this chain restaurant was the right place to start. He’d eaten in so many Denny’s over the years that he didn’t have to waste time with a menu. Besides, other birders reported that the trees around this Denny’s were roosts for the great-tailed grackle and black vulture. Either of these fine local birds, Komito decided, would be a wonderful launch for his year.

  From his window Komito watched the horizon lighten with the gray promise of dawn. Little moved.

  Across from the restaurant, though, a freight train suddenly rammed through the quiet. All the ruckus made something take wing outside and land just beyond his window.

  Komito’s heart raced: it was his first bird of the competition!

  He lurched forward for the identification.

  Plump … gray … head bobbing.

  “It’s a damn pigeon,” he muttered.

  Every year on January 1, hundreds of people abandon their dayto day lives to join one of the world’s quirkiest contests. Their goal: spotting the most species of birds in a single year. Most contestants limit themselves to the birds of their home county. Others chase birds only within the borders of their home state. But the grandest birding competition of them all, the most grueling, the most expensive, and occasionally the most vicious, sprawls over an entire continent.

  It is called the Big Year.

  In a Big Year, there are few rules and no referees. Birders just fly, drive, or boat anytime, anywhere in the continental United States and Canada, to chase a rumor of a rare species. Sometimes birders manage to photograph their prey, but usually they just jot down sightings in notebooks and hope other competitors believe them. At the end of the year, contestants forward their self-reported species totals to the American Birding Association, which publishes the results in a magazine-sized document that generates more gossip than an eighth-grade locker room.

  In a good year the contest offers passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental craving to see and conquer mixed with an unstoppable yearning for victory.

  In a bad year the contest costs a lot of money and leaves people raw.

  This is the story of the greatest—or maybe the worst—birding competition of all time, the 1998 North American Big Year.

  Nutting’s flycatcher is a small, plain, grayish brown bird, native to Central Mexico. Its cry is distinct. It says, “Wheek.” The last time this rarity was confirmed in the wilds north of the border, Harry Truman was president and Jackie Robinson was slugging his first home run in an All-Star game. But in mid-December 1997, a birder hiking along an irrigation reservoir near Nogales, Arizona, saw the flycatcher and reported it to the local Maricopa Audubon chapter in Phoenix.

  Maricopa Audubon flagged the news on the Internet; the Tucson Rare Bird Alert posted a message on its twenty-four-hour phone number; the North American Rare Bird Alert in Houston started phoning people on its High Alert subscriber list.

  From 2,400 miles away, at his home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, Sandy Komito answered the call. It was the sighting of the Nutting’s flycatcher, above all other birds, that had convinced him to begin his Big Year in Nogales.

  He left Denny’s and drove through the hills of prickly pear and mesquite until reaching the gates of Patagonia Lake State Park.

  A ranger greeted him.

  “Five dollars, please,” she told Komito.

  Komito had already spent hundreds of dollars on airline tickets, car rental, and motel room just to be here. But he had worked years as a New Jersey industrial contractor and he knew how to get things done. So he put a little sweetening in a deep voice that, back home, could startle work crews on the far end of a factory rooftop.

  “Oh, I’m just a birder,” Komito told the ranger. “I’m here to look for one bird. I’ll only be here ten minutes. Do I really have to pay five dollars?” he asked, trying to take advantage of the park’s unofficial policy of free entry for people who drive through and stay less than fifteen minutes.

  The ranger stared him down. His bargainin
g routine hardly ever worked, but he still made a game of it.

  From the Web, Komito had downloaded precise instructions on how to find the bird: “Turn right at the bottom of the hill and go through the campground. Where the loop turns around, there is a trailhead and about four parking spaces. Park here and walk in about one-third of a mile. On the left is the lake and willows; the bird is usually on the right in mesquite.”

  Komito found the parking area and felt suddenly, uncharacteristically nervous. His car, for one thing, was all wrong. For years, he had rented a Lincoln Town Car on all out-of-state expeditions. This helped pigeonhole his reputation among birders as the loud wisecracker from New Jersey who barreled around in a giant land barge. For this Big Year, though, Komito had converted to midsize rentals. His thinking was simple: to stretch his travel budget, he would spend money on miles, not comfort, and a less prestigious car was cheaper than a Lincoln. Still, birding was all about classifying creatures—long-eared owls always had long ears, and shorteared owls always had short ears—and now he was abruptly changing his own personal field mark. Was the birding world ready for Sandy Komito, Ford Taurus man?