There was another complication. All four parking spaces were filled; more cars perched along the narrow shoulder of the park road. The other vehicles had telltale stickers: Sacramento Audubon, Tucson Audubon. Komito wondered: Am I late? I hope I’m not too late.
The trail wasn’t exactly a trail. It looked more like a hard-packed cattle run—and smelled like it, too. Meadowlarks darted through the brush, but Komito ignored them. He had only one bird on his mind.
Three hundred yards up the path, two men were crisscrossing the mesquite. They looked as if they were searching for something—a lost hat, maybe, or even a flower or a butterfly. Komito guessed otherwise.
“Have you seen the bird?” he called to them.
“No,” one replied.
Komito loved it. In the brambles of the Arizona desert, he had found complete strangers who understood, and spoke, his intentionally vague language.
Though Big Years were intensely competitive, Komito preferred to join a gaggle chasing rare species. Sure, working in a crowd meant that many people would identify and list the same bird. But to Komito, all these other people were more than just birders. They were witnesses. Top birders have closely watched each other for years, and many suspected some of fraud. In fact, the nastiest, most personal fights in the history of North American birding had come over disputed sightings.
Komito had no time during a Big Year to slog through one of those quagmires, but he did expect at some point to come face-to-face with questionable characters. In a contest built on trust, credibility was like virginity—it could be lost only once. Komito wanted more than a Big Year record. He wanted a Big Year record that was bulletproof.
Up the trail, other birders worked the scrub. Komito recognized two.
Dr. Michael Austin was a general practitioner who had moved a few years ago from his native Ontario to South Texas to get easier shots at hard birds. His strategy had worked: now he had seen more species than all but fifteen birders on the continent. While Komito was watching the sun rise over breakfast at Denny’s, Austin was already out in the field, searching for the flycatcher.
The other birding acquaintance coursing the brush was Dr. Craig Roberts, an emergency-room physician from Tillamook, Oregon. Roberts was an intense man who, in the birding version of machismo, told others how he had spent hours memorizing tapes of birdsongs and chip notes. When Komito told jokes, Roberts rolled his eyes.
Behind a bush Komito saw one member of the search party pointing a Plexiglas dish; the contraption was supposed to amplify faraway birdcalls. So far, no luck. Komito tilted back his head to scan the high mesquite branches. His neck was so accustomed to this exercise that it had bulged in size from fourteen and a half inches to seventeen inches. Among birders, this peculiar condition was known as warbler neck—spending too much time looking up at treetops for darting songbirds.
Suddenly somebody hollered, “I’ve got the bird!”
Komito ran. His binoculars slapped his chest. What if the bird flew off? His cross-continent hunt closed to its last hundred yards. His stomach knotted. He ran harder.
Bird still there?
Slow down!
Now he was close. The last thing he wanted was to scare it off. Gasping, sweating, heart pounding, he edged ahead on tiptoes.
Twenty feet in front of Komito was Craig Roberts. Twenty feet in front of Roberts was a drab bird perching and darting among the thicket. Komito quickly positioned himself with the sun at his back and raised his binoculars. He knew Roberts, a gifted scout of obscure species, was unlikely to misidentify the bird. Still, the Nutting’s flycatcher did look strikingly similar to the ash-throated flycatcher, a far more common bird. Like a cop homing in on a stakeout suspect, Komito hurriedly searched for the distinguishing characteristics—a browner face, rounder head, shorter bill, yellower belly.
Then the bird sang.
“Wheek.”
That call clinched it. Komito grabbed the Nikon from his backpack and rattled off a dozen shots on slide film.
The bird was his, with witnesses and photographic proof. He pulled out a palm-size notebook and wrote: Nutting’s. 1/1/98. Patagonia, Arizona.
He wanted to whoop with joy, but that might scare the bird.
His intensity melted. He stepped back and marveled at the scene around him.
A throbbing, twitching pulse of thirty people had emerged from the mesquite with a collection of the world’s finest optics—Leica, Zeiss, Swarovski, and Kowa—and encircled the flycatcher. Cameras cascaded with clicks and flashes and whirs. This bird had paparazzi.
The irony was hard to resist. In Nogales, the INS had assigned one thousand Border Patrol agents to keep Mexicans out of the United States. But put wings on a lone migrant no larger than a Lonsdale cigar and dozens of people across America formed a pilgrimage to greet it.
Many birders remained with the flycatcher, savoring their glimpses of such a rarity and swapping stories with old friends. Though these postdiscovery klatches were one of the main reasons why Komito loved birding, he glanced at his watch.
Even on the first morning of the first day of his Big Year, Sandy Komito knew time was slipping away. He hustled back to his Ford Taurus.
AL LEVANTIN
Al Levantin had waited forty years for this day. When he toiled in the lab, mixing the chemicals that won two patents for the company, he waited. When he flew one hundred thousand miles a year to sell products for the company, he waited. When he moved his family overseas for seven years to run the European division for the company, he waited. He waited during the weeks when he worked sixty hours, and he waited during the weeks he worked eighty. He waited for his two baby boys to grow into men, and he waited for his wife to become a grandmother.
Now the waiting was over.
He had set his alarm for 6 A.M., but he already lay awake. He looked out the bedroom window. Though the moon was barely a sliver, it was bright enough to reveal the outline, just beyond his aspen stand, of Snowmass ski mountain. He didn’t want to wake his wife, so he didn’t turn on the bedroom light. It was dark, but he knew where he was going.
Today he would set out on his quest to break the North American birdwatching record.
From his closet he grabbed a sweater and headed for the kitchen. Levantin lived in a spectacular home. Built on seven timbered acres along a ridge of the Elk Mountains near Aspen, the house was one of those architectural marvels that appeared to ramble across several county lines while still feeling all warm and intimate on the inside. The hallway and dining-room floors were made of brown flagstone, with hot-water pipes beneath to keep naked toes cozy even in the depths of a Colorado winter. You couldn’t move anywhere in this house—the stairway, a hallway, an office area—without passing some vast window with some breathtaking view. Ceilings were high and vaulted, with husky wood beams, and a fireplace gaped large enough to swallow unsplit logs. Levantin walked into his kitchen—floor of cherry planks, Sub-Zero that could ice a Volkswagen—and fired up the coffeemaker. It had taken eighteen months to build this place, six more than planned, but the results were worth it. Sometimes there were perks for waiting.
He picked up his Leica binoculars and Kowa scope and followed the covered outdoor passageway to the garage. No fresh snow last night. From an elevation of nine thousand feet, stars seemed to spill everywhere.
The gate at the end of the road opened automatically when his Audi approached. He goosed the gas. He wanted to be in a certain spot before the sun edged over the Continental Divide.
Levantin had Highway 82 all to himself. Most people in the Roaring Fork Valley did not rise before dawn. Some didn’t sleep before dawn. They came here for Aspen, eight miles up the road, where Marla told Ivana that Donald was hers and Kennedys tossed footballs on the slopes and Goldie and Kurt and Don and Melanie and Barbi and Arnold and Jack all pranced for the cameras. Last night, Levantin had been at a small dinner party, with Ethel, his wife of thirty-eight years. At 10 P.M., mountain standard time, they turned on the TV to w
atch the New Year arrive at Times Square in New York. They were home in bed by 11 P.M.
Where the highway curved, his headlights strayed beyond the road onto the river below. Steam rose. There were other places in North America—the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the mountains of southeast Arizona, Cape May of New Jersey—where birders were so thick that a flycatcher could barely lift a wing without having its every movement broadcast around the world on the Internet. But Aspen was uncharted territory for a birder. Levantin liked it that way. A self-made man in business, he was determined to be a self-made man in birding. That meant a Big Year on his own terms. Others started a Big Year in some big birding hot spot; Levantin insisted on being with his wife for New Year’s. Others hired guides to ease the discovery of rare birds; Levantin wanted to find everything himself. Others depended on the advice of veterans; Levantin relied on his own wits. What was the point of going for a personal record if everyone else was going along, too?
Finally the black of night washed into gray. For the first time he could see beyond his headlights, the red of the river walls, the snow on the box elder branches. Then he saw: not all that white on the tree was snow. He slowed his Audi and raised his Leicas.
A bald eagle! Levantin beamed. It wasn’t exactly a rarity, and there definitely were other birders, the grizzled types, who would shrug off this bird as a commoner, but Levantin was not so world-weary. A bald eagle on a tree above the Roaring Fork River in the snow on New Year’s Day—that was magnificent.
Gray gloom in the valley gave way to yellow warmth, and birds moved into the light. It was the magic hour: an American dipper in a river eddy, an evening grosbeak atop a willow, a red-tailed hawk spiraling a thermal—nature was rising. Black-billed magpie. Black-capped chickadee. Dark-eyed junco. Levantin was making his list—birds spotted today wouldn’t have to be spotted again for the rest of the year—but he could hardly keep up. American coot, American goldfinch, American kestrel. He looked down to scrawl the names in his notebook. He looked up and saw a merlin, diving, and he wrote that, too. Out flitted a northern flicker. The birds came faster than his fingers could move.
He stopped.
He heard no phones. He wore no tie. He took no meeting.
From the soul of a company man, forty years of repressed obsession was simmering into the dawn mist of the Roaring Fork River.
Al Levantin was free.
In the area around Aspen, there were two kinds of life—up-valley and down-valley. Up-valley was home of the resorts, Snowmass, Ajax, Highlands, and Buttermilk, where the skiing was rivaled only by the shopping, and the air-kisses by day became tabloid headlines at night. They used to say that tourism was king here, but locals knew better. Real estate ruled. In Aspen, the average home cost $3 million, and nearly one of ten city residents had a license to sell it. Real estate offices were so abundant that boutique owners complained they were killing downtown’s street ambience; the city council debated whether to slap a quota on the number of brokerages permitted on Main Street. City lots were so expensive that people paid $4 million to buy a house, tear it down, and build a new one in its place.
Of course, few Aspenites had calloused hands from any actual tearing down or building. Those people, the worker bees, were down-valley. In El Jebel, Mexican families lived in shifts in $1,200 a-month trailers; one year of demolition work in Aspen earned them enough to buy their own house south of the border. The store managers and chefs lived in Blue Lake, where three-bedroom, two-bathroom tract homes cost $400,000. The $260,000 town houses at the Ranch at Roaring Fork were filled with framers, electricians, and tilers. Auto mechanics, however, remained a problem. Once a week a garage had to fly in mechanics 160 miles from Denver just to work on Range Rovers.
Up-valley and down-valley were linked by four lanes of Highway 82. This worried Levantin. In a few minutes, the maids, busboys, and dishwashers from down-valley would start funneling onto Highway 82 for the bumper-to-bumper grind to their up-valley jobs. The Roaring Fork rush hour could be so nasty that the Colorado State Patrol installed roadside signs with a simple message—Road Rage: *CSP—that was punched in repeatedly by frustrated commuters. Levantin didn’t want to be caught in that mess. So he quickly scoped Blue Lake for ducks and cruised the Missouri Heights for hawks and jays in the piñon and juniper. He tallied thirty-two species before turning back up-valley.
Just outside the El Jebowl bowling lanes—“The Most Fun You Can Have With Your Shoes On,” where a vacationing Diana once picked up spares with Harry and William—traffic congealed. This meant Levantin had to pay more attention to cars than birds. By the time he finally reached Woody Creek, Levantin felt his watch ticking against him. His twenty-five-mile return up-valley seemed to take forever. He knew the best part of his day was supposed to come next, but he hadn’t counted on racing the clock to enjoy it.
It was 10:30 A.M. Levantin hustled home and buckled a stiff plastic ski boot onto his left foot while keeping a shoe on his right. This was an old trick. He used his shoe to brake and accelerate his car up the twists and turns of Snowmelt Drive—the whole road was heated with underground coils to ward off icy spots—and parked at the base of the ski mountain. Now he had to squeeze into only one ski boot; doing half the job in the comfort of his house had saved him five minutes of awkward foot-stomping in the parking lot.
At the base of the Fanny Hill lift, the wild life of Snowmass, two-legged variety, strutted in full display. There were Spyder suits on lady-killers and goose down over chicken hearts, with even a few mink and ermine on the side. Though loud colors were the fashion statement this season, Levantin wore plain black pants and a dull blue coat. He sported one unique accessory around his neck—binoculars.
Al Levantin usually bubbled with a Boy Scout’s enthusiasm, but skis made him more excited. He did not like to ride ski lifts alone. He loved stories, both telling them and hearing them, and a ride up the mountain with a stranger was a great way to indulge one of his favorite treats. He enjoyed meeting new people so much that, after making vice president of an $8-billion company, he still volunteered to work as a greeter at the base of the ski mountain. He teased. He started conversations with young women by saying, “I’m an old man. I can’t flirt.” He was sixty-six years old, but often accused of lying about his age. With an outdoorsy pink in his cheeks, slate-blue eyes, and shoulders that still packed some muscle, he looked fifty. He acted thirty. He had charisma.
Skiing and birding were the two things Levantin loved most about Colorado. That’s why, when he’d mapped out this day months ago, he’d decided to become the first birder in history to launch a Big Year from skis. To hell with how everyone else said a Big Year should be done. He was having fun.
Halfway up the mountain, as skiers glided off the Fanny Hill lift, ski area greeters passed out free cookies. Levantin took one and waited. He had a plan. Sure enough, something moved in the aspens. A Clark’s nutcracker, gray body with distinctive black wings, swooped down into the snow to scoop up cookie crumbs. Levantin smiled. Unless you knew the right places, a Clark’s could be a tricky species to find in winter.
Bird bagged, Levantin hopped on the adjoining Coney Glade lift. Just below was the Spider Sabich Ski Racing Arena, named after the Olympic ski racer shot to death by his live-in lover, Claudine Longet. The O.J. of the seventies, Longet had paid for her crime with only thirty days in a specially redecorated Aspen jail cell, then ran off with her married defense lawyer and became the butt of endless Saturday Night Live skits.
The two-lift shuttle up Snowmass mountain took ten minutes. Levantin was itching to get off his duff. He cut a quick left from the lift and pointed his skis downhill. Hands up, elbows out, and a grin on his face, Levantin blasted down the Max Park run. He was a ferocious skier, diving straight for the fall line and throwing up a rooster tail of conquered snow with each carved turn. There was no subtlety in his style—he looked like a fullback on ice. He had the strength to streak downhill at forty-five miles per hour but the grace to hold his kne
es close enough to keep any sunlight from peeking through. Anyone who saw Al Levantin on skis wondered how he ever qualified for an AARP card.
With perfect timing, he hockey-stopped at the Ullrhof mountain cafeteria just as skiers started carrying their trays outside for lunch. The arrival of the day’s first french fries on the restaurant deck was exactly what Levantin had come to see. A diner raised a fry up high and a gray jay darted from the trees to sweep it out of his hand. Levantin could have wasted a half day in some wild forest in a long and arduous search for this species, but why bother? Ten thousand feet up the Colorado Rockies, the gray jays of Snowmass behaved as if they were seagulls on a Coney Island boardwalk.
Levantin skied past the decks at Gwyn’s High Alpine and Café Suzanne, but saw only Steller’s jays and mountain chickadees. Though Levantin needed those common birds, they weren’t what he had in mind. Snowmass was home to something better.
He tucked down the Adams Avenue catwalk to his car, which he drove this time with two shoes. Now it was payoff time. For the past two years, whenever he’d met anyone in Snowmass who’d expressed the slightest interest in birds, Levantin had returned with a housewarming present—a bird feeder. This was partly because Levantin hoped others would share his love of birds. But he had an ulterior motive. He wanted rosy-finches. Good birders coveted rosy-finches. Fickle and frustrating, the gray-crowned, brown-capped, and black rosy-finch lived most of the year in extremely hard-to-reach places, the tundra of Alaska or the steepest scree fields of the Rockies. During some winters, though, hundreds and hundreds of rosy-finches converged on the much more accessible and comfortable slopes of Snowmass. Why this happened, Levantin couldn’t say. He also couldn’t explain why, in other winters, the rosy-finches just didn’t show up. But if Levantin could keep salting his neighborhood with bird feeders, then maybe, just maybe, he could have his own secret stash of one of North America’s flittiest birds.
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Page 2