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

by Mark Obmascik

  For a five-year-old, temptations were everywhere. Every morning by nine, Levantin had to walk down three floors of tenement stairs and along Eastburn Avenue to P.S. 70. On the corner was the market. The market was a problem. Through the window at the market he could see the box of Chunky candy bars, chocolate and raisins and nuts, positioned in that same prominent spot on the counter. Every day he passed that window, and every day he looked inside. Levantin’s buddies got to go in for a Chunky.

  When the afternoon school bell rang, Levantin faced a choice: he could go home to an empty apartment and work on the pluses and minuses of single-digit arithmetic, or he could play outside. Levantin usually played. He was bigger than most other neighborhood kids, and he learned to use his bulk in basketball to box out for rebounds and put-backs. There was one problem: he didn’t own a basketball. For a family that couldn’t afford a Chunky bar, a ball was out of the question. If Levantin wanted to play basketball, he had to learn to be nice to the boys who owned the basketball. Levantin became a good basketball player.

  He also excelled at the ultimate New York street game, stickball. In the blocks around 175th and the Grand Concourse, Levantin was known as a two-sewer guy—standing in the street with a broomstick, he could belt a pink rubber ball beyond the second manhole cover. A few other players were three-sewer guys, but those bombers weren’t as skilled at place-hitting the Spalding between cars and off the fire escapes.

  By 6:30 P.M., the D train brought his mother home. Mother and son ate dinner together and fell asleep in separate beds in the same bedroom. In Levantin’s world, a man was something that existed elsewhere. His mother hardly ever dated, and all signs of his deadbeat father were banished from the apartment. Levantin had no idea what his father even looked like.

  One day Levantin came home talking about the Boy Scouts. His mother was thrilled. In the Scouts, her only child might find a man to look up to. Besides, the Scouts met at his local Mount Eden Synagogue—and joining hardly cost anything.

  The Boy Scouts changed Al Levantin. For the first time, he learned about camping and hiking, fishing and swimming, finding stars in the sky and minerals in the ground. All these things happened someplace outside the Bronx. In his whole life, he had been outside the Bronx only on day trips to visit relatives in New Jersey. But Levantin could read about life outside the Bronx in his Boy Scouts handbook. So he read. And he dreamed.

  One day the impossible became possible: Levantin was going away to summer Boy Scout camp. How this happened, he never knew. He had no connections, and his mother had no money. Levantin was afraid to ask for an explanation. But for eight weeks in the summer of 1945, he lived at Camp Ranachqua. It was only a three-hour trip by bus, but it may as well have been on a different planet. Camp Ranachqua was where the Boy Scouts handbook became more than a book. It was the first time Levantin ever spent the night outside the Bronx. He slept under the stars and swam in the lake and hiked through the Catskills. There were no sirens. There was no yelling. He could shoot an arrow at Ranachqua farther than he could slug a Spalding on Eastburn Avenue. He learned enough about birds to earn the birdwatching merit badge. At the beginning of camp, he knew nobody. At the end, he had dozens of friends. He didn’t want to leave.

  When he did finally return home, he was a birdwatcher possessed. With his mother still balancing books at the lingerie factory, Levantin had afternoons to himself and occupied his time chasing sparrows and warblers through the Bronx Botanical Garden and Van Cortlandt Park. While at DeWitt Clinton High School, Levantin joined his first Audubon Christmas Bird Count and learned there were lots of other people who chased birds not for a Boy Scout medal, but just because they loved it. He tooled around the city with guys named Marshall and Arnold—the same people Sandy Komito joined in the field. Komito lived only a mile from Levantin and was in the class of 1949, one year ahead of Levantin, at DeWitt Clinton. The two now believe they must have birded together as boys, though neither can remember the other. It may have been the first and only time Komito on a birding expedition failed to make a lasting impression.

  Levantin’s grades and test scores were good enough to win admission to the tuition-free City College of New York; he studied chemistry because the campus offering that was closest to his home. Within weeks after graduation, he was drafted into the army. He served sixteen months as a weatherman in Alaska and became preoccupied with life outside New York. He enrolled at the University of Kansas for a doctorate in chemistry, but the theoreticals and philosophicals of academic life drove him crazy. He quit his doctoral studies after one year, but succeeded in riding a bicycle for the first time. He was twenty-four.

  For his third date with a Queens woman named Ethel, he suggested they go to Jones Beach. She thought he wanted to see her in a swimsuit; he brought along his binoculars and tried to teach her birding. She cared about him, not birds. They married in 1959.

  He took a job in Philadelphia as a laboratory chemist for Rohm and Haas, the international chemical giant with the slogan: While few consumers know us, few industries don’t. In his first two years he won two patents for coatings that prevent paint from chipping on cars. He was enthusiastic about his work, but the lab chemicals soon took a toll. Levantin lost his sense of smell. Luckily, his bosses learned that Levantin had a rare skill: he was good with chemicals, but even better with people. They started sending him on the road to meet customers. He was pulling in good money, but had to travel fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand miles a year, leaving his wife alone with their two sons. All that weekday travel made him feel too guilty to take off again on weekends to go birding. He tried to teach his sons about shorebirds in the marshes at the Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, but the boys only wanted to play in the watchtower. He tried to show them hawks in fall migration at the Bake Oven Knob area near Allentown, but the boys amused themselves climbing rocks. When the family went to the beach, he could only spend so much time under the umbrella with binoculars.

  Little by little, Levantin stopped birding. He had no time to do it and no one to do it with. His one contact with his boyhood passion remained a subscription to Birding magazine, which he read on planes or at home after the boys were asleep. He also hoarded thirty years of Christmas Bird Count reports from around the country. Though these six-hundred-page documents offered just the basics13 common redpoll, 12/29, Minot, North Dakota—they did tell him the best places to find many species in the dead of winter. Maybe someday he would have time to go there. His book knowledge was growing. His life list was not.

  In the meantime, he climbed the Rohm and Haas ladder. His time in product development turned him into the head of the development group, then manager of Polymers, Resins, and Monomers. The company offered him a chance to run the European division—eight major chemical factories, plus sales forces from the United Kingdom to the USSR, Sweden to South Africa. Levantin moved the family to London, where he worked longer and traveled farther. To strengthen parental bonds, he brought his oldest son on a business trip to a Spanish manufacturing plant, but the teenager came away convinced that his father worked for a polluter.

  When the family returned to Philadelphia in 1985, Levantin’s overseas business experience was a sought-after skill. He was recruited to join the board of another Philadelphia company, CDI, a head-hunting and temporary-staffing corporation anxious to expand in Europe. Levantin, who had never served on a board of directors, was interested in the new experience.

  A few years later, though, Levantin’s existing employer began cutting back. After thirty-three years at Rohm and Haas, Levantin was offered three years’ salary for his early retirement. At age fifty-nine, Al Levantin stopped working.

  His retirement lasted six months. CDI persuaded him to take over a money-losing company division that hired out clerical workers as temps. It was Levantin’s first and only work outside the chemical business. He wore a suit and tie again. He logged long hours again. He acquired a competitor and joined the operations and made hi
s $175-million-a-year division turn its first profit—all in eighteen months. He was proud. He stopped working again.

  His second retirement lasted less than three years. Levantin had moved to Colorado when he got another call from CDI. This time, the subsidiary he had turned around, Today’s Staffing, needed a chief executive to mentor a replacement. This time, Levantin had to live two days a week in Dallas. This time, he worked another two years.

  In October 1997, Levantin retired one more time. The dream house had been built and Ethel was ready to enjoy it. At one point, she pulled out some travel records and did some math and came up with a remarkable conclusion: though Al and Ethel had been married thirty-seven years, they had never—not once—lived together thirty days in a row. While Al was spending all those days on the road, Ethel returned to school, earned her master’s degree, and opened shop as a marriage counselor. In her business, she had seen her share of workaholics.

  Now Al was retired for the third time. All the nights when the kids were running around and Ethel was tired and Al was on the road again—she had been waiting for this time, for just the two of them. But Al had been waiting for something, too.

  When Levantin told his wife that he wanted to take off again and spend a year chasing birds, she wasn’t quite sure what to say. But she knew they had managed to stay married thirty-seven years. Plenty of friends hadn’t. Maybe the key to a marriage, she thought, was keeping it fresh, to let one go off and follow a dream and bring it back home for both of them to celebrate.

  Go for it, Ethel told Al.

  He didn’t need to be told twice.

  THREE

  The Early Birds

  The concept of a Big Year was more than a century in the making. In fact, the urge to see and conquer the birds of North America grew out of a Napoleon complex.

  While the diminutive general was marching his triumphant armies across Europe and the Middle East, a young man named Jean-Jacques Audubon dodged Napoleon’s draft by fleeing France for America.

  The bastard child of a French sea captain and his chambermaid mistress, Audubon was ashamed of his past. He changed his name to John James Audubon soon after arriving in the New World, but then failed at every venture that was supposed to give him a fresh start. He botched the management of his father’s estate in Pennsylvania and was forced to sell it. He opened trading posts in Kentucky and Missouri, but they failed, as did an import business in New Orleans. He built a sawmill on the Ohio River where there was little demand for lumber, and the inevitable shutdown shoved him into personal bankruptcy. He emerged from debtors’ prison in 1819 with only his clothes, his gun—and his watercolor brushes.

  The one thing Audubon excelled at was drawing and painting. As a boy in France, when his father forced him to attend military school, Audubon comforted himself by slipping into the woods with his pastels and drawing paper. Ever the romantic, he reveled in nature. And the most beautiful facet of nature, he concluded, was birds.

  Audubon was obsessed with birds. He painted them when his businesses started and he painted them when his businesses failed. Many suspected that his preoccupation with avian life was the true cause of his financial ruin. At one point, Audubon’s wife, Lucy, lamented in a letter to her sister, “I have a rival in every bird.” Audubon’s fifth business failed. In all his wilderness wanderings, he had discovered dozens of birds, but not a single goose with golden eggs.

  From desperation rose inspiration. On October 12, 1820, Audubon boarded a boat on the Ohio River in Cincinnati and set out on a great birding adventure. His quest: to paint a life-size portrait of every bird in the New World. His journeys ultimately led him down the Mississippi River to New Orleans across the South to the Dry Tortugas of Florida, through the Atlantic coast to the rocky shores of Labrador, and up the Missouri River to the Great Plains of the Dakotas.

  His art became a landmark book. His travels became the basis for a Big Year.

  The Birds of America was an international sensation. With 450 magnificent watercolors of the creatures of the untamed New World, Audubon revolutionized wildlife art. His paintings were big, bold, and remarkably animated. Though Audubon’s gift for depicting birds in natural settings set him apart from other artists, his work required heavy sacrifice. To complete a single drawing, Audubon would shoot and kill whole flocks of birds—dozens of brown pelicans, bags of warblers—just to select the one or two specimens in freshest plumage. He then threaded wire into the carcasses and posed them as if they were still alive, flitting on branches and regurgitating food for mates.

  Audubon, the man, won fame that rivaled Audubon, the artist. In England, where new industrialists were devouring James Fenimore Cooper’s latest book, The Pioneers, Audubon seemed the living embodiment of wild America. A cocky frontiersman with buckskin coat, sharpshooter’s eye, and hair preened with bear grease, he regaled European audiences with his woolly tall tales, many of which were serialized in London newspapers. There were knife fights with Indians, an overnight in a backwoods hunting cabin with Daniel Boone, and most of all, birds, strange and beautiful, tiny and tall, creatures that proved to European industrialists that America was home to more than just cotton, tobacco, and merchant profits. After so many years of poverty, Audubon, now a swashbuckling dandy, was finally able to pay back his supporters. He named the Harris’s hawk and Harris’s sparrow after a New Jersey farmer, Edward Harris, one of Audubon’s earliest patrons. The highest powers of the land also took note. An 1826 portrait of Audubon, with heroic gaze, shoulder-length mane, and long gun at the ready, still hangs in the Red Room of the White House.

  Sadly, several of the birds originally painted by Audubon—the great auk, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Bachman’s warbler, Labrador duck, and ivory-billed woodpecker—are extinct today, the victims of habitat destruction and slaughter for food and for fun. Audubon himself was a sharpshooting hunter who enjoyed blood sports, but extirpations horrified him. After a grueling trip through the Great Plains, where men shot animals only because they could, Audubon warned that the buffalo, like the great auk, was on the verge of disappearing forever.

  Audubon died in 1851. But his wife, who had paid the family bills for years by working as a schoolteacher, had a former student ready to pick up the conservationist banner. Editor of Forest and Stream magazine, George Bird Grinnell was aghast at senseless wildlife slayings. In 1886, he urged readers to join him in the nation’s first bird preservation group, which, in honor of his hero, he called the Audubon Society. In just three months, more than thirty-eight thousand people signed up; Grinnell was so overwhelmed that he disbanded the society. But the naturalist spirit lived on, and the group was eventually reconstituted by Massachusetts women disgusted at the slaughter of birds, especially egrets, for hat decorations. The National Audubon Society today is one of the world’s foremost environmental organizations, with 550,000 members and more than a hundred sanctuaries across the United States.

  Though the frontier was long gone by the turn of the twentieth century, one old sport was not: many Americans still celebrated Christmas with contests to kill the most birds in a single day. Sometimes these “side hunt” competitions were between individual men; other times they involved teams of men. But they all ended the same way—with a mound of feathers and carcasses piled at their feet.

  On Christmas Day, 1900, an Audubon Society ornithologist named Frank Chapman came up with a better idea. Instead of killing birds, Chapman said, outdoorsmen should count them. On December 25 of that year, twenty-seven bird lovers from New Brunswick, Canada, to Monterey County, California—a total of thirteen states and two provinces were represented—went afield. They found 90 species and 18,500 individual birds, but most importantly, these bird lovers discovered each other. The first continental birdwatching network was born.

  Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count began as a way for birders to meet and greet others with the same quirky obsession. With their annual state-of-the-union census of bird populations across North America, Christma
s counters told themselves that serious ornithology was being conducted here. Though this technically was true—university biologists did occasionally rely on Audubon-reported counts to analyze trends among avian species—the Christmas Bird Count also served as a hotbox for birders with competitive blood. Soon some Christmas teams began to compete with other teams to report the biggest list, and some birders began to compete with other birders on their own team to report the most species. Today the Christmas Bird Count has become a birding tradition nearly as strong as spring migration, with more than 52,000 people joining 1,800 different counts across North America.

  Inevitably, some birders stopped waiting for Christmas to compete. The result was a Big Day. By rising at midnight to shine lanterns on owls, working the brush at dawn for songbirds, scoping the lakes at noon for waterfowl, and then scrambling through new habitat as the sun set, Big Day participants combined strategy and endurance in a race to see the most species in a single twenty-four-hour period. By the end of World War I, a Big Day with one hundred species, a Century Run, was something to brag about.

  Then came Roger Tory Peterson. In 1934, at the age of twenty-five, he converted birding from a pastime of the peculiar to a sport for the masses.

  Peterson’s pocket-size book, A Field Guide to the Birds, summed up the species of eastern North America in 167 pages and revolutionized the way Americans viewed the outdoors. Before Peterson’s book was published, bird chasers still sighted their quarry from the barrel of a shotgun; a carcass in the hand was the only proper way to identify many species. But Peterson moved identifications out of the taxonomist’s laboratory and into the hands of everyday Americans by showing them how to distinguish live birds by sight and call. His book grouped similar-looking species together on the same page and then highlighted their field marks—the visual characteristics that made one bird species different from another. Four pages of color plates were reserved for the most brilliant birds—warblers, blue jays, and scarlet tanagers—but most species were illustrated in black and white, with an arrow highlighting each bird’s defining physical feature. Until Peterson, many unarmed bird lovers had little choice but to assume that a sparrow was simply a sparrow. Then the Field Guide offered indispensable advice: white outer tail feathers signified a Vesper sparrow, large central breast spot meant a song sparrow, unstreaked underparts distinguished a grasshopper sparrow. The natural history museum’s lock on bird identification was broken.