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

by Mark Obmascik

  If a college kid could cook up a plan to knock off a record, what could a real businessman do? James M. Vardaman stewed over that question. A timber consultant in Jackson, Mississippi, Vardaman conceded that he was only a so-so birder. But one thing he did know was business—his middle initial M actually stood for Money (a family name, he said)—and Vardaman’s business needed publicity. A Big Year, he concluded, would be the cheapest, easiest, and most fun way to make a national name for James M. Var-daman & Co.

  As a business consultant, Vardaman strongly believed in writing a plan and sticking with it. One hitch: he didn’t know enough about birding to draft his own Big Year plan. So Vardaman hired a who’s who of birding to meet in Mississippi and serve as his Strategy Council. There was Kenn Kaufman, the 1973 Big Year hitch-hiker who now lived in Tucson; John Arvin of McAllen, Texas, a virtuoso on the birds of the Rio Grande Valley; Larry Balch of Chicago, a top lister who operated Alaskan bird tours; Will Russell of Seal Harbor, Maine, an owner of the Northeast Birding tour group; Rich Stallcup of Inverness, California, author of Pelagic Birds of Monterey Bay, California; and Paul Sykes, of Delray Beach, Florida, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service specialist in endangered species. The idea, Vardaman said, was not only to hire the best experts, but to hire the best experts from different birding regions who were tied into local hot lines whenever rarities showed up.

  Still, Vardaman worried that his paid posse might sometimes find itself out of the rarity loop. As a backup, he got the addresses of 850 North American bird clubs, then added 300 top members of the American Birding Association and National Audubon Society. Everyone on this mailing list soon started receiving a regular newsletter, Vardaman’s Gold Sheet, that told everyone about the progress of his Big Year. Though the sweetener in the newsletter was the description of his latest birding adventure, the business end was a box with this plea: Call collect 601-354-3123, ask for Birdman.

  Vardaman had created the first North American birding hot line. He picked up an extra twenty species because of it.

  Not all went according to plan. While Vardaman, fifty-eight, was gallivanting around the continent on his Big Year, his wife, Virginia, was home alone with the couple’s six children, ages six to seventeen, including two sets of twins. At one point, after Vardaman took off on an Arctic swing for gyrfalcons, bluethroats, and crested auklets, Virginia told a Wall Street Journal reporter, “I would have sold him for a dime when he went off to Alaska and left me for weeks with the kids.” By the middle of the year, when Vardaman phoned home, his children stopped saying, “We miss you,” and started saying, “What’s your count?”

  From the beginning, Vardaman wisely decided to make his Big Year above reproach. Every time he saw a bird, he made sure a witness saw him seeing the bird. Vardaman showed off both his witness list and species list to all comers. Even so, many birders were soured by the spectacle of a rank amateur—whose repeated flights made him an official Flying Colonel of the Delta Air Lines fleet—spending wildly to see birds that he sometimes couldn’t identify by himself. When Kenn Kaufman guided Vardaman outside Phoenix to find Le Conte’s thrasher, a notoriously elusive soil-digger of the saltbush desert, he excitedly pointed out the bird and started to pull out his scope for a better look. “Oh, no, that’s okay,” Vardaman told Kaufman. The bird was checked off his list. Time to move on.

  Vardaman ended 1979 with several major accomplishments. He shattered the Big Year birding record, with 699 species. He broke the Big Year spending record, with total expenditures of $44,507.38—including guide fees of $10,157.12—and an overall cost of $63.67 per bird. He proved conclusively that there was no connection between birding skill and a big birding list. And perhaps most importantly, James Money Vardaman pissed off the North American birding establishment.

  Birders had long wrung their hands debating whether their passion was science or sport. In a single twelve-month swoop, however, Vardaman had reduced it to bingo. Bingo was for little old ladies in tennis shoes. Was birding, too?

  No way, the Old Guard decided.

  The job of defending the honor of competitive birding fell to a chortling Tennessean named Benton Basham. The original membership chairman of the American Birding Association, Basham was an anesthetist nurse with a Norman Vincent Peale-like zeal for birding who joked, promoted, and sweet-talked his way into the front ranks of the sport. A recruiter with an evangelist’s fervor, he had helped persuade Floyd Murdoch in 1973 to do his Big Year.

  In 1983, it was Basham’s turn.

  With Basham in the field, the American Birding Association directors left little to chance. While Vardaman solicited rarity news in 1979 by mailing his Gold Sheet to bird clubs and three hundred selected birders across the continent, Basham and his American Birding buddies expanded the information network even further. They mailed individual letters to four thousand members of the association telling them about Basham’s attempt to take back the record, and urging them to phone in news as soon as any rarity turned up.

  This request wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Though many birders knew the species around their hometowns, they had little idea how they fit into the bigger continental picture. A black oystercatcher, for example, would be an amazing rarity in Massachusetts, but it was common on the Pacific Coast. Basham didn’t want middle-of-the-night calls about birds that were common somewhere; he wanted calls about true freaks of nature. So he invented a code system that prioritized all North American birds. Code 1 was for the easiest birds, the starlings and house sparrows; Code 2 birds, such as the peregrine falcon, were seen regularly but not predictably; and Code 3 was for tougher species, such as the violet-crowned hummingbird, that required a special trip to targeted areas during a short observation season. Together these Code 1, 2, and 3 birds represented 675 species, the breeding and migratory base of North America. Basham assumed he’d pick up these species somewhere, sometime during his Big Year. These birds weren’t worth urgent phone calls; Basham wanted news about Code 4 and 5 birds, the vagrants, accidentals, and weirdos that somehow got lost on their home turf and blew over from other continents. These species were Basham’s top priority, the birds that would break Vardaman’s Big Year record.

  To make sure that birders would remember Basham’s quest, Birding magazine covered his Big Year with the same kind of hoopla that Sports Illustrated reserved for Henry Aaron’s assault on the Babe Ruth home run record. “703 in ’83” began one pre-Big Year article, describing Basham’s hope and plan to take back the record from Vardaman, the moneyed outsider, with 703 species. “Benton Basham continues to roll on toward his goal,” reported another Birding update, “and it now appears that only a miracle will stop him from soaring well over seven hundred.” When Basham did finally win back the record from Vardaman, with 711 birds, Birding celebrated with eight pages of coverage—led by a cover photo of Basham in conqueror’s pose atop a gate with a no-trespassing sign. It was one of the few times a nonbird ever appeared on the cover of Birding.

  The birding elite celebrated: Vardaman the vulgar was vanquished. Basham had put true birders back on top. The pecking order was restored.

  His feat wasn’t cheap. Though Basham steadfastly refused to say exactly how much he spent on his Big Year, he did admit that, for the same amount of money, he could have built a nice home and put a car in the driveway. This was in Tennessee, though.

  To hard-core birders, Basham’s new record was the feat of the century: though 675 species or so lived in North America, he managed to see 36 more. The rarity-chasing game first started by Scott Robinson on Eastern Airlines had been pushed to the hilt. Others tried, but failed, to beat Basham.

  But in February 1985, in the living room of a house in Clint, Texas, Basham sowed the seed of his own doom. Waiting for a staked-out, purplish-backed jay to show up at someone’s backyard feeder—it was the first record of this species in North America—Basham was plopped inside the living room on the sofa when a stranger knocked. Like Basham, this man was bearded, boisterous, and seri
ously intense about chasing birds. The two talked, and Basham extracted three promises from the newcomer: (1) He would join the American Birding Association. (2) He would spend $5,000 on a new top-of-the-line Questar birding scope. (3) He would set aside at least three weeks of his life to run after Asian rarities on a deserted Aleutian Islands government outpost called Attu.

  By the time the purplish-backed jay finally landed at that West Texas feeder, the newcomer, Sandy Komito, was a walking tinderbox of bird lust. Benton Basham had just passed him the lit match.

  Two years later, in 1987, Komito was traveling the continent on a practice run for a 1988 Big Year. By August, however, Basham had persuaded Komito to shell out a few thousand dollars for a bush-plane camping trip, north of the arctic circle at the confluence of the Kelly and Noatak Rivers, to hunt down Siberian tits. At the end of that successful trip, Komito had 660 birds for the year—and a hunch that he should turn this Big Year practice run into the real thing. On November 6, he broke Basham’s record with a Muscovy duck below Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande and pushed on until a long-eared owl on New Year’s Eve took him to 721.

  Komito had spent $60,000. He had traveled two hundred twenty days. He had become the new and undisputed Big Year birding champion of North America.

  He remained unfulfilled. For starters, he had missed at least thirty birds—including a white-tailed eagle on Attu, an eared trogon in Arizona, a Ross’s gull in Oregon, Manitoba, and Alaska—that he could have seen. He had wasted precious days chasing some birds in remote arctic breeding grounds when they could have been picked up much more easily, with a little more organizational effort, on the Great Plains and the Gulf Coast. And he still wasn’t enough of a birding insider to be fully plugged in to the national rare-bird alert networks. (In contrast to the hero’s parade of publicity lavished on Basham, Komito’s Big Year record didn’t even rate a story in Birding magazine; Komito eventually self-published a book on his 1987 record, titled Birding’s Indiana Jones.)

  Komito knew he could do better. Even worse, he knew that others could do better, too. He even knew them.

  Dr. Bill Rydell was one of Komito’s best birding buddies. They had roomed together at Attu, where Rydell had considered Komito an ideal bunkmate because he didn’t snore, didn’t drink, and didn’t lug his muddy boots into the room. While playing bridge and cribbage and hearts by the hearth, Komito had told Rydell more and more about his 1987 Big Year. Rydell had listened—and learned.

  By 1992, Rydell was prepared to retire from his general-surgery practice in Las Vegas. But he was too restless for retired life, and his wife, Mary, wasn’t ready to have her husband around all the time, especially when she was decorating their new house in Pebble Beach. So Rydell stockpiled $50,000 and ten frequent-flier airline tickets and took off on his Big Year.

  At the Kelly and Noatak Rivers in northern Alaska, Rydell flew the same bush plane to see the same tits as Komito. Rydell knocked off two of Komito’s nemesis birds, the long-eared owl and Muscovy duck, ten months earlier than his friend had in 1987. The surgeon who had spent four decades in the emergency room was so caught up in the frenzy of seeing a Bahama mockingbird and La Sagra’s flycatcher that he somehow locked his keys in his car twice in the same day—in the Florida Keys and Big Sur, California. Racing on his Big Year roll, Rydell then prepared for the all-out trump of his old bridge partner: a weeklong boat trip, on the private yacht of a California millionaire, two hundred miles off the Pacific Coast. Rydell and the rest of the birding world could hardly contain their excitement. Never before had a boat toured so far, and so long, just for birds. Who knew what rarities lived way out yonder?

  As it turned out, not much. While Rydell did pick up one hot species, a red-tailed tropicbird, on the first day out of San Francisco Bay, the remainder of the trip was a bust. Rydell returned from sea with only five new birds, and all but the tropicbird were commoners. A Big Year was always a race against the clock, and Rydell had burned seven full days of precious time. When a prized spotted redshank turned up in New York on December 21, Rydell decided he’d rather spend Christmas at home with family. He finished with 714 birds that year.

  Komito’s record still was safe; Rydell had ended seven birds short. But watching one of his best friends travel with the same budget to the same haunts for the same birds had rekindled something inside Komito. He missed competitive birding. Komito knew his record had barely survived. Someday, he figured, someone would break it. If not Rydell, then who? Komito considered the possibilities, but kept returning to the same conclusion.

  He wanted to do another Big Year.

  But no man in history ever had done it twice. He had the time and money. But the strength? The stamina? The monomaniacal devotion to a single cause?

  It was time for the rematch, Komito concluded, me against the birds.

  He never even considered the possibility that it could be man versus man versus man.

  FOUR

  Strategy

  Greg Miller went straight for the bedroom and dug for the Christmas present from his brother. He had stashed away the gift for the same reason a dieter stashes away a box of chocolates—to make it hard to find. But Miller was over the guilt phase now. He wanted that birding book.

  After a few minutes of excavation he found it, maroon and gold, with a songbird on the cover. It was Kingbird Highway, the story of Kenn Kaufman’s 1973 Big Year, and Miller devoured all 318 pages in a marathon reading session, splayed on the frameless futon that was plopped on his bedroom floor. Miller couldn’t believe a man could see all those birds and travel all those miles for less than $1,000. Maybe a Big Year wasn’t so unattainable after all. Miller started thinking. His Ford Explorer had survived the divorce, so he wouldn’t have to repeat Kaufman’s feat of thumbing his way across America. Could Miller really afford a Big Year?

  He unfolded a blue metal card chair and set it up in front of his wood-laminate computer desk. He navigated his PC straight to the Internet travel sitewww.travelocity.com and saw, amazingly, the spoils of an airline fare war. He pulled out a Visa card and started clicking.

  One hour later, Miller had booked round-trip flights on the no-frills carrier Southwest Airlines to Arizona, Texas, and Minnesota in February; Oklahoma and California in March; and Texas again in April. His total airfare cost for these six trips was $1,000, or roughly the same as Kaufman’s entire Big Year.

  Miller wasn’t done yet.

  For years he had dreamed of a May trip to Attu, the Holy Grail of serious birders. A treeless Alaskan spit seventeen hundred miles from Anchorage but just two hundred miles from Russia—the international date line actually curved around the island to keep North America on the same calendar page—Attu was where Asian rarities landed when storms in the Bering Sea turned brutal. A two-week trip to Attu, plus another week of tours to other forsaken Alaskan isles, cost $5,000, or more than a year’s worth of rent in this two-car-garage apartment. Miller knew he couldn’t afford Attu. But he couldn’t afford to sacrifice his mind to work and despair, either. Attu would be the trip of a lifetime, if he could only live until May. He bought Alaska with a $500 deposit.

  Never in his life had he booked so much travel. Never in his life had he felt so exhilarated. His whole body tingled; he nearly expected to look up and see a Bonaparte’s gull land on his home computer monitor.

  Miller pulled out his favorite reference book, the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, and tried to steel himself with some cold reality. At work he still had thousands of Y2K bugs to slay, and at home he had little money. If he missed a bird on the coast during spring migration, he would have neither the time nor money to chase it later on the tundra breeding grounds. Wild races for one-of-a-kind rarities were out of the question. He might see six hundred birds.

  In the middle of the night, alone on the futon in his garage apartment, Greg Miller still felt lucky.

  A Big Year ultimately is a numbers game. There are 675 birds that commonly live in North America,
and there are 365 days to see all of them. Find two new birds a day and you’re the new champ.

  Doing the math is easy. Living it is madness.

  For starters, birds don’t all live in the same place. Ornithologists say 440 species live on land, 190 stick to shores, and 45 stay far at sea. Many of these species remain extremely picky about where they live. Though a purple sandpiper and rock sandpiper are nearly identical in looks, voice, and flight, the purple chooses to live only in the pounding surf of the North Atlantic. The rock prefers the Pacific. Why does one creature with the freedom of flight require an ocean sunrise, while the other demands a sunset? Nobody knows, but a successful Big Year birder must spot them both.

  The problem is, spots move. Migration is one of the planet’s most powerful natural forces, and at least three hundred North American species succumb to it each year. The Canada warbler, for example, remains true to its name every May by nesting in the moist North Woods. But by August this yellow-and-gray songbird turns into a fair-weather friend, flying a thousand feet above the treetops until it reaches its wintering grounds four thousand miles away in the eastern Andes Mountains of Peru. That gives Big Year birders a five-month window to see the Canada warbler in North America. Almost everyone does; a Canada warbler is so easy to find while migrating to and from its nesting turf that it’s considered a “gimme” bird.

  Many others aren’t. The northern wheatear looks like a pale, half-sized robin, but with a rugged behavioral quirk: it insists on sex only in the rocky tundra of Alaska and northern Labrador. Chicks happen. But after a summer of love above the arctic circle, the wheatear replaces its appetite for romance with a new craving for particular kinds of beetles. So the northern wheatear ditches the Western Hemisphere—Alaska birds travel over Siberia, Labrador birds go over Greenland—for the beetle-rich wonderland of Africa. This remote migration route makes the wheatear a tougher species for birders, but one that Big Year contestants still can’t miss.