And so it goes. Each species poses a different problem. To succeed, a Big Year birder must research each of the continent’s 675 homegrown species and figure out when, where, and how to see it. Does this bird migrate early or late? Over land or water? Which flyway route—Atlantic, Pacific, Mississippi, or Central? Alone or with other species? Does it winter in the American South or flee the continent altogether?
Many species must be seen on a moment’s notice.
Strategy is king.
Scheduling is a bitch.
The challenge is setting up a whole year of travel around the sweeping pendulum of the migratory clock. For Big Year contestants, spring migration is the easiest and best way to see dozens of species on a single trip. Most springtime action centers on so-called migrant traps, the crucial oases where exhausted birds rest after surviving a major water crossing. For birders these are magical places—High Island of Texas, Dauphin Island of Alabama, and Point Pelee of Ontario are three of the most famous—that brim with a continent’s cornucopia of species, but are also conveniently near major airports. A bird seen in a migrant trap is a bird that doesn’t have to be chased again in a more inaccessible breeding ground; Big Year birders turn frantic trying to see everything possible. Only a rookie would arrive at Point Pelee after sunrise in mid May and expect to find a parking spot.
The second migratory sweep, in fall, is desperation time. The only birds being sought then are the ones missed in the spring migration, missed during nesting season, and missed throughout the summer. Miss a bird in fall migration and kiss it good-bye for the year. Big Year birders don’t like to depend on fall migration.
Around the two great migrations, contestants must fit in other stops at birding’s stations of the cross: South Florida for tropical species and shorebirds; northern Minnesota for owls and other cravers of cold; West Texas for desert specialties; southeast Arizona for hummingbirds and goatsuckers; the Great Plains for longspurs and inland sparrows; coastal Alaska for Eurasian breeders; Colorado for sage grouse and other wild chickens; and California and North Carolina for seabirds and land leftovers.
A birder who arrives at all these right places at all the right times can expect to see all 675 homegrown North American species. The problem: the Big Year record is 721 species. How can a birder see 721 species in a continent that is home to only 675? Vagrants and accidentals.
During migration, birds get lost. Some are blown off course by hurricanes or typhoons. Others, like a father on a family road trip, refuse to stop for directions. The result, though, is the same: a bird that doesn’t belong in North America ends up in North America. These lost species quickly get categorized: a vagrant is a species that has wandered off its typical migration path; an accidental is a species that has been seen only a few times in an area a long, long way from home. Vagrants and accidentals have a nasty habit of turning up on the side of the continent farthest from Big Year birders.
Sandy Komito knew that drill better than anyone. In 1987, he had sensibly tried to save money by booking airline tickets far in advance to traditional birding hot spots. Just as he was about to take off according to plan, he’d get word of a vagrant or accidental spied somewhere else. Should he continue his existing plan to see a dozen native species or ditch the cheap trip for the chance at a once-in-a-decade accidental? The dilemma always gave Komito heartburn—and an adrenaline rush.
This time, in 1998, for his second Big Year, Komito was ready to stop the hand-wringing. Always chase rarities first, he decided, and worry about the checkbook later. Still, Komito was too frugal to burn $100 bills. Besides, few things gave him more pleasure than working out a better deal. Komito started working.
First he walked his wallet over to Continental Airlines, which sold special senior-citizen ticket booklets for $999. Each booklet contained eight tickets; each ticket allowed him to fly a segment anywhere in the continental United States or Canada. Because Komito had traveled 60,000 miles the previous year, mainly chasing birds, he almost always got free upgrades. Combine the senior booklet with all the upgrades and Komito expected to fly first-class to almost any bird on the continent for $125. Komito bought three booklets, or twenty-four flights.
Komito also knew he had to get to Attu. But he had a problem—a lingering dispute with the Attu tour director over a $48.06-a-night hotel room. In 1993, Komito and other birders were ready to fly their tour-chartered plane to Attu when a fall storm slammed Alaska. The group was grounded in Anchorage for four days, so the tour director, Larry Balch, former president of the American Birding Association, booked rooms for all stranded birders at a local hotel. Komito believed that Balch should pay the resulting $192.24 hotel bill because he had selected the hotel and given Komito no choice about where to stay. Balch said the room was Komito’s responsibility. For months afterward, the two men exchanged nasty letters—Komito could, after all, type eighty words per minute—until Balch finally shut off argument with one sentence: “As a matter of policy, Attour will not accept reservations from persons with delinquent accounts.” Komito seethed. But there was no way for Sandy Komito to get to Attu without Larry Balch, and Balch would not let Komito on Attu until he paid the $192.24. So Komito wrote the check. He also worried about a repeat of the infamous Attu tour of 1995, when bad weather canceled that year’s trip altogether. Komito cringed at the prospect of having thousands of his dollars tied up in a birding tour that might be washed out. His solution: pay the deposit to Balch, but withhold the remaining $5,000 until this year’s trip was guaranteed to happen. Attu wasn’t until May. In the meantime, Komito told himself to focus on birds, not people.
Al Levantin, by contrast, had no people problems. For years, while Komito and the rest of the birding elite had been traipsing around the continent, Levantin was cooped up in his office. Few top birders even knew him. That meant he didn’t have anyone who would call him in the middle of the night to tell him about a vagrant or accidental. But he also didn’t have anyone trying to settle an old score against him. This was a distinct advantage.
Levantin was determined to go it alone. He’d had enough of assistants setting all his lunch dates, all his meetings, all his plane travel. He was a chemist. He loved solving problems. And a Big Year was a giant logistical problem.
For inspiration, Levantin read Jim Vardaman’s book, Call Collect, Ask for Birdman. Like Levantin, Vardaman was a businessman with money to spare but no insider status among the top flight of birders. Levantin admired Vardaman’s executive approach—when he didn’t know something, he hired the best expert to tell him how to do it. True, many birders spat out Vardaman’s name the same way a sick man spat phlegm—can you believe that guy bought himself a Big Year record? He was so clueless, he had to hire somebody to show him all the birds—but Levantin really knew his birds. He wouldn’t have to hire anybody. He wanted to prove that an outsider could break the Big Year record without being led around like a cruise ship tourist.
Levantin had read Komito’s self-published book, Birding’s Indiana Jones, so he knew how the 1987 record was set. Ever the scientist, Levantin analyzed Komito’s strategies and concluded that one change could score him a lot more birds.
That change was boat trips. Komito had admitted that he missed at least six seabirds during his record-setting run because he hadn’t scheduled enough ocean journeys. Levantin would not make the same mistake. He scoured through catalogs, the Internet, and Birding magazine and bought tickets for as many offshore tours as he could find. From his home in the Rocky Mountains, he prepared for victory at sea.
All was well—until he actually tried to book a plane seat. This was the last problem he’d ever expected. As he’d climbed in his career from laboratory man to middle manager to vice president to chief executive, he also rose in the pecking order of United Airlines frequent fliers—from Premier (25,000 miles a year) to Premier Executive (50,000 miles) to the most perk-laden of all passenger peaks, Premier Executive 1K, for the 100,000-mile-a-year traveler.
But he s
till couldn’t get a flight out of Aspen. From January through March, Aspen was a capital of North American skiing (or at least après-skiing), and nearly every flight was already booked solid. Levantin called the special line for top United customers and tried every argument possible: He was Premier Executive 1K, not some first-time tourist. He was flying out of Aspen, not in. He was packing binoculars, not heavy bags of ski gear. After a few minutes of this, Levantin realized he may as well have been trying to cut a better deal with the post office—it just wasn’t going to happen. Levantin scooped up the few airline tickets he could and braced himself. As long as the skiing starlets and trustafarians flocked to Aspen, Levantin would have a hard time finding vagrants and accidentals. Who’d have thought that the airport in Aspen—rich, glamorous, fast-paced Aspen—would be such a bottleneck? He shared this complaint with only his wife. Levantin knew he could never win sympathy among birders by lamenting the difficulty of life during an Aspen ski season.
Greg Miller could only dream of such riches. He started the year with $7,000 in his checking account, but nearly all that money was already spoken for to pay for the big Alaska trip. He also had $10,000 of debt spread across three Visa cards, one MasterCard, and one Discover card. Though he hated paying 19 percent interest on some monthly balances, Miller believed he had little choice. Credit cards gave him financial wiggle room. His credit limit still allowed another $6,500 of charges. He wanted to pick up more cards, but didn’t hold out much hope. Sometimes in his work binges he had forgotten to pay a few monthly bills. Visa made him feel grateful for the plastic he had.
Miller’s Big Year, then, would have to be all hand-to-mouth. He got $45 an hour at the nuclear power plant. He worked as a contractor, so there was no time-and-a-half overtime. But his bosses encouraged him to rack up the hours. A twelve-hour day, after taxes, would pay for a Miami flight, if the airfare wars lasted. A fourteen-hour day could get him to Vancouver. He calculated the office time required for a flight to Point Barrow, Alaska, and he shivered.
If he worked the hours, he could afford the travel. But if he worked the hours, he didn’t have time for the travel. Y2K was two years away, and the software was still rife with bugs. Would Miller’s boss risk a meltdown for the birds?
No way. Miller would have to work hard and bird hard. If the year went well, he would have nothing left in his desk, his wallet, and his dreams.
Nobody ever had tried to work a full-time job during a Big Year. But Miller was a man of extremes. He knew he could do it.
FIVE
Bodega Bluff
At any given time, there were billions of birds in millions of places watched by thousands of people. So why in the world, Al Levantin wondered, did that man have to show up right here, right now?
There was no mistaking it: a half hour before dawn in Bodega Bay, California, Sandy Komito had just walked onto the same birding tour boat. Or, to be completely accurate, it was Komito’s voice—that booming, bass voice—that entered the boat far in advance of his feet.
Before that moment, Levantin could think of no improvements to his Big Year. It was only nineteen days into January, but he had already tallied 245 species. That was one new bird every two hours. He felt invigorated. He had traveled to three states and one Canadian province. And that British Columbia bird, a green microburst of energy called a Xantus’s hummingbird, was exceedingly rare—so rare, in fact, that it had been reported north of the Mexican border only two other times in history. Rarities build a Big Year record, and Levantin hoped to find even more with the promise of new seabirds on this offshore trip.
Enter Komito, with bluster. Levantin, of course, knew exactly who Sandy Komito was. In two earlier spring migrations, they had spent weeks together, along with the hardest of birding’s hard core, in that lonely Aleutian Islands outpost called Attu. After all that time in such close quarters, Levantin concluded that Komito was rich and relentless. He also knew Komito was the undisputed owner of the Big Year record, 721 birds, set in 1987. Levantin knew he was going to beat Komito’s old record. He just didn’t know if he would tell him.
“Good morning, Master,” Levantin told Komito. Levantin had given Komito that nickname on a long-ago birding trip, and Komito had never really disputed it. Levantin was so jovial that it was hard to tell if the nickname was sarcastic. A career in the Fortune 500 had taught him that a smile in business, even unpleasant business, went a long way.
“Hello, Al,” Komito replied. “How you doing?”
Decision time. Should he tell Komito that he was out to get him?
Before Levantin could open his mouth, Komito walked away. It was the first big offshore birding trip of the year, and Komito saw fifty other birders on this charter. He was a volcano brimming with a winter’s worth of war stories, and he was about to erupt.
For Levantin to run into Komito here felt especially odd. Bodega Bay was the same harbor where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed his 1963 horror classic, The Birds, the movie that made the world think twice about backyard feeders. Hitchcock knew the worst shocks came from the mundane, and few creatures were as widespread, and as taken for granted, as birds. So the great director had western gulls dive-bombing children at an outdoor birthday party, raspberry-dipped house finches pouring into a living room through the fireplace, and American crows slashing at Tippi Hed-ren while she cowered in a bedroom. Suffice to say, The Birds was not a popular movie with birders on board this tour boat. After lifetimes of weekends in the field, they knew birds didn’t attack humans. The only way Hitchcock had got ravens to chase actors was to sprinkle their hair with seed. Crows lurked on the gutters of the old schoolhouse because he affixed magnets to their feet. Children fleeing swarms of blackbirds in the movie were actually running on a studio treadmill with birds tied to their necks. It all seemed silly to Levantin. The only menacing thing birds ever did to him was poop on his patio.
A single human, however, was about to cause him more trouble. Komito returned from the bow of the boat. Was that a new bounce in his step, or just sea legs? Either way, Komito seemed to be accompanied by that eerie whEE, whEE, whEE of Hitchcock horror music.
Should I tell him? Levantin wondered. Should I tell him?
Komito, as usual, cut to the chase: “You been out lately, Al?”
What Levantin thought was: I have been out lately. A lot. I’m at 245 and I’m gunning for your record.
What Levantin said was: “I just got back from British Columbia. Got the Xantus’s hummingbird there. Nice bird.”
“Excellent bird,” Komito replied. “You know, I was thinking of trying for Xantus’s.”
That’s odd, Levantin thought. Komito had seen the Xantus’s years earlier. It was on his life list. Why would Komito spend the time and money traveling to see the same bird again?
If Komito wouldn’t tell Levantin what he was up to, then Lev-antin wouldn’t offer anything, either. Information was valuable. One of the main challenges in a Big Year was identifying the competition. Every top chaser had some weakness—a shortage of cash, a surplus of hubris, an aversion to long separations from a spouse at home—but no soft spot could be exploited until a foe was conclusively identified. Levantin didn’t want anyone, especially a Big Year champion, to know what he was up to.
Waves lapped. The boat rumbled. Finally Levantin couldn’t suppress it. The helpful side of his personality, Mr. Nice Guy Engineer, took over. “Well,” Levantin told Komito, “I came straight from Vancouver and I’ve still got my maps and ferry schedules. You want them?”
Did Komito want them? What kind of question was that? Levantin just offered Komito the birding equivalent of a treasure map. Without Levantin’s ferry schedule, Komito could spend good money on a plane flight to Vancouver but then sit around and wait on a dock until who knew when. In a Big Year, there was nothing more precious than time, and Levantin was giving the gift of a 366th day.
The extra day became even more valuable when the boat motored to the mouth of the harbor, near the Bodega bluff where Je
ssica Tandy’s house had withstood the monumental cinematic crow attack. Waves in the ocean beyond were ten feet and blasting. It was unsafe to continue, the captain announced, and he called off the trip. The day was a bust. When the boat turned around to the dock, Levantin had no birds to count, but he did have plenty of time to think. His own Big Year secret was still safe. But what was Komito up to? Why would he want to see a lifer twice? Could Komito be on a Big Year, too? Nah, nobody ever did a Big Year twice. He knew Komito was a birding lunatic. But that kind of lunatic?
Levantin felt tinges of dread and suspense. The Tides restaurant, same as in The Birds, loomed above the bay. Western gulls tailed the boat, but the engine groaned too loudly for anyone else to hear a note of that Hitchcock music.
Three days later, at another dock two hundred miles down the California coast but three thousand miles from home, Komito walked onto Levantin’s boat again. This was too weird. Komito had time for the Xantus’s hummingbird in British Columbia—and this boat in Monterey Bay? When Levantin and Komito finally greeted each other, it was hard to tell who eyed the other more suspiciously. There still was no talk of a Big Year, but Komito did confide he hadn’t had a chance yet to zip up to Canada for the hummer. Komito seemed strangely preoccupied. He had his own worries.
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Page 9