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

by Mark Obmascik

  Eleven years earlier, during his first Big Year, Komito had had a legendary run-in with the operator of this very boat, Debi Shearwater. In the birding world, Shearwater was the High Queen of the High Seas, the Pacific Coast’s leading organizer of offshore trips, called pelagics, that gave birders their only chance to see about seventy-five different species that live almost their entire lives far at sea.

  There was no disputing that Shearwater loved birds; in fact, she had legally changed her name in 1980 from Debi Millichap to Debi Shearwater in honor of the thirteen species of shearwaters, the tube-nosed seabirds that coursed the deep waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific. (Her favorite bird was a land-based raptor, but Debi Golden Eagle sounded too Indian for a woman with Swedish grandparents.)

  For Komito, the problem was that Shearwater loved more than just birds. She also had the hots for whales and dolphins and often called time-outs in the middle of birding trips just to watch sea mammals. Birders put up with this partly because her trips produced fabulous birds, but also because Shearwater was intimidating. In a pastime filled with the shy, bookish, and polite, Shearwater had the temper and physical presence of a linebacker. She yelled.

  Not everyone cowered. In 1987, when Shearwater once again stopped her charter far offshore to watch some cavorting gray whales, Komito finally had enough.

  “Hey, we paid to see birds, not whales!” he called to her.

  Shearwater ignored him. The whales were beautiful.

  With no birds in sight, Shearwater kept the engines cut next to the spouting cetaceans. Komito couldn’t take it. He went customer to customer on the charter and asked a single blunt ques-tion: Do you want to watch birds, or whales? With a crush of these customers waiting outside the captain’s cabin, Komito confronted Shearwater with the results.

  Forty-seven of fifty customers on your boat want to see birds, not whales, Komito told Shearwater. Let’s stop this whale nonsense right now and get on with the reason we’re here—pelagic birds.

  Shearwater was not happy. A mutiny at sea over birds? The gall!

  Miles from shore, Komito had found the one person, a woman, who could match his stubborn streak. Shearwater refused to move the boat. So Komito relayed the voting results to the actual skipper, who, like most captains on Shearwater boat trips, was used to running lunch-bucket fishermen, not persnickety birders, out to sea.

  The skipper looked at the New Jersey industrial contractor, then looked at the woman who had changed her name to a bird. “I do what she tells me,” the captain told Komito. Shearwater told him to stay put.

  So they did.

  Shearwater and Komito refused to speak long afterward. She bet that Komito needed her more than she needed Komito. She turned out to be right. Here it was, eleven years later, and Komito was back for another Shearwater trip. He knew, and she knew, that he had no other choice: if you wanted to see Pacific pelagic birds, you had to start at Shearwater’s dock.

  The two bumped into each other as the seventy-five-foot boat throttled up its engine. How would she treat Komito? What if a good bird was holding on the other side of the boat? Would she move the boat for him?

  Komito had been on so many pelagics—he’d stopped counting at two hundred—that he had already memorized the usual onboard safety lecture. But Levantin, who had been at sea only twice before for birds, paid closer attention.

  Shearwater barked: No smoking, life jackets are over there, make sure you take a pill for seasickness. Drink a lot of water and go easy on the coffee. If you have to throw up, don’t go in the bathroom, because that’ll just make a mess. And don’t go off the front or sides because it’ll just blow back. Go off the back, okay? Any questions?

  There was good reason why Shearwater ran trips from Monterey Bay: it was a biological wonder. Monterey is one of the few places on earth with just the right convergence of parallel-to-the-coast winds, an unusually deep canyon, and rich undersea life. The result is a natural phenomenon called an upwelling.

  To most humans this upwelling is barely discernible—a slightly off-color rip with cooler water temperatures. But to marine life, it’s an open pipe from a food factory. The upwelling traps microscopic life, phytoplankton, from the depths of the Pacific and blasts it on a nonstop elevator ride to the top. Phytoplankton attracts baitfish, which attract tuna and dolphin and whales, which attract birds.

  When Shearwater began hiring fishing captains for birding trips in the 1970s, she found that they saw the same natural phenomenon, but from a different angle. A lifetime of searching for fish at sea had taught skippers to look for “tuna birds,” the agile white dive-bombers that trailed schools of albacore and feasted on the predator’s leftover anchovies. But on her first trip with fishing skippers to the albacore grounds, Shearwater discovered that “tuna birds” were arctic terns—a species prized among birders and the greatest migrant of the animal world, a four-ounce creature that flies ten thousand miles every year from the endless summer sun of the North Pole to the endless sun of the South, and then back again.

  If Shearwater could teach skippers the real names of pelagic birds, she could also show them how to pilot a boat for birders. Some species, such as northern fulmars, were so common that skippers could blast right by them. But others, like the streaked shearwater, had to be chased. How could manly fishing captains learn to identify dainty birds on the wing? Shearwater had to speak their native language: a rhinoceros auklet flew like a football, she told them, and a Cassin’s auklet flew like a golf ball. The tutoring process looked a lot like the maritime version of My Fair Lady, but with the young woman instructing the old salts. Slowly, but inevitably, fishermen became birdmen.

  By 1998 Shearwater was running seventy birding charters a year, and the drill was well established. The boat first cruised the rocks to find harlequin ducks, gaudy inshore birds with a seeming suicide wish: every time surf crashed against the jetty, the ducks dived for crabs and mollusks. Somehow the harlequin returned to the surface with head intact.

  Just beyond the white water worked the pigeon guillemot. Black with a white wing patch, it seemed smarter than the duck, avoiding the pounding waves and diving down a hundred feet for deep crabs and mollusks.

  As sunrise crept over the coast, sea lions and harbor seals basked on the jetty. Komito and Levantin checked out birds, not each other. Life was good.

  The boat barreled out to deeper water. The great thing about Monterey was that the upwelling was less than five miles offshore. Some East Coast trips, dependent on the Gulf Stream, had to motor fifty miles before seeing their first pelagic species. But here were northern fulmars and pink-footed shearwaters and pomarine jaegers, all within sight of land.

  Someone called, “There she blows!” Just off the starboard side spouted a pod of gray whales.

  Komito braced himself. The Big Year clock was running. He needed every minute for birds. Would Shearwater paralyze him with the torpor of whale watching?

  Amazingly, the boat continued on. It was fifty degrees with ten-knot winds, but Komito felt an undeniable warmth. Maybe, just maybe, an old hatchet was buried. (The truth was that Shearwater had lost some of her fascination with gray whales. When she’d first started running trips in the 1970s and 1980s, the giant mammals truly were unusual sights. But decades of conservation policies had finally let the populations bound back, and gray whales weren’t unusual enough today to cause her to throttle down the engines.)

  Off the stern, birders started a chum line, tossing out popcorn and anchovies and attracting a wave of gulls, including blacklegged kittiwakes. Komito hated fouling his hands with anchovy slime, which he believed could take a week to properly scrub off. Levantin and some others did work the chum. Levantin couldn’t help wondering again: Why was Komito here? Waves rolled. The boat was out of the harbor.

  Attracted to the diving and splashing and fighting throng of gulls, a black-footed albatross glided by. On board, near bedlam broke out. An albatross was always a star attraction: eight feet of effortless wings
pan that rarely came within eyeshot of land, the albatross was payoff for all the hassles and expense of a trip to sea.

  A guide unpacked the secret weapon of every pelagic trip—a big bucket of cod-liver oil—and poured it off the stern.

  The birds went wild.

  Cod-liver oil—whew!—Levantin hadn’t smelled that in years. It really stank.

  More waves rolled.

  Diesel fumes wafted from the engine.

  Waves. Cod-liver oil. Diesel. Waves.

  Why did Komito want the ferry schedule?

  Feeling tension in his toes.

  Komito seeing a life bird again?

  Cod-liver oil.

  Levantin upchucked over the rail.

  He felt embarrassed, very embarrassed. But his embarrassment was part of the chum line now. He staggered into the cabin, closed his eyes, and tried to recover. Why did he get sick? Was it waves or nerves?

  While Levantin ruminated, Komito remained out on the rail, where he spotted Cassin’s auklets and short-tailed shearwaters. By the time Levantin could stand again, those birds were gone. Komito was two species ahead of Levantin, with directions in pocket for that rare hummer. Levantin knew he had to hustle, if only he could keep his face from turning green.

  SIX

  Whirlwind

  Sandy Komito was worried. He thought he had a competitor, and not just any competitor. Al Levantin possessed a dangerous mix of time, money, and birding smarts. Komito had seen Levantin in action at Attu. He knew Levantin was tireless and at ease with people, a personality advantage that could translate into a few goodwill birds. Plus, Levantin was from the Bronx. Komito had learned long ago that there was a word for people who ignored driven men from the Bronx. That word was loser.

  If Al Levantin wanted a contest, then Sandy Komito would give him one. In the month after the two met on a boat ride on Monterey Bay, Komito tore off on a travel schedule that was ridiculous and exhausting, but designed to deliver one defiant warning:

  Don’t mess with Sandy Komito.

  January 20. Gibsons, British Columbia. 1,100 miles. $366

  Second Street, Second Street. Where the hell was Second Street?

  Sandy Komito knew men weren’t supposed to ask for directions, but this was different. He was in a strange city in a foreign country and it was raining. Somewhere out there was a rare bird, the Xantus’s hummingbird that Levantin had told him about, in Canada for the first time in recorded history. Levantin had told Komito the bird was diving to a house feeder on Second Street. Komito needed that house. He needed that bird. He needed help.

  In a town that seemed to ban older people, Komito finally spotted a fiftyish woman on the sidewalk walking through the drizzle. A mature woman, he figured, might understand his plight. “Excuse me,” Komito called, rolling down his car window and pulling his rented Taurus alongside. “Can you tell me where Second Street is?”

  The woman stopped.

  “Oh, you’re looking for that bird!” she said.

  Komito burst out laughing. In his mind, most people couldn’t tell a hummer from a Humvee. But he had somehow picked the one person on the streets of Gibsons, British Columbia, who knew the exact home address of the Xantus’s hummingbird.

  Just up the hill, on a panhandle lot jutting into Georgia Strait, stood 221 Second Street. At the moment, it was the center of the Canadian birding universe.

  When Gerrie and Lloyd Patterson had first reported that something weird and green was poking its bill into their fuchsia flowers, few birders twittered. After all, the Pattersons were nice people with a few feeders, but they were hardly chasers. Besides, the bird they described wasn’t in any field guide common to the Pacific Northwest—or North America, for that matter. Even the local experts were puzzled, so they called in Mike Toochin, globe-trotting birder extraordinaire, from Vancouver, who confirmed it: the ru-fous tail and buffy underparts made it a Xantus’s.

  How it got here, nobody knew. The Xantus’s was a sun-lover that was supposed to winter twenty-two hundred miles south of B.C., along the tropic of Cancer in the lower tip of the Baja. In fact, this bird had been found north of the Mexican border only twice before, and both those spottings had come in Southern California more than a decade earlier. Some ornithologists thought this bird had been blown north during a freak West Coast hurricane in October; others thought it must be an escapee from a local zoo, even though no one had reported a missing Xantus’s.

  How could a tropical pip-squeak live through the dankest depths of a Pacific Northwest winter? Luckily, hummingbirds were one of the few animals that could, at will, survive a cold night by dropping into semihibernation; in this temporary state, a hummingbird cut its body temperature in half, to fifty-five degrees, and braked its heart rate from twelve hundred beats per minute while flying to just fifty or so pumps in torpor.

  Once word of this biological miracle spread on the Internet, the house on the island at the top of the hundred-foot driveway became an international tourist sensation. By the time Komito arrived, more than fourteen hundred people from twenty-eight states, eight provinces, and five countries had signed the visitors’ log at 221 Second Street. Most came on the morning ferry from Vancouver, which offered a bustling coffee concession. By the time these latte-loaded birders reached the Patterson driveway, they were performing a wiggly gotta-pee jig. The Pattersons giggled—until the jigglers started ringing the doorbell and begging to use the bathroom. The Pattersons took up a collection and rented a Porta Potti.

  Knowing that coffee could not be bought, only rented, Komito had taken care of his morning beverage lease before arriving at the Pattersons’ door. He signed the visitors’ log, but a raindrop turned his hometown into a blob.

  Six days earlier, Al Levantin had signed the same book.

  Komito tried making small talk with Lloyd Patterson, who was polite but not foolish enough to walk out from under his porch overhang in a fifty-degree drizzle to greet his latest visitor. In the rain, behind a chest-high cedar fence, twenty feet from a red, plastic feeder filled with sugar water, Komito waited. The Xantus’s hummingbird stayed long enough for Komito to snap a few pictures.

  Take that, Al Levantin.

  January 21. Vancouver. 200 miles. $120

  Over a lifetime of birding, Komito most fondly recalled his times in wild places—the swifts darting behind waterfalls, the grouse exploding through the North Woods, the albatrosses gliding through the sunrise.

  This was not one of those times.

  He parked at the Wild Coyote Bar and Grill and walked south toward the roar of jets just across the water at Vancouver International Airport. At the Arthur Laing Highway Bridge, rush-hour traffic streamed up and over the causeway.

  Komito ducked beneath the bridge. He was in the last lair of the crested myna.

  One hundred and one years earlier, legend had it, a careless sailor or customs official had opened the cage of some captive crested mynas from South China and set them free on a dock in Vancouver. The birds went forth and multiplied. And multiplied.

  By the 1930s, the streets of Vancouver were rife with tens of thousands of crested mynas, a dark, chunky, robin-sized bird with white wing patches and a scruffy forehead. Homesick Chinese laborers kept crested mynas as pets. But Canadian wildlife biologists, who valued tried-and-true native species over spicy exotics, regarded the myna as winged vermin. They feared that the bird would keep moving and breeding until it had plagued all of North America. There was, after all, a horrible precedent for this: 120 European starlings, released in New York City at about the same time the myna was set free in Vancouver, had already multiplied a millionfold and conquered the continent.

  Then Mother Nature, in her unsentimental way, hosted a strange encounter on the streets of Vancouver. Asian invader met European invader. It turned out that the myna and starling enjoyed having sex (though not with each other) in the same urban environments—in the crevices of old buildings, amid the grime of noisy underpasses, around the trash of unkempt alleys. Th
e difference was that starlings made better mothers. Whenever a myna grew bored of incubating eggs and decided to take a quick flight around the neighborhood, the starling moved right in, taking over the same habitat, and, sometimes, the very same nest.

  The starling—pushy, pesty, and promiscuous—now ruled the streets. By the time Komito got here, fewer than fifty breeding pairs of crested mynas survived in North America. Vancouver was its Alamo. Though there were steady reports of crested mynas going Dumpster-diving for french fries at local McDonald’s, the Arthur Laing Highway Bridge was supposed to be the myna’s last, best remaining roost.

  If only Komito could stand the racket. Overhead, cars and trucks and buses rattled the girders so loudly that he could hardly hear himself think; no chance of hearing any bird’s call here. His eyes watered from the stench of exhaust. How could any animal that managed to live here still teeter on the brink of North American extinction?

  He checked the girders, the posts, the sign brackets, but the myna was missing. Maybe the Golden Arches were a better bet, after all. He did not relish the thought of chumming for any bird with a Happy Meal.

  So he walked the underpinnings of the bridge, northbound to southbound, merge lane to exit ramp. He looked up so much that his neck hurt. A headache started to take root, and the diesel fumes didn’t help. Finally, from a pipe supporting a highway sign, out popped one myna. Then another.

  Komito got the hell out of there.

  January 22. Seattle. 2,500 miles. $300

  There was a report of a rare Siberian bird in Alaska. On a layover in the Seattle airport, Komito called all four people he knew in Anchorage. Nobody was home. Should he grab the 9 P.M. flight anyway and hope the bird was there when he arrived? Decisions, decisions, then he remembered: since New Year’s Day, he had been home in New Jersey a total of ten hours.

  He flew to Newark.