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

by Mark Obmascik

  January 23. Fair Lawn, New Jersey

  At home, he paid bills, saw a red-breasted nuthatch at his backyard feeder, called Alaska, ate dinner at a restaurant with his wife, and announced he would be leaving tomorrow by dawn. He fell asleep by 9 P.M.

  January 24. Superior, Arizona. 2,400 miles. $266

  As a teenager in the rough-and-tumble copper town of Butte, Montana, William Boyce Thompson played high-stakes poker in bars. His parents, aghast, shipped him off to prep school at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He failed to graduate. He was admitted anyway to Columbia University, where he tried studying mining. He quit after his freshman year. He mined back home in Montana, but failed there, too. So Thompson moved back to New York City.

  In the canyons of Wall Street, where they moved paper instead of earth, William Boyce Thompson got rich—tens of millions of dollars rich. His stock plays financed some of the vast Western mining pits that today are some of America’s nastiest toxic waste dumps. But his booty also built a spectacular desert arboretum fifty-five miles east of Phoenix. Naturalists, aghast at the mining scars, loved the arboretum. So did the rufous-backed robin, a secretive Mexican that occasionally enjoyed wintering up north in Arizona.

  At the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, near a tree labeled “Net-leaf Hackberry,” Komito bagged a rufous-backed robin. The soul of William Boyce Thompson moved one step closer to being freed from environmental purgatory.

  January 25. Portland, Oregon. 1,400 miles. $189

  Komito leaned into a pay phone and slowly repeated three words: “Long. Eared. Owl.” He felt like an undercover agent. Would the password work?

  Success! He had been admitted to the select society of the North American Rare Bird Alert, or NARBA. His $25-a-year membership gave him instantaneous access, no matter the time or place, to a Houston phone hot line that told where the latest rarities roosted. For $15 a bird more, he would be guaranteed a drop-everything phone call anytime a particular hottie was sighted.

  Sure, this service did little more than duplicate what the local rare-bird alerts across the continent were already doing. But NARBA put all this information in a single place, one-stop shopping for the seldom-seen. It was a critical time-saver, and if there was one thing Komito needed during his Big Year, it was time saved.

  His password, long-eared owl, was a reminder of his nemesis bird from his 1987 Big Year. Though that bird usually was a gimme in the West End parking field at Jones Beach, New York, Komito repeatedly missed it there—and in Toronto; San Diego; Casper, Wyoming; St. Louis; New Haven, Connecticut; and the New York Botanical Garden. He finally got it one hundred miles from home on December 31, 1987, the last day of that Big Year. Komito picked that long-eared-owl password to keep himself from feeling too cocky during his 1998 Big Year. So far it was working.

  January 26. Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge,

  California. 600 miles. $79

  Komito had driven eleven hours from Portland to northern California and back to Portland again, and he was spent. He wanted to sleep. But before his head would touch a pillow, he had to repeat his nightly on-the-road ritual. He had to shake down a motel clerk.

  To Komito, there was little difference between a desk manager at the Hilton and a trinket peddler at a flea market. Both advertised prices that were negotiable. Komito had stayed thousands of nights in hundreds of motels. He didn’t sleep well unless he knocked off at least 10 percent from the desk manager’s first rate.

  He had this down to a system. He walked into the lobby of the Fairway Inn and tried to look as untired as possible. He didn’t ask if the motel had any available rooms; only hopeless tourists did that. Instead, he said, “What’s your best available rate for a room tonight?”

  When the clerk told him, he didn’t take it. He asked to see the room. He took the keycard and noted in his walk across the parking lot that few cars were there. An empty motel offered more chances to negotiate.

  Inside a room, he always found something wrong—a faucet that dripped, a touchy thermostat, a curtain that reached the windowsill instead of the floor. He returned to the clerk loaded for bear.

  There’s a problem with the room, he told the clerk, sliding the keycard across the counter as if he were about to walk away. He rattled off the woes, but the clerk refused to budge. He mentioned the half-empty parking lot, then pulled out his travel agent card—he was his only customer—and asked for a travel agent discount.

  He got the room for $31.80, with tax.

  January 27. Seattle, Washington. 180 miles. $343

  Komito needed to get to Alaska—now. But there was no easy way to Alaska from Portland. So he negotiated a no-drop-fee arrangement with the rental car company, drove to the Seattle airport, and called Alaska again. The man in Anchorage said: You need to get here now.

  January 28. Anchorage, Alaska 1,500 miles. $176

  Why was a bug-eater visiting Alaska in January? Komito had to admit that it was a strange question. But it was no stranger than another question: Why would any sane creature visit Alaska in January?—which he didn’t want to contemplate, much less answer.

  Komito couldn’t ignore reports that a Siberian accentor, an Asiatic connoisseur of mosquitoes and other flying nasties, had decided to winter somewhere in an old neighborhood of central Anchorage. The accentor was a good bird, a really good bird, a once-a-decade visitor to North America that looked like a mere chickadee but made a chaser’s heart race faster than a hyper hummer’s.

  Lucky for Komito, the accentor had virtually been adopted by an old Attu roommate, Dave DeLap. A retired junior high school biology teacher, DeLap had made the first ID on the bird when it had showed up on a tree behind the home of former teaching colleagues Phil and Carolyn Kline. When the Klines had fled Anchorage over Christmas break for a two-week vacation in Florida, they’d given DeLap their house keys. No point in having birders wait outside for the accentor when there was a warm and empty house with a big living-room window. By the time Komito called, the homeowners were tanned and back to teaching seventh-graders. But DeLap still had their keys.

  For Komito, this was another birding miracle. Though he prided himself on his relentless powers of persuasion, he had never before finagled the house keys of complete strangers in the darkest hours of an Alaskan winter. But here he was, cozy in a comfy chair with a straight-on view of Mr. Accentor’s expected perch.

  Komito liked to talk. DeLap liked to listen. They could have sat together in the Kline’s house for hours and hours. So they did.

  The wait actually wasn’t their choice. Komito wanted a quick in-and-out. The bird, however, was nowhere in sight. DeLap had already shown the Siberian accentor to more than a hundred birders, and no one had come farther to see it than Komito. DeLap felt terrible.

  As the winter sun set at 4:50 P.M. over Anchorage, the two men called off the day’s hunt. Komito walked out of the Klines’ house without leaving a thank-you note. When the Klines returned home that day, they never knew a stranger had spent the day in their living room.

  January 29. Anchorage, Alaska. 50 miles. $96

  Time for Plan B. There were rumors that the accentor sometimes favored a backyard cottonwood just up the block from the Kline house. DeLap moved the accentor hunt two houses west.

  The owners there welcomed Komito and DeLap inside their yard, but not their house. So Komito and DeLap bundled up at dawn and waited below the home’s second-story deck. Though it was a natural hiding spot, the yard beneath the deck was frozen for a reason: it rarely saw sunlight. Komito zipped his parka to his chin. He wanted to shuffle his feet to generate body heat, but concluded that any movement might scare the bird. He stayed still and hoped for something to happen soon.

  When he pressed his binoculars to his face, they fogged over with body heat. Ah, winter in Alaska. No question it was far too frigid for insects. Was it too cold for a bug-eating accentor?

  At first light, Komito checked the cottonwood.

  “Dave, I’ve got bir
d!” Komito whispered hoarsely.

  “Sure you do,” DeLap replied sarcastically. Did Komito ever stop telling tall tales?

  “No—really!” Komito replied. “Eye level. On that horizontal branch.”

  Sure enough, there it was—five and a half inches of buffy brown with an orange eyeline. They watched it flit until Komito couldn’t stand the cold any longer. He had his bird. Even better, Levantin didn’t.

  Walking back to their cars, DeLap spied something that stopped him in his tracks. The mystery of the insect-eating Siberian accentor was finally solved.

  Above the home’s deck was a bug-zapper. On the deck and beneath it was a wide splattering of electrocuted bugs.

  He connected the biological dots: the accentor had foregone its migration to warmer Asian climes to subsist on freeze-dried food in Anchorage.

  That night, Komito himself opted for steak, medium well, and reserved a plane seat for south Texas.

  January 30. Bentsen State Park, Texas. 4,000 miles. $369

  The first time Komito birded Bentsen State Park, he hated it. Most of it was at least a mile from the Rio Grande, scraggly with mesquite and crawling with people. At Bentsen, you didn’t go birding on trails. You birded on a long, paved trailer loop filled with senior citizens from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Kansas, Ohio, Idaho, and other cold points north. These “campers,” if you could call them that, watched television in their Winnebagos and Airstreams and fifth wheels. Some even had air conditioners and, worst of all, electric bug-zappers. How were you supposed to spy a great crested flycatcher when mosquitoes made the sparks fly?

  Over the years, though, Bentsen had grown on Komito. These trailer people weren’t birders, but they had learned to help. Now most had nailed up a half-orange (to attract orioles) or tossed out seed (to attract everything else). He had to admit: the campers were friendly. And they generally didn’t make fun of pale strangers pointing $800 binoculars and $1,000 spotting scopes into the bushes around their campsites. Today most of North America’s best birders passed through regularly, turning Bentsen State Park into a station of the cross—and social circuit—for serious chasers. Komito himself had been here at least two hundred times. He knew all seventy-eight spaces of the trailer loop as well as his backyard.

  NARBA reported that a clay-colored robin was feeding reliably on a marshmallow at Trailer Space No. 19.

  By the time Komito got there, the marshmallows were out. The clay-colored robin wasn’t. He left after a few hours. Had the bird grown tired of marshmallows and moved on to new dietary horizons—Twinkies, perhaps, or maybe even night crawlers? This question kept Komito up all that night.

  January 31. Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge,

  Texas. 50 miles. $229

  Fifteen miles east, on the banks of the Rio Grande, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge also reported a clay-colored robin. Komito ate breakfast at Denny’s—the usual ham, eggs, hash browns no oil, and dry toast—and walked the refuge’s B trail. No alarm clock needed here; few places in North American birding were as loud as Santa Ana at dawn. Grackles crackled and catbirds meowed, but loudest of all were the chachalacas, the Mexican thicket-dweller that sounded as if Ethel Merman had swallowed a rusty trombone. No way any living creature, especially a clay-colored robin, could sleep through all that. Two miles of trail-trudging, however, produced nothing.

  Luckily, Komito did spot another birder, Marcel Holyoak of Davis, California, who claimed to have just observed the winged suspect. Holyoak started relaying detailed directions—at the second bridge, look under the lone palmetto—when he stopped and thought the better of it and decided to make the whole hunt easier by simply taking Komito there.

  Holyoak, it turned out, was doing a Lower 48 Big Year—a nonstop year of birding strictly in the continental United States. Because his lunacy had limits, he was no threat to Komito. He also was offering to help. Komito’s conclusion: good man.

  Five hundred yards up the trail, at the second bridge and under the lone palmetto, was a dull olive-brown bird that looked like a typical backyard robin, but with the color bleached out. It was the clay-colored robin, and it had apparently not moved for the past half hour.

  Quarry conquered, Komito walked easier. For the first time in weeks, he actually had time to bird at leisure. Days of target birding—ignoring everything but the species he really needed—was efficient, but joyless. His mood lightened.

  At the visitor’s center, he joined a stranger, Sharon Smith, as she pushed her husband, Ron, in his wheelchair. Limited by infirmity, Ron marveled in the freedom of birds. It was a sweet moment, but Komito made sure it was just a moment.

  As the three birders scanned the brush, hoping for a Cassin’s vireo, Sharon told how she and Ron once were trailed by a hawk.

  “Maybe,” Komito interrupted, “you looked delicious to the hawk.”

  She shot right back, “I’m not buying any of your New Jersey blarney.”

  “You know,” Komito said, “birds are creatures of instinct and are motivated by just two things—to eat and to mate. I’ll let you decide what it may have had in mind.”

  For some reason, the Smiths continued birding with Komito.

  February 1. Allendale, New Jersey. 2,000 miles

  When a man loves a woman and has seen her for a total of one day in the first month of a new year, he wants to see her. But what does he do with her?

  After a morning at home, Komito got fidgety. And more fidgety. He finally couldn’t ignore nature’s call. He took his wife birding at the Celery Farm, a nature preserve near their house, and for the first time during this Big Year he spotted everyday Eastern birds such as blue jays and tree sparrows. He and Bobbye enjoyed their time outdoors together. But the day trip also boosted Komito’s Big Year total to 342 birds, nearly sixty birds ahead of his record-breaking 1987 pace. He wouldn’t stay fidgety at home for long.

  February 4. Jericho, Vermont. 310 miles. $69

  Komito left his house well before dawn to drive seven hours through an ice storm to a country house in Vermont with a big lump in a backyard tree, but nobody was answering the doorbell. The northern hawk owl was supposed to be somewhere in Jericho. What if the lump was the owl?

  He knocked again. Still no answer.

  He had already checked all the NARBA-recommended perches—the hardwoods behind the hardware store, the roosts around the restaurant, the timber by the U-Store-It warehouses. No owl. If he had to drive the streets of Jericho one more time, these small-town cops were going to get suspicious.

  He really wanted this bird. Northern hawk owls rarely ventured south of the Canadian border, and even then, they preferred the rugged and remote over a quaint town with fresh decaf in the café. Hawk owls looked like a mix of their two namesakes: they were long-tailed day-hunters that could hover like a kite and snatch sparrows in midair. Komito didn’t want to miss a prized bird like that.

  Well, if nobody was home, no one would ever know that he trespassed, right? Deep in the throes of hot-bird fever, Komito could convince himself of almost anything. He hoped the no-answer house didn’t have a no-bark rottweiler. Komito traipsed around the side, then the back, hustled through the clearing, and pointed his glass up that massive, leafless tree.

  Did that lump just move?

  It was the northern hawk owl! He ran off two pictures for proof.

  Nobody home, nobody harmed. He glided back to Jersey.

  February 5. Washington, D.C. 250 miles. $80

  Rain fell in sheets, then blankets, and flood warnings were everywhere. Komito was headed to Virginia Beach, Virginia, for another offshore birding trip, but the weather didn’t bother him. He was safe with his SKUA.

  The vanity license plate on his Lincoln Town Car, SKUA, was Komito’s kind of joke. Any mild-mannered bird lover could go for GULL or WREN or EAGLE, but it took a hard-core chaser (or crossword puzzle nut) to get the humor behind SKUA.

  The skua was the bully pirate of the open seas, a barrel-chested brawler that combined inte
lligence and intimidation to survive comfortably in some of the earth’s most inhospitable places. When south polar skuas nested in the Antarctic, they lived off the eggs of penguins. When they worked the coasts of North America, they traveled patiently with gulls and shearwaters until it came time to spirit away their food. Unless the pickings were unusually abundant, skuas stayed solitary. They were experts at letting others do the hardest work.

  While one skua rode the trade winds of the mid-Atlantic, another drove I-95 down the coast.

  February 6. Virginia Beach, Virginia. 210 miles. $96

  Komito’s two-day drive ended with bad news: the offshore trip was canceled because of foul weather. The good news, though, was that someone else had found a real rarity, a white-throated robin, back at Bentsen State Park in Texas. The skua in Komito booked the first flight in the morning.

  February 7. Bentsen State Park, Texas. 1,800 miles. $268

  From his Virginia Beach motel room he drove to the Norfolk airport, where he hustled onto the first flight to Houston, where he caught the first connection to McAllen, where he drove the first available rental car to Bentsen State Park. So rushed that he didn’t bother trying to score a free admission, he cleared the park gate by 11 A.M.

  Komito wasn’t alone. Word of the white-throated robin had spread rapidly, and two dozen chasers from Arkansas, Florida, and Washington, D.C., among other places, had already joined the hunt.

  The main binocular focus was on Trailer Space No. 73, an unoccupied campsite fifty-four spots past the former haunt of the marshmallow-baited clay-colored robin.

  NARBA reported that the white-throated robin was visiting a “water drip,” an idyllic way of saying the bird was hanging by a rusty campsite spigot left running by some trailer person. From sixty feet away, the crowd trained its glass on the galvanized faucet.