The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
Page 13
Back on the reservoir, the sun moved faster than the boat. Komito repeated to himself: Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.
He almost did once, but looked up and thought he saw a red-billed pigeon. Though the bird wasn’t there, Komito got an idea: every time he thought about cracking some comment—about the impending sunset or the pokey boat or the fact that no one had eaten for hours—he simply raised his binoculars and searched for red-billed pigeons.
If something moved in that sky, his 7×42s were all over it.
At 6:30 P.M., the sun set. At 7:15 P.M., twilight was gone. At 7:45 P.M., everyone realized there was no moon. At 8:15 P.M., the last flashlight exhausted its batteries.
Thwomp!
The boat hit a submerged tree. Komito tasted panic. The front of the boat now had three navigators. More submerged trees. Where was the dock?
Sue Wiedenfeld plunged through the darkness onto shore. No one on board said a word. She returned a few minutes later with some disconcerting news: they appeared to be stuck on an island. Maybe they should motor farther through the dark to find the mainland.
Others debated. Komito thought: Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.
At 9 P.M., they spotted the lights of the deserted dock. They were too tired to trailer the boat, so they tied up, loaded the gas can into their van, and drove fifteen miles to the nearest motel.
Komito was raw and grimy and too exhausted even to try eating. But as he fell asleep alone in his motel room, he wondered:
Could anyone else on a Big Year do all that for one bird?
Would they?
SEVEN
El Niño
GREG MILLER
It was a windup alarm clock, black with gold trim, and it had hands that glowed a sickly green in the dark. It cost $4.95. After comparing it to a dozen competitors on the shelves at Wal-Mart, Greg Miller picked it for one simple reason: it clanged like a fire bell. Miller needed a loud alarm clock. At night, he didn’t sleep. He hibernated.
After another fifty-four-hour week at the nuclear power plant, Miller collapsed into bed on Friday night and set his trusty alarm for 3 A.M. He dreamed of birds. In the morning he was leaving on a flight for Arizona. Six weeks into 1998, his Big Year would finally begin in earnest.
He woke up in a pitch-black apartment, but something wasn’t right. His alarm clock was silent, but its spring was sprung. He rolled over and double-checked the time on his digital watch. It was 4:30 A.M. Somehow he had slept through the entire two minutes of his clanging wake-up bell. Miller was in trouble. He lived eighty miles from the airport, and his flight left in two hours. He was so panicked that he skipped breakfast. He raced 80 mph on 55 mph roads to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where there was no time for $5-a-day economy parking. He nabbed a $12 space and bolted for the terminal.
In the years before he got away with murder, O. J. Simpson was the universal image of a scrambling traveler in Hertz commercials that showed him leaping like a gazelle over suitcases and seats until he finally made his gate. Even the little old ladies yelled, “Go, O.J., go!” But in this airport, nobody cheered Greg Miller’s mad dash. He had six minutes. He ran with all the grace of a tank—and this tank was in serious danger of overheating. He plowed past the ticket counter, through the security station, down the concourse. Two minutes. His wheelie bag wobbled. His attaché slammed his thighs. He made the gate just as they announced final boarding. Then he remembered: he was flying Southwest Airlines, the no-frills carrier with no assigned seats.
The gate attendant shut the skyway door. He was the last one on this flight. He was breathing so hard, and perspiring so profusely, that he stripped off his windbreaker. He walked onto the plane and dozens of faces creased with horror. Only middle seats remained on this flight, and nobody wanted to sit next to the guy with half-moons under the armpits and a smear the size of Jupiter on the chest. Luckily, in the back, way in the back, Miller found an empty aisle seat. It was in the last row of the plane, so the seat didn’t recline. At least there was one empty chair between him and the traveler by the window. Miller looked over at him. The man refused to acknowledge him. Miller considered saying something, apologizing for his smell and the streams of sweat gushing from the band of his Cleveland Indians hat, but decided that he couldn’t say anything that would help. He cranked open the overhead air vent—when he reached up, he saw the half-moons in his armpits had gone full—and hoped the jet would soon move. His stomach grumbled. No breakfast. Southwest served only snacks—peanuts over America, Miller called it. He pulled off his cap to mop up more sweat. The window guy shot him a disgusted sideways glance. Miller feigned sleep.
He woke when they landed, rested but embarrassed. He was physically incapable of sleeping without snoring. His snores were so bad, in fact, that his wife often made him sleep on the couch even when they weren’t fighting. Miller shuddered to think what noises had erupted from his hibernation during this flight. The window guy was too nice to say anything—or too scared.
After a cold, wet winter at home by the Chesapeake in southern Maryland, Miller longed to feel his face blasted with Arizona desert air. He didn’t get it. Rain pelted Tucson. By the time he had driven to Sonoita, seventy miles later, rain had turned to sleet. Another half hour up the road, in Sierra Vista, the sleet became snow, and the Huachuca Mountains above were blanketed white.
Miller blasted the defroster on his rental car and shivered. His suitcase was packed with clothes for chasing roadrunners and cactus wrens—not the abominable snowman. Twenty miles from the Mexican border, he still hadn’t seen his first desert bird, and he was wishing that his Arizona rental came with snow tires.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t how he hoped to start his Big Year. What was happening here?
In the tropical Pacific, a few hundred miles off the coast of New Guinea, an ocean buoy bobbed five inches lower than usual. A government satellite detected the shift and beamed the new measurement to a data collection station in Wallops Island, Virginia, which forwarded the news to computer banks in Largo, Maryland, and Seattle, Washington.
Those five inches launched an international scientific sensation: El Niño, the bad boy of global weather, was back.
In the equatorial Pacific, westward trade winds are so strong, and so consistent, that the sun-warmed seas at Indonesia are seventeen inches higher than at Ecuador. At least once every seven years, though, the trade winds mysteriously ebb. Without gusts to hold it back, water from the tropical Pacific sloshes back, warming South American coasts that are supposed to be cold. Peruvian fishermen called the phenomenon El Niño, after the baby boy Jesus, because it tended to show up around Christmas.
No matter the time, the result is the same—weather havoc, all over the planet. Storms that usually pelt the western Pacific instead hammer the Americas. Indonesian rain forests wither. African deserts flood.
In 1982, scientists were caught so flat-footed by the onset of a strong El Niño that they deployed seventy buoys, sixteen feet high and tethered to the ocean floor, across the Pacific. Each buoy measured surface winds, water temperature, and subtle changes in the depth of the ocean. All information was transmitted to passing satellites; the hope was to predict El Niño-related weather far enough in advance to warn people of the dangers.
By the fall of 1997, the buoys from New Guinea to the Galápagos were detecting a new El Niño, and scientists sounded the alarm loud and often. That was a good thing. By early 1998, when snow pounded Greg Miller in southern Arizona, the new El Niño was easily the most intense in recorded history—packing more energy than a million Hiroshima atomic bombs.
The freakishly warm waters spawned a slew of wild weather—236 mph winds on Guam; the earliest onset of monsoons in a century in India; rainfall forty inches above normal in Kenya; and drought so terrible that wildfires in Indonesia spewed more carbon dioxide in four months than all of industrialized Europe pumped in an entire year. Record high tem
peratures were recorded in Washington, Mongolia, and Ho Chi Minh City. Record floods devastated Poland and the Czech Republic. So much rain pooled up in South America that Peru suffered its worst outbreak of malaria in decades.
All told, the El Niño of 1997 killed at least two thousand people and caused at least $36 billion of economic damage.
It did, however, make for excellent birding. The Xantus’s hummingbird in Vancouver, the Siberian accentor in Anchorage, the white-throated robin in Texas—these birds all were a long, long way from home. The same El Niño winds that caused so much grief for so many people were depositing an unprecedented cornucopia of lost birds on the shores of North America.
In 1998, El Niño was responsible for dozens of new weather records. It just might make a birding record, too—if a birder could grit through a snowstorm in southern Arizona.
If this were a vacation, or even an ordinary birding trip, Miller might have slept in. He had checked 250,000 lines of software code. He had traveled twenty-five hundred miles. He was exhausted. And after last night’s storm, the Arizona roads were slippery and the backcountry was a frozen mess. But he had to meet a special person.
In Miller’s mind, Stuart Healy was living the dream. For fifteen years, the diminutive British expat had toiled, like Miller, as a round-the-clock software jock. But after braving the brutal work schedule first in Silicon Valley, and then in Microsoft’s shadow north of Seattle, Healy had decided to chuck it all and move to Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he had established himself as one of the state’s premier birding guides.
It all made Miller jealous. In the depths of those windowless, fourteen-hour days at the nuclear power plant, he thought about Stuart Healy and his life as a professional birder. Healy seemed to know everything about the birds of southeastern Arizona—where they lived, when they migrated, how they sang—and Miller couldn’t imagine anything better than being paid to do exactly what he loved. Then Miller learned that Healy was paid only $10 an hour. Maybe that dream wasn’t so idyllic after all.
Miller never liked to put a price on birding, but he had to admit, $10 an hour was a terrific deal. Other Big Year contestants might be too cheap, or too proud, to hire a guide. Miller didn’t think twice. He was six weeks late in starting his Big Year and was playing catch-up. All he had so far were birds commonly seen around his Maryland nuclear power plant. If an out-of-state guide had to lead him by the nose to get tough birds, he wouldn’t feel embarrassed. A mountain-climbing guide had short-roped a customer up Mount Everest, but she still was a conqueror, wasn’t she?
Nobody ever achieved greatness by whining, so Miller buttoned his lips when Healy led him from his warm car into the aftermath of an Arizona ice storm. The sun was barely up. Steam rolled from Miller’s nose. And the ground, frosted stiff, crunched with every step deeper into the bush.
Healy hiked like a man on a mission. Miller labored to keep up. They trained their binoculars in the shadows and searched.
When the sun crept high enough to illuminate the mesquite, Miller rejoiced. Finally, some warmth. Soon, though, he recoiled. The sunrise thawed the mesquite, and ice water was drip, drip, dripping from the branches onto his Cleveland Indians hat. No Jolt needed this morning; Miller snapped awake.
From somewhere inside the thicket, Healy called. Miller ran, even faster than in the airport. Mesquite slashed his thighs, his ribs, his face. He was a 215-pound rocket. He stopped at a thirty-foot tangle and pointed his glass exactly where Healy directed.
The bird called, “Wheek.”
There, in the thicket of Patagonia Lake State Park, was the Nutting’s flycatcher.
It was the same bird Sandy Komito had seen on January 1.
It was the same bird Al Levantin would see six days later.
It was No. 160 on Greg Miller’s Big Year list.
At night in his motel room, Miller should have been happy. In five days in Arizona, he had hustled 125 new birds onto his year list. He had reveled in twelve hundred miles of spectacular scenery. He had wrung every dollar of Arizona birding knowledge out of Stuart Healy.
Still, he moped. What was the point of a great time if you couldn’t share it with someone? Though he loved finding out-of-the-way places during the day, he longed for friends by dinnertime. It was just Miller and the motel and the Weather Channel, night after night after night. He was starting to feel like New Year’s Eve all over again.
He clicked off the television and picked up the phone.
His father answered.
Dad, Miller said, I’m in Arizona and you won’t believe the birds.
Really?
Really.
Even though his father had an impressive life list of more than five hundred species, he had never even heard of a Nutting’s flycatcher. He was enthralled. He wanted to know what it looked like, where it lived, how his son had found it. He got his son to imitate the flycatcher’s call—Wheek!—over the phone.
Miller didn’t need more prodding. His mouth was off to the races. He told his father of the ruddy ground-dove in a pecan grove outside an airpark with dogfighting biwings, the Le Conte’s thrasher in the desolation fifty miles west of Phoenix, the failed search for a spotted owl in the foot-deep snow of the Huachuca Mountains, the successful score of the rufous-backed robin at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. (Dad, in Arizona they call it a botanical garden, but back home in Holmes County they would say it needed a lot of water.)
His mother popped on the line and asked about his health. Miller said he was fine. The mother had her doubts—she knew that her son, when excited, could push himself beyond exhaustion—but whatever she said as a caution was just a blur to Miller. He kept thinking about his father.
There was no hint of disappointment in his father’s voice. The whole issue of the failed marriage hadn’t come up. If anything, his father sounded thrilled. Miller realized that his Big Year could be more than just about birds. It was a way for him to connect again with his father. Miller could heal a relationship that he feared was hurt by divorce. With a mentally retarded son and only a modest government paycheck to support him, the father had neither the time nor the money for a Big Year. But he could understand one. He could appreciate one. Miller wished his father could help him on one.
Even in the strange world of a Big Year, this was a strange problem. Miller still had eight more hours in Arizona, but he had already spotted nearly all the winter birds of the desert Southwest. He couldn’t grab an earlier flight; Southwest Airlines would make him pay too much to change reservations. He couldn’t try again for the spotted owl; the Huachuca Mountains were a slushy and muddy mess. And he wasn’t about to go off and blindly beat the brush for some undiscovered species; after five days of predawn wake-up calls, he hardly had the energy to roll out of bed. What to do?
Miller drove north from Nogales on Interstate 19, the only freeway in America with distances marked solely in kilometers, and blew past the sprawl of Tucson and the brown cloud of Phoenix. He drove west until all human habitation stopped, then drove ten miles more. He parked. This was the desert that was never on postcards. Flat, brown, and barely vegetated, the moonscape stretched as far as he could see. There were no other cars. He was alone.
In the distance, he heard something. He pointed his binoculars and saw movement. He walked in that direction. Whatever it was—it looked brown, with a long tail, probably some kind of thrasher—it moved again. He followed. Soon he couldn’t see his car anymore. He could hear the bird, though, farther away. He trailed it.
In typical Miller preparation, he had brought no water bottle. At least the desert wasn’t hot today. Miller had been so intent on chasing the bird that he hadn’t seen the sky clouding over. When El Niño began leaking on him, he was at least a half mile from the road.
He ignored the rain. He had three more hours in Arizona and had no interest spending them on some vinyl chair at Sky Harbor International Airport. He followed the birdsong. He got wetter.
After concluding he could sneak no close
r than one hundred yards to the still-unidentified thrasher, he turned back. He squished when he walked.
In the car he was so hot and wet that he fogged all the windows. He flipped on his tape recorder and fast-forwarded straight to the thrasher section to match the call of the bird that had just turned him into a sopping mess.
Someone knocked on his window. He jumped. He wiped away the fog and saw a Border Patrol officer peering in.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Birdwatching.”
“Birdwatching? What are you watching for?”
“Sage thrasher, curve-billed thrasher, Crissal thrasher, Bendire’s thrasher.”
“Well, I’ve never seen anybody out here before. It’s a rainy day today.”
Miller didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that.
“What have you got in your hands?”
“Tape recorder.”
“Play it.”
“Huh?”
“I want to hear the tape recorder. Play the tape recorder. Turn it on.”
Miller turned it on and felt relieved. The tape was proof: that bird was a sage thrasher.
The Border Patrol agent still looked perturbed. Nobody came out here to look at birds, he said. What they looked for was airdropped drugs.
Miller showed the agent his binoculars and field guide. The agent turned and left.
“Birdwatcher. Huh.”
Miller drove an hour to the airport and passed airport security with a wet T-shirt. When he boarded the plane, his sneakers still squished. Luckily, the flight was so empty that he had a whole row to himself. He snored an opera.