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

by Mark Obmascik

AL LEVANTIN

  Some birders called it the Tamaulipas Crow Wildlife Sanctuary. Others preferred the Brownsville Nature Preserve. Those with a Latin flair opted for Corvid National Park.

  Al Levantin, who was never one for pretense, simply called it the dump.

  For the past thirty years, the Brownsville, Texas, Municipal Landfill had been the only reliable place in the United States to see a Tamaulipas crow. Nobody besides the crow liked going there. To say it stunk did injustice to the word stunk. It reeked. It rotted. It marinated decades of throwaway table scraps in the fecund humidity of the Rio Grande Valley and then roasted it under the south Texas sun. It smelled so bad it made grown men cry.

  Not Al Levantin, though.

  Whenever Levantin went to the dump—and he had been there before, always to search for the Tamaulipas crow—he carried a secret weapon. Levantin had no sense of smell. All those years in the Rohm and Haas chemical lab had done a number on his nose. When his wife had picked him up from work, she had to drive all the way home with the car windows rolled down—the solvent stench was that bad. Levantin, however, remained oblivious. When he walked in the door at home after a day in the lab, he stripped over the washing machine and dropped his clothes straight in. French food never tasted quite the same anymore, but all those years in the corporate suites had taught him the importance of turning a liability into an asset.

  Let the others swoon from the stench at the Brownsville Municipal Landfill. Levantin was ready to strut.

  He idled in line behind a parade of garbage trucks—even they drove with their windows up—until he finally reached the gate. Levantin veered away from the truck scale and waved his binoculars at the guard, who waved him in. The road was rail-straight with a partition that, in more northern climes, would be called a snow fence. Here it captured blowing trash. Spackled with snags of newspaper, grocery bags, and twelve-pack boxes, the fence was a spiderweb of man-made detritus. Levantin drove on.

  Brownsville was one of the few major landfills anywhere that still admitted birders; most insurers and city attorneys refused to let passenger cars share a dump road with trash haulers en route to their honey hole. But Brownsville was a border town anxious to promote nonborder businesses. If birdwatchers wanted to spend their tourism dollars pointing $1,000 binoculars at heaping mounds of trash, the city elders here weren’t about to block their view.

  Levantin finally arrived at the key road fork with two signs. The orange-and-black one on the straight fork warned: No Bird Watchers Beyond This Point. The black-and-white one, with a silhouette of a soaring crow, had an arrow pointing right: Landfill Birdwatch. These signs, Levantin surmised, were not mass-produced.

  He parked his rental and ambled toward the viewing area. Other birders had already formed a neat line of scopes and tripods. Everyone seemed to be breathing through the mouth. Levantin inhaled through his nose. He had to admit, even a man with a hapless honker could tell this place was skanky.

  Levantin snapped open his tripod and zoomed in on Mount Trashmore. He felt lucky. New garbage was still being dumped in this part of the landfill. A connoisseur of refuse, the Tamaulipas crow liked fresh best. If anyone needed proof, he just had to check with Manuel Vela, the landfill scalemaster, who had spent two years teaching a crow, whom he had named Jack, to snag and eat bread crusts tossed in midair.

  The Tamaulipas crow was a species common in its home turf, but rare in the United States. Tens of thousands of them lived south of the border in Mexico, but a hardy few—three dozen in good years—spent the winter feasting on Brownsville trash. The challenge was identifying them. The Tamaulipas crow looked a lot like other all-black birds. At fifteen inches, it was slightly larger than a common grackle, slightly shorter than a Chihuahuan raven, and roughly the same length as a great-tailed grackle. If the crow, grackles, and raven were side by side in the sun, the ID would be easy. But at the Brownsville dump, the crow rarely flew within a quarter mile of birders. It wasn’t easy to estimate size, distorted by heat waves, through the lens of a sixty-power telescope.

  Fortunately, Levantin had played this game before. When he spied a black bird on a faraway fence post, he suspected he had his crow. To make sure, he scanned the disgusting countryside for a similar, but much closer, fence post. Now he had his size comparisons.

  With heat waves shimmering in the midday sun, Levantin ticked the Tamaulipas crow off his list. At the dump, he knew his nose gave him an advantage over most birders. He could not honestly say, though, that he enjoyed it.

  Cocooning himself in the cool refuge of his car, Levantin heard something. He had been so focused on the Tamaulipas crow that, until this point, he had ignored all other sounds. The sky above him was filled with dozens of laughing gulls. They were cackling.

  “Well, Ethel,” Al Levantin said over the phone that night to his wife, “today I was in Brownsville, Texas, and I saw the Tamaulipas crow.”

  “A Tamawla what?”

  Ethel Levantin was not a birder. Years ago, she had tried. She had joined her husband on birding trips to the sea and the desert, the mountains and the valleys, but she never quite got it. Her husband could stand for hours in the sticks and marvel at the beauty of a single bird. Ethel got bored. At first she felt bad about it. She wanted to be excited about the same thing that excited her husband. She was a marriage counselor. She knew the importance of common interests. When Al asked Ethel about doing a Big Year, Ethel was determined to do something to share the experience. Maybe she could write it up for a family keepsake. Her husband’s thing about birding, she never understood. But traveling the continent on a moment’s notice, going to exotic places where few people had trekked before, that would make a fun travelogue. Al just had to supply the material.

  “A Tamaulipas crow. A Mexican crow. I saw it today.”

  “How nice. What does it look like? Is it a good-looking bird?”

  “It’s a crow. It’s black.”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “At the dump, Ethel. The Brownsville dump.”

  The dump. He had paid hundreds of dollars to fly fourteen hundred miles from Aspen at the height of ski season to look for a crow at a dump. The news would make some wives scream. Not Ethel, though. This was travelogue material. She did her best reporter’s imitation.

  “Was it a nice day?”

  “I got the bird.”

  After thirty-seven years of marriage, she realized her husband wasn’t being short. He was just so focused on his singular goal, finding birds, that he blocked out, or never took in, anything else around him. He would have his fun. She would put away her pen and paper.

  From the dump in Texas to the dead of winter in Duluth—Al’s travels were becoming harder and harder for Ethel to understand. Al was insistent. He kept telling Ethel, there are a few birds that usually live high in the Arctic, but drop down into northern Minnesota in January. Duluth for these birds was like a Caribbean cruise for people—a midwinter change of scenery with decidedly warmer weather. Big Year birders who didn’t score these species in Minnesota would have to bushwhack for them in northern Canada sometime in summer. Chasing them now meant you didn’t have to battle the mosquitoes.

  He flew to Minneapolis—finally, a birding hot spot with a direct flight from Aspen—and drove north. He hardly had the heart to tell his wife that he wasn’t really aiming for Duluth. That was just a city most people had heard of. His true destination was another forty-five miles northwest of Duluth. Officially, this place had no name; even the roads had only numbers. But by driving Highway 53 to County Road 232 and then looping up 7, 28, 788, and 213, Levantin would be on cherished ground—the place birders called Sax-Zim Bog.

  The North Woods of North America have spruce bogs that are bigger, wetter, and birdier, but Sax-Zim is famed among birders for another reason: it’s easier. Sax-Zim is the only big bog within a half day’s drive of a major airport. And it’s crisscrossed with country roads that make two hundred square miles of foreboding spruce, tamarack, and whit
e-cedar swamp open to anyone with binoculars.

  On the road to Sax-Zim, Levantin started learning how much of Big Year birding wasn’t even birding; it was traveling to birding. If Sax-Zim was so convenient, how come he couldn’t find a radio station with classical music? At least there wasn’t much traffic.

  That was fortunate. About a half hour beyond Duluth, where the spruce really started towering, Levantin spotted a clump on the flat road, one of those dirty ice clods that builds up and falls off the rear tire wells of country cars. The closer he got, though, the less the clump looked like a clod. Clods should be on the side of the road; this was on the yellow line.

  At 60 mph, he saw that the clod had a head.

  Levantin slammed his brakes and raised his binocs. Ten powers of magnification showed that the clod was actually a wild chicken of the north, a ruffed grouse, with crested head, black-banded tail, and absolutely no fear of a fast-approaching Hertz rental sedan. Levantin drove within forty feet of the bird and grabbed his camera. Before focusing, however, he checked his rearview mirror for a speeding logging truck. (In these parts, “speeding logging truck” was redundant; there was no other kind.)

  With reassured rear, he resumed focus through the windshield.

  The bird was gone.

  He slammed his hand on the steering wheel. Though a ruffed grouse was a good bird, a tough bird, it still wasn’t an extremely rare bird, and there would be no reason for anyone to doubt his sighting. He really wanted the photo, though, to prove the location. Birders were accustomed to whacking brambles to find good birds, but Levantin had found this specimen, a game bird that had just survived a Minnesota hunting season, in the middle of a highway. Somebody once told him that grouse groused on winter highways because they ate ice-melting road salt. He also wondered if the bird was attracted to black pavement because it held the sun’s warmth longer than the eighteen-degree air temperatures around it. These were only conjectures. Without a photo, they all sounded like more birder bar stories.

  By the end of his time in Sax-Zim, he had accumulated whole shot glasses full of stories. He lucked into the Arctic’s two toughest dainty birds, the sparrowlike common and hoary redpolls, gorging themselves at feeders in someone’s backyard by a frozen lake. He found a snowy owl camouflaged on the jammed ice and drifted snow of Duluth harbor. Most unlikely of all, though, was the way he scored his great gray owl. The elusive flat-faced nemesis of so many accomplished birders, the great gray owl stared at Levantin with brilliant yellow eyes atop an electrical pole in the frozen bog flanking the road from Sax (a wide spot in the road discovered by Rand McNally’s mapmakers) to Zim (no McNally).

  When he phoned home to Ethel, he sounded like a Boy Scout. The birds were great, he told her, and then he passed along the hows and wheres of each discovered species. Everything else, she had to ask about. Yes, he was outdoors three days and the thermometer had never climbed above twenty-five degrees. No, he never saw the sun. Yes, he always had the whole bog to himself. It was all birds, birds, birds, no distractions, and all the time.

  Ethel admired his passion. She questioned his sanity.

  I worry about you, she told Al. I wish you’d go to some of these places with someone. What if your rental car broke down? What if you got hurt?

  Whatever you do, she told him, make sure you’re safe.

  The mountain lion was so close that Levantin could count its whiskers. They were twitching. Levantin would scream if he could force air into his throat.

  He was two miles into a hike a hundred miles from nowhere, and he was alone, helplessly alone. At first he had thought that rustle in the bush behind him was a bird. But when he’d wheeled around, he’d seen the cat, big and bulky, ready to pounce on his neck. The lion stared. Levantin stared back. It was gray eyes versus blue eyes, a glaredown at twenty feet.

  Slowly, steadily, he raised both hands above his head. If another hiker chanced upon this confrontation, here in the high desert of West Texas’s Big Bend National Park, he would think that the man with binoculars was surrendering. Levantin hoped the lion thought otherwise. With hands up, Levantin was trying to make himself appear larger, a stunt he had read about in the predawn gloom on a trailhead sign.

  The lion didn’t flinch.

  Finally wind filled Levantin’s throat.

  “Get out of here! Lion! Get out of here! Go away! Get out of here!”

  Five seconds passed. Then fifteen. The lion wasn’t budging.

  “Get out of here! Get out of here!”

  The four-foot lion sprang up and away and hightailed it back down the trail. Levantin hurled fist-size rocks at the lion’s fanny. He hit nothing, but threw more. He wanted the lion to think it was being chased.

  Levantin stopped and listened. Nothing. He kept staring ahead while stooping down for more rocks. Still nothing.

  His instincts told him to run to the safety of his car. But the lion had run that way, too. So with rocks in hand, he turned uphill and quickly, cautiously, continued along the Boot Canyon trail. He had another four miles to go. He hoped the lion wasn’t also prowling that way.

  The whole reason he had come here was to see a Colima warbler, a singing bugeater of southwest Mexico that fancied trysts north of the border. Turn-ons: out-of-the-way oaks and maples in the Chisos Mountains above 5,900 feet. Turn-offs: dry weather. Thanks to El Niño’s showers, Levantin figured that Boot Canyon would be crawling with Colimas by now. He hadn’t counted on carnivorous cats.

  Every rock and tree suddenly looked suspicious. Though he had heard other birders groan about the long, steep hike into the lair of the Colima warbler, Levantin shrugged it off. He was in excellent shape. Back home, he pedaled his bike over mountains for sport. After weeks of wintertime birding out the window of his car, he was looking forward to a pore-opening hike under the high border sun. Now he worried that his perspiration smelled like cat food. His neck grew sore from all those looks over his shoulder. It would have been the fastest four-mile hike of his life if he hadn’t spent so much of his time hiking backward.

  Luckily, just shy of his destination, Levantin met up with two other birders who had spent the night camping in the canyon. He told them about his lion encounter. The birders banded closer together.

  Finding the warblers themselves was anticlimatic. There were dozens of them flitting around the brush, yellow-rumped with flanks washed in brown. It was another bird that was rare in the United States, but not the world. He was glad to get it out of the way.

  He hustled six miles back to the trailhead and confronted a National Park Service ranger with his news: There’s a mountain lion out there that stared me down from twenty feet! He thought the ranger would hike the trail to caution others or at least post a warning sign.

  Instead, the ranger smiled. “Are you lucky!” he told Levantin. “I’ve worked here eight years and I haven’t seen a mountain lion!”

  Levantin, sore neck and all, could have popped the guy.

  That night, after a hot shower in the comfort of his motel room, Levantin felt better. The Colima warbler was the 435th bird of his Big Year. He was twenty ahead of Sandy Komito’s record-breaking 1987 pace. But he still had a serious problem: What would he tell his wife?

  Ethel, who knew her husband had scheduled a backcountry trek, cut to the chase:

  “Did you see the bird?”

  “I saw the bird,” Al replied.

  “Did you go with somebody?”

  “You know how you don’t like it when I go birding alone? Well, today I went out with a gorgeous blonde. Slinky. Athletic. Hot-blooded. Biggest eyes you’ve ever seen.”

  By the time he uttered the words mountain lion, Levantin feared his phone connection had gone dead. It hadn’t. When Ethel finally responded, she sure didn’t sound a thousand miles away.

  SANDY KOMITO

  April Fools’ Day started early for Sandy Komito. The motel alarm clock beeped at 3:30 A.M., and he was out of his room a half hour later. The temperature outside was fifteen degrees,
but Komito was flush with excitement. Today he would spy wild chickens having sex in the cheatgrass of Colorado’s high desert.

  He could imagine no better stunt for April 1. Let the amateurs make do with mere whoopee cushions. Komito needed something more. Among birders, he was the Sultan of Slapstick, the Guru of Guffaws, the Bigshot of the Biological Borscht Belt, and he had a reputation to uphold. So he rose before dawn with a plan to spy on sharp-tailed grouse in the throes of copulation.

  Komito felt so good about this adventure that he shelled out the extra money at the rental car counter for a Lincoln Town Car. As he nosed the land barge onto Highway 40, he saw through his high beams that every driveway in Hayden, Colorado, was filled with a pickup truck, many with gun racks. This was cowboy country. A guy from New Jersey was as common as a vegetarian at a rodeo. But a New Jersey guy in a Town Car—that was the punch line to a local joke, not something that ever showed up here in real life. Luckily, at this early hour, the cowboys and sheepmen were quiet.

  South of town, past the towering smokestack of a coal-fired power plant, Komito turned onto a dirt road. About five miles beyond, the directions said, lay the lek of the sharp-tailed grouse.

  A kind of singles bar of the grouse world, a lek is a grassy knoll where hot-to-trot birds meet year after year to search for mates. Leks are all about dancing. Males stomp their feet, shake their tail feathers, spin in circles, and fend off rivals; females swoon over the best strutters. The whole peculiar mating dance repeats every dawn for about a month, after which the females start nesting, the males drop from exhaustion, and the Peeping Tom birders take long, celebratory drags from cigarettes.

  The Hayden lek was infamous as one of the horniest places in the world of grouse. Problem was, Komito’s Town Car was spinning its wheels a long way from the action.

  Three miles up the dirt road, just after the No County Maintenance Beyond This Sign warning, Komito was high-centered in ruts ten inches deep. He rocked the car forward, then backward, and then forward again, but all he heard was the dismal whine of rubber digging deeper into mud. Komito popped out and discovered that he had stopped just shy of a seven-foot snowdrift. (Thank you, El Niño!) When the weather was warmer, that melting snow turned this road into quivering mass of slop. But now that the thermometer inside the Town Car read sixteen degrees, that slop was black ice. Komito was stuck.