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

by Mark Obmascik

  Dawn was an hour away. He saw no sign of lights, or help, anywhere. He had no food or water. He wore only two light sweaters and one windbreaker jacket. For the first time in his Big Year, Komito was scared. He shivered.

  He could wait in the warmth of his car, but for how long? With a seven-foot drift looming over his windshield, he could tell no one was coming down this road anytime soon. Komito started walking back in the direction of his tire tracks.

  Fifteen minutes of trudging and he still found nothing. No danger of human overpopulation here: it was darkness and sagebrush and barbed wire for as far as he could see. A cold wind blew. His face hurt. He wished he had warm gloves. He wished he had long underwear. He wished he knew where the hell he was.

  Finally, a cow brayed. He trudged another mile and saw a porch light on his left. Civilization! Two dogs tore down the driveway. Komito ignored them. Dogs didn’t frighten him as much as a wasted dawn in a Big Year. The mutts barked to high heaven, but never bothered nipping at Komito’s heels. Rescue was within reach.

  Then his day took a truly weird turn. From the dark a Vietnamese potbellied pig suddenly confronted Komito. The man of a million words was dumbfounded. Did these things bite? He didn’t intend to find out. When the potbellied pig grunted at Komito, Komito grunted back. The pig eyed him suspiciously. Komito grunted again. His Vietnamese finally worked—the pig retreated. At 5:30 A.M., with pig at his side, Komito walked onto the lit house porch and rapped on the ranch house door.

  Nobody answered. Komito peeked inside. A man ducked in the kitchen. Couldn’t he hear the knocks? Komito rapped again. Still no answer. That pig was sniffing Komito’s calf. Three more hard knocks. The guy finally opened his door.

  Komito explained his problem, but the pig-propagating cowboy said he was too busy to help. He gave Komito a cup of coffee and the phone numbers of two local towing services. Komito, oblivious to the fact that most of the world was still in bed at 5:45 A.M., called both. Neither answered. Now he was really stuck.

  Maybe the cowboy sensed Komito’s desperation. Maybe the cowboy sensed a new punch line to a local bar joke.

  “Get in the truck,” he told Komito, and up the road they went, cowboy in hat behind the wheel, birdman with hope in the passenger seat.

  When they found the Town Car, even Komito had to admit that it looked pathetic. The sun was up, and it illuminated acre after acre of wide-open ranchlands. Komito had managed to get stuck in the only rut for miles around. At least the cowboy could see that Komito wasn’t exaggerating his mess. Of course, Komito had no idea how to fix it.

  The cowboy parked well short of the mud bog and extricated from the back of the truck a long length of chain, the heavy, rusty stuff that looked and clanged as if it had just come off the anchor of an old warship. This shouldn’t take long, the cowboy said.

  It did. For people who lived in sage country, every vehicle was equipped with an undercarriage hook to rectify situations like this. But a Lincoln Town Car, to the surprise of Komito and the disgust of the cowboy, had no easy place to affix a tow chain. A Town Car was not made for tugging.

  After the cowboy lay on his back in the snow—Komito stood safely aside; he wasn’t about to roll in the cold—he finally found some metal strong enough to support a grappling hook. One jerk from the truck and the Town Car was liberated at last.

  Komito was so grateful that he pulled out his wallet to reward the cowboy with $50. Alas, Komito carried nothing smaller than a Ben Franklin. He gave the cowboy the hundred—oh, the horror of overpayment!—and plopped down exhausted in his car.

  What were you doing out here, anyway? the cowboy asked.

  Looking for a bird—the sharp-tailed grouse, Komito replied.

  The cowboy shook his head. What lived on the range was for eating, not looking.

  Komito goosed his Town Car heater and sped away.

  Somewhere deep in the brush, a sharp-tailed grouse cried “April fool!”

  Komito rested at home, but he needed a good bird. He thought about Newfoundland, where a redwing from Iceland had somehow survived an Atlantic crossing, but Newfoundland was a grueling trip. He was tired. He reconsidered his need. No, he didn’t need a good bird. He needed a good, easy bird. But nothing new was being reported in Florida. Minnesota was quiet. Arizona was dead. Texas—toast.

  He picked up his phone and repeated his code words: Long. Eared. Owl. The North American Rare Bird Alert responded with big news: a pink-footed goose was paddling just 130 miles away in Pennsylvania.

  A native of Europe, the pink-footed goose was so common on its home turf that it was a bigger hit with hunters than birders. On this side of the ocean, however, the goose was a bona fide Code 5 bird—one of the 155 rarest species in North America. Komito backed his Town Car out of his garage by dawn. SKUA was on the prowl again.

  He made a beeline for Lake Ontelaunee, near Reading, and ran out of his car. In the reservoir was a white mass of five thousand snow geese. On the shore before them was a battalion of binoculared birders. Komito, breathless, recognized one, Paul Guris, a veteran of many pelagic trips.

  “Is the goose still around?” Komito asked.

  The other birder checked the focus inside his scope. “Take a look,” he told Komito.

  The eyepiece filled with the unmistakable image of the pink-footed goose.

  Komito was stupefied. After all his wild-goose chases—the days in the sleet in Alaska, the hours in the summer stench of the Salton Sea, the nights among the border swimmers on the Rio Grande—his hunt for the pink-footed goose was over in thirty seconds. The only way he could describe his feelings was to use a word that, until this point, had been alien to his vocabulary.

  He felt guilty.

  EIGHT

  The Wise Owl

  The question was simple: Where is the best place to see a long-eared owl?—but the answer to Greg Miller was fraught with complications. This bird was fickle. One day it would gather in groups of thirty along oaks in a parking lot; the next day all would be gone. Though long-eareds did tend to show up most often in New England and the Rocky Mountain West, Miller had his own little stash. The tricky part: those long-eared owls were back home in Ohio.

  Since his first trip to Arizona, Miller had started calling his father nearly every night, sometimes to compare birding notes, other times just to break the loneliness. The divorce never came up, and Miller was grateful. His father was sick with congestive heart failure. His heart worked at only 15 percent efficiency. After he had open-heart surgery, doctors gave him only six months to live. That was two years ago, in 1996. Now his father was savoring every extra day of life, and Miller didn’t want to do anything to make him worse. He debated the issue again and again in his mind: Would a birding trip with a divorced son help or hurt his father’s fragile heart?

  When Miller finally broached the subject, his father quickly cut him off. Of course he wanted to go birding with his son. He was sixty-eight years old. He already knew what he would die of. This trip would give him something more to live for.

  His father was weak. Miller could see it in his face and hear it in his voice. Every step was an effort, but his father kept taking them, one after another through the snow and wind of Killdeer Plains. For the past hour they had searched every tree for any sign of a long-eared owl, but all they had found was a single pile of scat beneath a maple. Daylight was vanishing as quickly as his father’s energy. Maybe this wasn’t such a treasure trove after all.

  From the next grove emerged another birder, a teenage girl with the strength to ignore the sideways snow. Miller’s father knew the search could be helped by an extra set of eyes.

  You two go ahead, he told Miller, and I’ll see what I can find back here.

  Miller tried to protest, but his father would hear none of it. Miller and the girl pressed on together to a distant woods.

  The girl had a sharp eye, a keen ear, and identification skills good enough to name their first dozen birds in Killdeer Plains without a field guid
e. She was gung ho enough to believe that the owl was always just in the next tree, but careful enough to keep herself from moving too quickly and flushing the bird. She reminded Miller of himself, twenty-five years earlier.

  But teenage optimism wasn’t enough to produce a long-eared owl. After a half hour, Miller worried about his father. The snow blew sideways again. Miller and the girl redoubled their steps back to the original forest.

  Miller’s stomach pitted. Why had he left his father behind? What if something had happened to him? Even in the cold, Miller broke out in sweat. He quickened his pace.

  Beyond the next field, luckily, thankfully, he spotted his father standing beneath a tree. He looked okay, but he wasn’t moving. He was looking up.

  Miller raised his binoculars.

  In the maple above Miller’s father was a long-eared owl, perched and wheeling its head from father to son, father to son, father to son.

  The eyesight of a long-eared owl is extraordinary, but this particular bird could not tell which two-legged creature beneath it wore the broader smile.

  NINE

  Yucatán Express

  On a sultry April night deep in the Yucatán jungle, a ruby-throated hummingbird stirred. She was hungry, but that was nothing new. For the past two weeks she had done little more than eat. She had downed so many aphids and spiders and bees and nectar—especially nectar—that she had nearly doubled her body weight. Now she weighed as much as two pennies. Her breast bulged with yellow globs of fat. She needed those globs. Her life depended on them.

  At her tail a steady breeze blew. It had been 106 degrees during the day, and the heat stifled everything in the jungle, even the keel-billed toucan, that screeching, big-honkered bird made famous by Froot Loops. But the sun had dropped below the beach a half hour ago. Trees were coming alive, not with calls of local birds, but with the trills of travelers like her. Everything felt right.

  She lifted off her perch and so did waves of others. There were tanagers as red as fireplugs and buntings as painted as Vegas showgirls and warblers—warblers!—with orange faces and blue backs and yellow bellies and sides with zebra stripes. Beside that thousand-winged art show, the female ruby-throated hummingbird was a mere plain Jane, a pinkie-size creature with green back, dull belly, and brown flanks.

  Her goal, however, was astounding

  Tonight she would try to fly five hundred miles over the Gulf of Mexico. If she stopped just once to rest, she would die. If she made it, she would earn the chance for two or three seconds of copulation on the ground with a promiscuous male with a brilliant red throat.

  To navigate her nonstop, nighttime ocean crossing, the ruby-throated hummingbird would rely on a brain smaller than a pea. Humans, with noggins ten thousand times larger, were still trying to comprehend this incredible journey—the marvel of migration.

  Bird migration has dumbfounded humans ever since they started scanning the heavens.

  In the Bible, when a miserable Job had to be reminded of the Almighty’s might, the Lord asked him, “Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom and stretch her wings toward the south?” In Jeremiah 8:7, migration was cited as proof that birds could be smarter than man: “Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtledove and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming. But my people know not the judgment of the Lord.” The quail that fell from the sky to feed Moses and his wandering band in the desert was, scientists now say, part of the biannual migration between nesting areas in Eurasia and African wintering grounds.

  Even the pagans knew something was up. Homer began the third chapter of the Iliad by likening the battle cries of the Trojans to “a flight of wildfowl or cranes that scream overhead when rain and winter drive them over the flowing waters of Oceanus.”

  But recognizing bird migration was a lot different from understanding it. Aristotle, the renowned expert of logic and metaphysics, was stumped by swallows. He believed the speedy bug eaters vanished from the autumn skies of ancient Greece because they hibernated in tree holes. When black-faced Eurasian redstarts skipped town for warmer climes and were replaced by orange-faced Eurasian robins, Aristotle came up with a novel explanation—the redstart and robin were part of a glorious transmutation, the seasonal change of one animal into another. (At least he kept his feathers together; Romans thought swallows turned into frogs.)

  In 1703, an Englishman who identified himself only as a “Person of Learning and Piety” published the “Probable Solution of This Question: Whence come the Stork and the Turtledove, the Crane, and the Swallow, when they Know and Observe the Appointed Time of their Coming?” His answer: birds wintered on the moon.

  By the late 1800s, after Linneaus had classified the birds and Darwin had figured out how they evolved—his famed thirteen finches of the Galápagos helped inspire the Origin of Species—migration became less of a mystery. For the first time, ships and railroads made it possible for man to match the travels of featherweight creatures. When biologists crossed the globe from north to south, they found many of the same birds from home. Bird migration became the new conventional wisdom.

  The hows and whys of migration remained elusive. Clearly, one of the world’s great flyways linked South America with North, but the exact route was unknown. Noting that land birds such as warblers sometimes landed on tankers and shrimpers in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, most scientists concluded that migrants simply flew over water. In 1945, though, Texas professor George Williams rocked the ornithological boat with a simple question: Why would tiny songbirds risk their lives in a five-hundred-mile ocean crossing when they could fly around it? To make sure no one ignored his point, Williams even revived a twisted form of the old Person of Learning and Piety moon-jab. The belief in trans-Gulf migration, he wrote, was like the belief that “the interior of the moon is made of green cheese”—there was little scientific proof of either. Even though Williams knew that many species tended to appear magically on the same spring days on the Gulf Coast of the United States, he concluded that these were land-bound migrants, blown out to sea by storms and trying desperately to return.

  Williams’s green-cheese raspberry was so troubling to ornithologists that they soon began staying up nights to disprove it. The most successful was a Louisiana State University researcher, George Lowery, who spent the spring of 1948 peering at the moon through a 20x telescope from the southern coast of the Gulf, in Progreso, Mexico. What Lowery saw in the dark was vindication. Songbirds were taking off within an hour of sunset and flying high in the night past the glow of the moon. Each one was headed due north.

  In all his nights on the shores of the Yucatán, Mr. Moonwatcher rarely saw more than a meager thirty birds per hour—a telescope, after all, takes in only a minute percentage of the sky—but it was still enough to spoil Williams’s cheese. A Gulf flyway clearly was open. But no one knew how many travelers used it.

  The big breakthrough came from an ornithologist who, strangely enough, made his most important discovery indoors. In the mid-1960s, Sid Gauthreaux learned about a new battery of government radars rimming the Gulf from Brownsville, Texas, to Key West, Florida. Though the equipment was built to forecast the weather, Gauthreaux figured out that the sensitive radars also picked up something else moving in the sky—evidence of migrating birds. One small blob on a radar screen represented a small flock of birds; a bigger blob was hundreds of birds. When Gauthreaux started looking through old weather records, he found blob after blob after blob. Fortunately, the government, being the government, had archived nearly every weather radar image since the network had been built in 1957. Gauthreaux hunkered down and reviewed thousands of radar pages. It was mind-numbing work, but the weather records proved that the Gulf of Mexico was one of the planet’s most important avian flyways. It came to be known as the Yucatán Express.

  At peak migration, Gauthreaux estimated, as many as 45 million songbirds arrived in a single night along three hundred miles of the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Lake
Charles, Louisiana. That’s 150,000 birds per mile, or 15,000 per city block.

  The overall numbers were amazing, and they contained incredible individual feats. Curious about the endurance of songbirds, a University of Illinois researcher named Richard Graber captured a gray-cheeked thrush—a smaller, plainer relative of the American robin—and attached a tiny transmitter to it. With Graber in hot pursuit in a small aircraft, the thrush took off in central Illinois and flew straight north at an average speed of 50 mph. (The bird was boosted by a 27 mph tailwind.) At Lake Michigan, the airplane played it safe by hugging the shoreline, but the one-ounce bird flew smack-dab up the middle of the vast lake. The eight-hour four-hundred-mile chase finally ended at the northernmost point of Lake Michigan when the pilot was forced to land to refuel. The bird continued north without stopping.

  Birds indisputably had the ability to complete staggering flights. Humans just had to believe them.

  Migration was lonely work. While other species banded together in aerodynamic flocks or majestic Vs, the ruby-throated hummingbird always flew apart. She neither gave nor received chirps of encouragement or hints on direction. She was, by nature, a solitary cuss. Hers was the only bird family that could hover, fly backward, or even upside down, but tonight she was interested in going only one direction—north.