Beneath her the land gave way to water, and the great blackness of the Gulf stretched before her. She climbed until she found her tailwind, which tonight was a steady 14 mph. Different species favor winds at different elevations. On the long flight north, sandpipers and red-necked phalaropes often fly so low that they could be seen only after cresting a wave. Above them are hummingbirds and songbirds, which typically stay five hundred to two thousand feet over the Gulf. (Most songbirds are too small to be seen without binoculars above one thousand feet.) At the top of the sky are the strongest flyers, mostly shorebirds, which often exceed three miles above sea level. Of course, nature never fails to make exceptions—or to astonish. Twenty-one thousand feet above the Nevada desert, a commercial jet once whacked a migrating mallard. Climbers gasping for breath on oxygen bottles atop Mount Everest, elevation 29,028, have been shocked to see geese flying overhead.
Five hours into her Gulf flight, the hummer was averaging 30 mph and still pointing toward America. Why don’t birds get lost at night? Some university studies have concluded that birds may follow the stars—Polaris, the North Star, is the one light in the sky that never moves—but other researchers have found stronger links to polarized light that wafts from the sun in the evening sky. Neither theory explains how birds successfully navigate hundreds of miles in the dark through clouds and fog. The truth is, the best scientific minds in the world still don’t know how bird brains find their way.
By the time the sun rose, the little ruby in the sky was becoming a mere shadow of herself. She had covered three hundred miles and was burning fat fast. A hummer’s metabolism is so high that, on a typical land-bound day, she must feed every twenty minutes or so just to stay healthy. That means she eats half her weight in food and drinks eight times her weight in water—every day. For the past ten hours on migration, however, she could consume nothing. Her wings flapped fifty times a second. Her heart beat a thousand times a minute. Her weight was down about 25 percent.
On the horizon, trouble loomed.
From two hundred miles away, Greg Miller could see it: billowing black storm clouds, closing on the Texas coast. Miller knew exactly what to do. He raced to the heart of the storm.
Al Levantin was already there. Sandy Komito was getting soaked by it.
In the thick of spring migration, competitive birders dreamed of foul weather. Actually, they lusted for it, the nastier the better, a gale-force thunderstorm or a cold front that took two sweaters.
The reason: fallout.
Fallout is a fabled natural phenomenon where migrating birds, confronted by a sudden head wind or downpour, literally drop from the sky to seek safe refuge. In many years fallout simply doesn’t happen; steady tailwinds and calm skies conspire to let birds cruise easily to their northern nesting locations. But when fallout does occur, it is the stuff of legends. Fallout looks as if a Star Trek transporter is beaming creatures from outer space and down onto the coast—birds, thousands of birds, come from nowhere. Tree limbs bend with scarlet tanagers. Lawns are carpeted with warblers. Yard bushes with bare spring buds are transformed into Christmas trees laden with brilliant winged ornaments.
For most birders, a fallout is an amazing spectacle. But for Big Year birders, a fallout is a shortcut, a time-saver, a Cliff’s Notes that gives the answers to most of that semester’s final exams. Every bird seen exhausted on the ground during a fallout is a bird that doesn’t have to be chased later on its breeding grounds. No competitive birder can afford to miss a fallout.
Greg Miller pushed his rental car to 80 mph and then floored it.
The hummer was fading fast. When the storm first hit, sweeping from land to coast, her fat globs were already thin. Now they were gone. All she had for energy stores was muscle. Each wingbeat ate more away. She was cannibalizing herself.
Sixteen hours of southerlies had brought her within twenty miles of land. But the tailwind that had carried her so far so fast had been spun around by the storm. The wind now blasted her face. She needed twice the work to go half the distance. All around her the storm had knocked down birds from their migrating altitudes and left them struggling just above the water. She was almost on the waves, too. The Gulf was really rolling. She couldn’t float or swim. One dip and she was history.
Humans have long understood the dangers of Gulf crossings. At the turn of the twentieth century, seamen on a ship thirty miles off the Mississippi River delta watched in amazement when hundreds of migrating warblers, confronted by a cold snap, braced against a head wind, struggled, and drowned. After another spring storm in April 1995, David and Melissa Wiedenfeld of Louisiana State University walked the beaches near Grand Isle, Louisiana, and found seven thousand dead birds per mile. That single storm, they concluded, killed at least forty thousand songbirds of forty-five species.
Gulf catastrophes were common enough that Mother Nature, through evolution, had hedged her bets. To prevent the destruction of an entire species by one horrible storm, many species, including the ruby-throated hummingbird, had two kinds of birds—those that migrated over land, and those that migrated over water. Land migrants knew about raptors. Water migrants knew about willpower.
The hummer was finally within striking distance of the coast. Rain fell in sheets. She had the biggest heart, proportionately, of any warm-blooded animal, and she was pushing it to the hilt. Her lungs, like those of all birds, remained fully inflated, but hers were turbocharged by nine special air sacs that pumped like bellows and kept the oxygen coming. She was turning weaker faster.
Then, over the waves, she saw it: land!
Not just the usual swampy coastal plain, but trees, big honking trees, stretching just beyond the ocean froth. She was almost there. She might be saved. Her wings were being battered by rain and wind. She fought hard. The closer she came, the better she saw—hackberries and honey locusts and water oaks fifty feet high, yaupon and privet bushes in the thicket below, and Indian paintbrushes and grass in the fields around.
She dropped on a hackberry like a hailstone from the sky.
She was weak. She had lost so much fat and muscle on her eighteen-hour journey north that she now weighed one-tenth of an ounce. She and nine friends could be mailed together for the price of a single postage stamp. But she had done it. She had conquered the Gulf. She was alive.
A two-legged creature approached. It made a loud, deep sound.
“Ruby-throated,” announced Sandy Komito, dripping wet in the rain.
For the past ten days, Komito had been hanging out at the famed fallout hot spot of High Island, Texas, and he was going stir-crazy because of it. There just wasn’t much to see; on a bluebird day, High Island didn’t even have bluebirds. Komito was so bored that he took to scolding children in Boy Scout Woods—“Screaming and loud noises bring mosquitoes!” he lectured a preschooler—and teasing foreigners. (“God bless the Brits!” he proclaimed to a tour group of twenty. “If it wasn’t for them acting as decoys for us, we’d all be eaten alive by these mosquitoes.”)
Now the waiting game was over. The fallout hummer on the twig before him was so spent, so oblivious to his presence, that Komito didn’t even need binoculars to identify her. Besides, her species was so common around summertime flowers and gardens along the East Coast that he expected to see hundreds during his Big Year.
She was no big deal.
He moved on. The sky was raining birds onto High Island, and Komito had more to find than ruby-throated hummingbirds.
Like some of the people it attracts, High Island is a little unusual. For starters, it isn’t an island. It’s a small town seventy miles east of Houston and twenty miles south of the interstate, a full mile from the roily Gulf, and surrounded by rice fields, oil rigs, and humidity.
High Island also isn’t very high. In fact, it rises only thirty-two feet above sea level, the crest of the bubble of a subterranean salt dome. But its fertile soils support a canopy of fifty-foot trees, a green oasis that can be seen for miles offshore, the most prominent point
on hundreds of miles of Gulf coast from the Yucatán to Mobile, Alabama.
The island’s reputation exceeds its size. Though it regularly draws birders from Los Angeles to Long Island to London, the prime fallout area covers only fifteen acres. Every year, more than six thousand people converge upon this tiny preserve with high hopes for a spring fallout.
High Island is not the most popular place on the continent for birding—Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas and Cape May in New Jersey each attract about one hundred thousand visitors a year. And it isn’t the richest—High Island birders pump $2.5 million into the local economy, a fraction of the $15 million spent to view the sandhill and whooping crane migration at Grand Island, Nebraska. But for three weeks in April, High Island is the undisputed center of the serious birding universe.
It even has grandstands. Determined to make birding a spectator sport, Houston Audubon built bleachers beneath the hackberries to hold as many as forty people—fifty if the birds were really good—with views of a puddle birdbath that was fed by regular drips from aquarium tubing. A sign on the grandstands warned Beware of Berry Bottom, but many intemperate birders still walked around all day with silly purple stains splotched across their seats. The most-trafficked walking paths were boardwalked, with benches at strategic locations. All other paths were hard-packed from the repeated laps of so many birders.
Though everyone came here for the birds, some of the most interesting spectacles are put on by bipeds.
There are vanloads of touring Brits, earnest but business-faced, always lugging their tripods and telescopes for the closest possible looks even though the fallout birds are so weary they can nearly be touched. For Englishmen—and they are, overwhelmingly, men—obsessed with ticking off as many New World species as possible, High Island is the trip of a lifetime. Their months of preparation mean they often know more about North American birds than most North American birders.
Close behind are the roving bands of middle-aged women, two or three abreast, wearing sensible shoes, uncolored hair, and plain pants. They care not one whit what any man thinks, unless he can help solve an especially difficult bird identification. When the women coo over the discovery of a rose-breasted grosbeak, crowds gather. Otherwise the women keep mainly to themselves and grin and chortle and have as much fun with each other as with any winged creature.
The noisiest bipeds in the woods are the married types. A typically disastrous trip to High Island occurs when one spouse, an inexperienced birder, insists on tagging along with the other to see exactly what this birdwatching thing is all about. Usually it takes four mosquito welts or one downpour for the inexperienced spouse to demand how the hell this fits into any normal person’s idea of a vacation. Inevitably the day ends with one angry spouse in the car, another angry spouse in the field, and both insisting over dinner that night that the other remain ensconced on his or her side of the motel bed.
Prowling, prowling, and never resting are the Young Turks, most easily distinguished by their absolute refusal to wear a foppish hat. The headstrong ones stare intensely, quote their Geographics, and generally talk as if they know it all, which they seemingly do until a tough call on a plain female warbler makes them into monkeys. The smart Young Turks ask for help from Brits and middle-aged women and say a lot of “Yes, ma’am,” “No, sir,” “Thank you.”
Then there are the standoffish types, almost all men, who lurk around as lone eagles until someone else calls out a particularly rare bird. Then they pounce. These guys are either seriously competitive or highly susceptible to competition fever. They talk about life lists.
All these people walk around and round the four-block circles, craning their necks to the heavens and speaking in the hushed tones usually reserved for Sunday morning in the pew. It is all so neat and proper and civilized.
It made Sandy Komito crazy.
He tried to keep quiet, oh, he really did. But with as many as five hundred birders a day walking the High Island boardwalks, he couldn’t resist some showmanship.
At one point, two tour groups clustered around a low oak branch adorned with an apparent chuck-will’s-widow, a robin-size bug-eater that hunts at night, sleeps during the day, and wears such perfect dead-leaf camouflage that it is usually overlooked as just another lump on a log. Komito was happy to join the crowd. A chuck-will’s-widow was rarely seen during the day; people usually drove the back roads at dusk with hopes of headlighting the glowing eyes of this bird.
Yes, the defending Big Year champ confirmed, it’s an excellent bird.
Just as Komito started puffing with the discovery of another toughie, Jon Dunn, the chief birdman for the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, ambled by. Dunn parted the tour groups like Moses at the Red Sea.
Dunn studied the bird and issued a new proclamation: “That’s no chuck-will’s-widow. That’s a whip-poor-will.” Though the two species were similar, the whip-poor-will was about 25 percent smaller, with more white in the tail.
Komito glassed the bird more closely and saw that Dunn was right. Komito felt the humiliating splat of egg on his face. Mistakes were always part of the game in birding, but Komito didn’t like to commit his in front of the game’s master, with two tour groups so up close and personal with his misfortune.
High Island was a small place, and Komito was a proud man. He really wanted something better out of High Island. He had spun his wheels the past ten days waiting for a storm to bring him fallout. All that was falling out now, though, were the usual suspects—]ruby-throated hummingbirds, golden-winged warblers, summer tanagers. Nice birds all, but nothing that was going to break any Big Year records.
Perhaps sensing the hurt, Dunn gave Komito a heads-up on a hunt for another tough bird, the elusive yellow rail, only a short drive away. Komito decided to chase it.
On his way out, as he shuffled on the boardwalk past the women and the warblers and the Brits and the buntings, Komito bumped into something that was totally unexpected: Al Levantin.
“Hello, Master,” Levantin said, his customary greeting to Komito when encountering him in an uncustomary place. It was the third time they had met in the first four months of the year. The hellos were about the extent of their conversation. Levantin could make small talk for hours, but was Mr. Secret Agent Man when it came to personal details.
So the two Big Year competitors passed on the boardwalk as quickly as they came. Komito went to dog the Dunn bird. Levantin stayed to score thirty-two songbirds.
Once safely out of each other’s sight, however, both men pondered the same question: What was he doing here?
The yellow rail was the Greta Garbo of the bird world: it wanted to be left alone. Few birds were camouflaged so perfectly; few animals were so obsessed with remaining unseen. It wintered only in coastal swamps with spartina grass so dense that it rarely saw its own shadow. It never walked in the open. If chased, it ran. It hated flying so much that scientists once suspected that it migrated alone at night—on foot.
For competitive birders, this all meant the yellow rail would never win any Miss Congeniality contests. It used to be an easier target, thanks to the federal government. For years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had driven something called a rail buggy—a monster Rolligon truck with wheels three feet high and four feet wide—through the skankiest depths of the thirty-four-thousand-acre Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. Birders rode on top. Rails ran for their lives.
But federal biologists grew concerned about the smushing damage inflicted by five-hundred-pound tires on five-day-a-week rumbles through a supposed nature preserve. In 1988, the buggy was officially derailed.
For the next decade, many birders simply wrote off the bird. Without the buggy to flush it, the yellow rail was just too difficult to see.
So when Jon Dunn mentioned a plot to spot yellow rails at Anahuac, Sandy Komito jumped. Though birders no longer could ride for rails, they could certainly scurry for them. Vanloads of birding tour groups, plus Ko
mito, converged at Anahuac headquarters and organized a rail walk. The Fish and Wildlife Service even endorsed the whole scheme by opening up a part of the swamp that had long been off-limits to human visitation.
There was, of course, a catch. All this was to happen in a place called Gator Marsh.
Anahuac was home to alligators. Big ones. Hundreds of them. Usually they stayed under the boardwalks and off the gravel roads, but they were most definitely there. They used to be one of the main attractions on the old rail buggies. They were fun to watch from the top of a truck with four-foot-wide wheels. But alligators at ankle level were an entirely different proposition. Some birders decided to play it safe by standing atop the levee well above Gator Marsh.
The rest got their marching orders. The only way to see yellow rails was to force them to take wing. This was no easy task. Even with a line of birders this long—there were sixty people—a rail could still move fast enough on the ground to escape detection.
So the birders decided to use a secret weapon: terror.
On long ropes they tied dozens of plastic milk cartons and poured gravel into each. The result was a noisemaking dragline. If the birders tugged this contraption quickly through the swamp, they might just frighten a yellow rail into the air—if a gator didn’t do something about the racket first.
For a good bird, Komito would risk danger. But to many other birders, Komito seemed to avoid extra work.
While fifty-nine other people trudged into the thigh-deep swamp grass with the dragline, Komito flanked to the left, hoping to be in a position to photograph anything that might pop up. Though the people in the middle of the dragline were the main brush-beaters, Komito knew they were less likely to reap any payoff. If a yellow rail couldn’t outrun a dragline, it often tried to sidestep the threat. That meant the prime viewing location was on the ends, or the wingtips, of the dragline.
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Page 16