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

by Mark Obmascik

  When Komito arrived on the island, he found that his saddle baskets, which he had last used two years ago, were stripped from his favorite bicycle. Komito asked the mechanic, Mad Dog Swertinski, to retrieve the baskets from someone else’s bike and return them. Mad Dog—a Harley-riding male nurse whose nickname came from an emergency-room argument that ended with a doctor being deposited outside the emergency room—told Komito to go jump. Komito stripped off the baskets himself.

  Then there were the clothes. Komito had been stockpiling clothes, boxes of clothes, at Attu for years. These weren’t your typical birding duds. The clothes Komito wore on one of the wildest places on earth were rejects from his New Jersey country club—golf clothes, pure polyester, a ticking time bomb of fashion from the 1970s. The more outrageous he looked, the better. He matched burnt-orange trousers with lime green shirts, blue-and-green madras with red-and-black buffalo plaid. His bell-bottoms could swallow a fire hydrant; his collars were as wide as the wings on a 747. His favorite of all, though, was a patterned plum polyester known as Mr. Pants. If Mr. Pants could talk, he would never shut up. A thirteen-year resident of Attu, Mr. Pants had accompanied Komito on some of the greatest bird chases of North American history—the Narcissus flycatcher on the bush, the white-tailed eagle atop the nest, the Oriental turtle-dove on the gravel. Komito was not a drinking man, but that did not stop him from waxing long and misty-eyed about the incredible adventures of Mr. Pants.

  These were the stories that brought birders to Komito. On a foul-weather day at Attu, when seventy-five of the continent’s most serious birders were stuck together in a leaky, rat-infested, former Coast Guard building, an industrial contractor from New Jersey was laid out in full polyester with a spasming back—and trying to speak Japanese on the base’s two-way radio with offshore fishermen. It was the borscht belt on the Bering Sea. Even in the lousiest circumstances, Komito usually could find some way to make people laugh.

  Somebody stuck his head out the door for a new weather report. Rain still pelted the island, but the direction had shifted. Now the wind blasted from the west—straight from Asia.

  That made the birders laugh a little harder.

  The next ten days were the greatest run of rare birds in recorded North American history. A giant vacuum cleaner of a storm had sucked up whole flocks of Siberian species and dumped them all across Attu. In one amazing day, Miller saw fourteen birds that were too rare even to be mentioned in Roger Tory Peterson’s first field guide. Birders accustomed to flying across the continent to see a single accidental were now awash in dozens of them. The wood sandpiper, a Eurasian fan of freshwater marshes, was typically seen in North America perhaps once every two or three years. Miller saw 212 in one day. The sky rained rarities.

  These birds, however, came at a high price—sixteen miles of biking and ten miles of hiking through snow, sleet, mud, and forty-knot winds. Miller’s rear end no longer was sore. It was raw. A bad intestinal bug was being passed around, too, and Miller was scared to death of No. 2 in the tundra—especially when Carol was around. He ate Imodium like Halloween candy and hoped against hope that there would be no line at the outhouse at the end of the day. He had made the mistake of buying a raincoat that was size medium; he couldn’t even fit an arm inside. First he got soaked. Then he got sick. At night Miller had already been assigned to sleep in the loudest room at the base, which everyone called the snore-a-torium. (His remarkable volume and cadence earned him the nickname Chainsaw.) But now a respiratory bug was spreading, and snores in the sleeping quarters were being replaced by oyster-hacking coughs. Miller still refused to give up. His sole concession to sickness was that he sometimes woke up at 7:30 A.M. instead of his usual 6 A.M. This was a once-in-a-lifetime trip and he was going to wring every possible minute from it.

  Komito was so paranoid of germs that he washed his hands every time he touched a doorknob. Some evenings this meant eight trips to the sink, but he wasn’t arguing with the results. In a building that was becoming a giant petri dish, Komito remained as immune to sickness as the Rock of Gibraltar. Even his back stopped hurting.

  After a certain point, when he saw Miller and others running themselves to exhaustion, Komito adopted a different birding tactic. He would venture far afield only for new rarities. This meant positioning himself at some central location, such as Smew Pond, or, when his back was nagging him, by the warm stove indoors, listening to those regular half-hour radio reports. If a good bird was found somewhere—say, an eye-browed thrush at Murder Point—Komito would chase it. That was grueling work. Otherwise he conserved his energy while everybody else flogged the soggy tundra for new finds.

  To Komito, this was called strategy. Others, however, disparaged it as radio-birding. They resented it. They felt like beaters on an English pheasant hunt. They found the birds—Komito got the glory. Though his Town Car was safely garaged back home in New Jersey, the skua was alive and well and scoring prizes on Attu.

  While nursing his delicate back in the warm base, Komito ran into other birders. One was Macklin Smith, a poet and professor of medieval English at the University of Michigan who could read and write the language of Beowulf and Chaucer. Smith was the only person who reported a bigger North American life list than Komito. Komito, however, believed that the professor’s list was rife with poetic license. Smith had a knack for discovering rarities that were seen by him and only him. There was an Asiatic common crane in Nebraska, a broadbilled sandpiper on Attu, and on and on—more than a dozen birds, all told, that Komito believed Smith had simply made up. For his part, Smith thought Komito should stuff a sock in it and vouched long and often for every bird on his list. He rattled his saber at Komito’s own claim several years ago of an Eskimo curlew in Texas. Komito, Smith said, was simply jealous, a claim that Komito has vehemently denied. As the tour group’s breakfast cook, Smith had birded on Attu six more years than Komito. (Smith missed 1987 only because of his wedding that year.) Smith was a high-minded professor; Komito was a streetwise night-school dropout who had scrapped his way from poverty to riches in one of the most macho businesses of the industrial Northeast. Smart people didn’t stand between them.

  This year, the lung virus had hit Smith particularly hard, which meant he was spending a lot of time bedridden in the base. Smith bunked next to Komito’s room. His cough was horrible, so loud and so wet that Komito couldn’t squelch it with his earplugs.

  When the radio call went out for a great knot at Alexai Point, Komito knew that Smith, no matter how sick, would not be able to resist. This brawny Asiatic sandpiper was as rare as a Nutting’s flycatcher, a bird seen only once in a generation. If Smith was going to claim it, Komito was going to be there, too.

  For twelve miles they biked and hiked through creeks, around waterfalls, and over tundra that squished like a sponge when a boot stepped on it. Sleet sloshed. Smith lost all color in his face. But every time Komito forged ahead, thinking Smith had finally quit, he would hear that disgusting cough again. It was the slowest-motion chase since Captain Hook and the crocodile that swallowed a clock.

  Two and a half hours of agony later, Komito finally arrived at Alexai Point. Smith had disappeared, but the great knot was staked out on a distant beach. A scope line of three dozen birders waited to see it. Komito was waiting his turn in the scope line when he heard it—the cough. Smith had pulled up two hundred feet short. He didn’t have the strength for the great knot.

  Komito got his look at the bird—Miller was in line in front of him—and then walked back to Smith. It’s a great rarity, Macklin, Komito told him, and you really should see the bird. Smith was tired. Komito wanted Smith’s eye on that scope. It wasn’t good enough to be in the neighborhood of a rare bird; if Smith was going to list the rarity, he actually had to see the rarity.

  Finally Smith mustered the strength to conquer the extra two hundred feet to the scope. Komito saw his nemesis see the bird. Now, he was satisfied. How Smith got himself back to the base—that was his business.

 
; Now there were other birds to chase. Komito was especially interested in a report of a pin-tailed snipe at Pratincole Beach. The snipe was a notoriously difficult bird to identify, but the call had been made by James Huntington, an Iowa postman who was unique among top listers for three reasons: he was soft-spoken, humble, and painfully careful with his field calls. He spent so much time staring at tricky birds that his name had become part of the birding vocabulary. A Huntington look was when somebody stared at a bird long after others left. It also was what some people were accused of taking when they lingered at the head of an antsy scope line.

  Because Huntington was one of the few birders with a life list that rivaled his own, Komito hadn’t been able to resist taking a few jabs over the years. On one of his first trips to Attu, Huntington had raced too close to a rarity and scared it off. Komito had memorialized the mistake by calling him Flush Gordon. On another year in Attu, the weather was oddly pleasant, and Huntington was sunburned so badly that he smeared white zinc-oxide cream all over his face for protection. For that one, Komito called him Casper, after the cartoon ghost.

  Komito took his Huntington look through Huntington’s scope and proclaimed himself unsure of the snipe identification. A fine line separated a pin-tailed snipe from its Asiatic cousin, the Swinhoe’s snipe, and none of the differences appeared clear to Komito. He thought the folded wings of a pin-tailed should extend beyond the tail; Huntington focused more on the central crown stripe. This was birding at its highest level, the ornithological equivalent of doing a Sunday New York Times acrostic in one sitting in pen. No one had ever seen both species of snipe in North America. Even on their home continent, where the two snipes were far more common, birders struggled to tell them apart. Most of the world would look in the scope and see nothing more than a brown bird with a long beak in a swamp.

  Huntington remained convinced the snipe was pin-tailed; Komito remained convinced that he wasn’t sure. They retreated to the base and consulted an Asian field guide, which didn’t offer enough new hints to change anyone’s opinion.

  Shortly after, though, there came news that could not be disputed.

  A collector had shot and killed the bird. It was, conclusively, a pin-tailed snipe.

  Komito was finally satisfied with the bird’s identity. The identity of the killer, however, remained unknown.

  Miller never thought he would admit this, but he was ready to get out of Attu. He missed the sun. He missed his privacy. He missed indoor plumbing.

  He wanted fresh food. (His last Snickers bar for lunch had warned, “Use by 9/94.”)

  He wanted to spend time with Carol on her home turf. (She was a supermarket deli worker outside Boston.)

  He wanted to call his father. He especially missed his father. This was the longest he had gone on his Big Year without phoning home. By now everyone on Attu was calling this the trip of the century. He had added forty-three life birds and fifty-four new ones for his Big Year list, which now stood at 555. He had seen Komito up close and decided maybe the Big Year record holder wasn’t so invincible after all. Miller’s father would have some ideas about that.

  Miller wanted never to see another bicycle seat for as long as he lived.

  On May 24 he squeezed his wet clothes into his duffel and marched one and a half miles with Carol past the wind sock to the runway. Miller’s time on Attu was over. Komito was staying another two weeks with the next group. Let him have it.

  They waited in the rain for an hour before a Coast Guard truck drove up with the news: fog was too thick for the pilot to land. The plane had turned around. Maybe tomorrow. Miller marched back to the base and found two more lifers, but he would have traded them for a break in the weather.

  The next day, he got it.

  Greg Miller and sixty weary birders shipped out.

  Al Levantin and sixty fresh birders shipped in.

  The only thing worse than missing one day of the trip of the century was missing that day and knowing full well that Sandy Komito was already there.

  When Al Levantin finally walked off that Reeves Aleutian airliner, he was burning to make up for lost time. He ran like a man possessed. He covered twenty miles on foot and bike and scored four lifers and sixteen new birds for his Big Year. He returned to base exhausted but exhilarated. This was it. He had rocketed off to a terrific start before even getting to Alaska, and now Attu was serving up rarity after sensational rarity.

  Then he noticed something strange indoors by the heating stove: Sandy Komito. Big Years were supposed to be about driving fast and hard. Levantin was giving it his all. Why was Komito already back at the base?

  Levantin looked at the base’s dry-erase board listing all species that had been seen that season on Attu and realized: Komito wasn’t running hard because he had already seen it all. The first two weeks on Attu were the trip of the century. The pressure was on Levantin to match it.

  The one bird that got Komito moving was the yellow-throated bunting. It was the first sighting, ever, of this species in North America, and every birder on the island dropped everything to see it. (Even Macklin Smith had rousted himself from bed to chase it and was later evacuated on an emergency Coast Guard medical flight to Anchorage, where he spent four days in a hospital with a life-threatening case of pneumonia.) Levantin was thrilled to spot the bird. More astounding, though, was the way Komito saw it.

  As soon as the rarity was discovered, an Attu guide followed island protocol and quickly retreated to radio in the bird and organize a sixty-person sweep. Because the bunting was up a canyon, he directed four birders to climb the ridge, two on each side, in case the bird tried to escape by outflanking the group. Komito was not one of the chosen four ridge runners, but he appointed himself the fifth member of the ridge patrol. Let the sheep in the valley take their chances with the shepherd’s direction. The alpha wolf scrounged his way to the prime viewing position.

  Komito stayed up top and saw the bird. Down low, Levantin did, too. A lesson was learned: If there was a good bird to get, Komito wouldn’t take a chance. He would get it.

  By the sixth day of the second trip, Levantin knew he was in trouble. The wind sock above base had shifted to the south, which meant the island got all the atrocious weather, but no Asiatic birds with it. Every new species was a struggle. He spent days in the rain pointing his scope out on Murder Point, but it was just the same old, same old. He needed birds from Siberia, not the Bering Sea. Just when he thought birding couldn’t get worse, the winds turned to the west, which blew everything rare back home to Asia. Komito stayed warm inside. Levantin withstood the rain and pounded the bush.

  He lucked out and found a Mongolian plover on South Beach. (No art deco nightclubs on this one.) Buff-breasted with a black blindfold, the plover was one of the few Asiatic species that actually looked dramatically different from anything on North America. He called in the report and waited for other birders to descend.

  His first visitor, however, had four legs. Up the beach strutted a blue fox, the same nonnative species brought to the island centuries ago by Russian fur traders. Levantin organized a line to keep the predator from the plover—grown men and women hooked their arms and called, “Go away, fox! Fox, get out of here!”—but the wild animal had no fear of man. The fox sauntered past. The plover flushed. Levantin retreated back to base, where Komito, who had seen the species during the first two weeks on Attu, was holding court again by the warm stove. Levantin was tired, wet, and succumbing to a nasty virus, but he had held out to help his fellow Attuvians see his rare plover. Komito was regaling yet another other audience with some story of a long-ago bird chase. Levantin checked the dry-erase board. He was still behind by five Asiatic birds.

  When the call went out for a Terek sandpiper on Alexai Point, both men peeled out for twelve miles of head-winds biking and hiking. With a half dozen others, they searched in vain until the radios crackled with another bird—a pin-tailed snipe was back at Massacre Valley. Komito smelled a problem. Attu was all about commun
ity birding—the more eyes searching for a rarity, the better the chances of finding it—and the community was about to leave him for another bird. Komito, who had already seen the pin-tailed snipe with James Huntington, was indignant that the others would consider leaving. The Terek was a new bird for Attu. The island needed it. Komito needed it. He pleaded with Levantin and the others to stay. They ditched him. Komito never saw the Terek sandpiper, but Levantin did get his snipe—and some satisfaction from a lesson in community birding.

  Though the Terek was clearly a rare bird, it was rarer still on Attu because it was one of Komito’s few misses. There was a good reason why Komito birded as he did. It worked. Toward the end of the tour, when Attu was buffeted with rain, sleet, and gales—but no new birds—Komito felt less compulsion to push himself outside for more misery. He had chased hard for weeks. Others muttered about a man paying so much money to spend so much time indoors. They were wet and exhausted. He had all the birds they did, but with only a fraction of the agony. It was the birding version of social Darwinism.

  Komito logged more time back at the base telling more stories. Levantin started to listen. The rufous-capped warbler in Texas, Siberian accentor in Anchorage, Bahama mockingbird in the Florida Everglades—Komito had seen birds this year that Levantin hadn’t even known were in North America. Some thought Komito was bragging, but Levantin figured it wasn’t bragging if he could back it up. And Komito could. He was speaking broadly, expansively, and he was getting excited.

  Finally Sandy Komito admitted it: he was doing another Big Year. He was spending $8,000 to $12,000 a month, but he was leaving Attu with 645 birds. Levantin was at 619 and spending half as much as Komito. Levantin still had a lot of easy birds to pick up back on the mainland, but he wouldn’t be able to make up rarities that had come and gone before this trip, or the five extra birds that Komito had seen on the first two weeks on Attu.