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

by Mark Obmascik

  When she finished, she looked at her husband’s face.

  The son was living the father’s dream. Who knew how much time the father had left for dreaming—or living.

  The B.O.D. approved the loan.

  THIRTEEN

  Doubt

  Al Levantin stared into the mountains from his home patio. He had returned from Attu a shaken man. He couldn’t believe that Sandy Komito was so far ahead of him. Levantin wasn’t used to finishing second in anything. It was frustrating. It was aggravating. It was … lonely.

  Truth was, he missed his wife. In the first 180 days of the year, he had been away 120, including four straight weeks in Alaska. (While he was in Attu, she luxuriated in a villa in northern Italy.) Even as a road warrior in business, he hadn’t traveled like that. But when he had gone away for work, he had usually fixed the problem. This was different. The Sandy Komito problem might not be fixable. Levantin wouldn’t complain about that—he wasn’t a whiner, never would be—but he still wasn’t thrilled with the idea. There was only one person who could understand all this, and it was Ethel.

  Al and Ethel loved to be together for the Aspen Music Festival, the two-month summer gala when eight hundred of the world’s greatest classical-music students gathered down the road from their home and staged night after night of magnificent concerts. Though Al and Ethel had done the whole black-tie philharmonic thing in Manhattan and Philadelphia, there was something about this festival—the shirtsleeves informality, the wine with friends under the stars, the music that started in the meadows and soared to match the mountains—that was irresistible. Plus, Al’s personal favorites were the same big, thumping compositions, the Mahlers and Beethovens, that so many students favored.

  The Levantins had already donated $1,000 to the Aspen Music Festival. Every Friday night and Sunday afternoon of summer, they knew where they wanted to be.

  Then Al’s birds landed.

  Ethel never said anything bad about birding. As a marriage counselor, she knew too many men who either lost their passion or let it burn only for business. She was thrilled her husband was chasing a dream. The last thing she wanted was for her husband to be halfhearted about it.

  But after Attu, Al just didn’t seem as crazy for birds. He liked Aspen. He liked the music. He liked staying home on the weekends with Ethel and their friends. He was sweet about it, actually. He wanted to have fun with his wife.

  For forty years, he had dreamed of letting his birding obsession run wild. But now, for the first time, he wondered if this dream was worth it. The Big Year was for the birds, but was it still for him?

  For six months, Greg Miller had thought only about birds. Now things were different. He was thinking about the bees, too.

  Since Attu, Miller was swapping a lot of phone calls and e-mails with Carol Ralph. He really liked her. He even told his father about her.

  His father accepted the news with some surprise. His son was freshly divorced, and emotionally raw and needy because of it. He worried about his son’s ability to handle a new relationship so quickly, but was also thrilled that his son was even interested.

  Miller really wanted to see Carol, but they could never quite get their schedules together. The more he pressed it, the more she talked about being such good friends. Miller figured a good friendship was the start of a great relationship, so he pursued a visit further. You don’t meet a fun woman with a 667-bird life list—she’d added 41 in Attu—and just let her slip away.

  Finally the right occasion presented itself—a little egret, the Old World cousin of North America’s snowy egret, was being staked out in New Hampshire, just seventy miles north of Carol Ralph’s home. To get the rarity, Miller would practically have to drive by her house. (Well, not really. She lived considerably west of the most direct airport-to-bird driving route, but Miller was not going to let an opportunity like this pass.) So Miller called her and landed an invitation to visit.

  First things first, though. He drove to Newmarket, New Hampshire, and got the bird. Then he drove five hours to the rocky shores of Machias, Maine, and got four Atlantic seabirds on a pelagic trip.

  Big Year birds under his belt, he drove 330 miles nonstop to Carol Ralph’s home.

  He showed her video from their trip to Attu. She showed him pictures of polar bears from her trip to Churchhill, Manitoba.

  He was ready for romance.

  She wasn’t.

  They were friends, good friends, she said, and they were going to stay that way.

  Really? Miller asked.

  Really, she replied.

  Miller forgot about the bees and focused on the birds.

  The Chiricahua Mountains were the Lower 48’s version of Attu. They were out there. Historic hideout of the Apache chiefs Cochise and Geronimo, the Chiricahuas were a craggy island in the Arizona sky 170 miles east of Tucson, 400 miles south of Albuquerque, 210 miles west of El Paso, and north of nothing in particular. From the biggest town, Portal, you had to drive twenty minutes across the state line for gas. Children rode an hour by bus to school.

  For Miller, the biggest problem here was crowds.

  So many birders descended upon the Chiricahuas every summer that the U.S. government had to ban tape-recorded birdcalls. This was no small matter. The sycamore- and pine-shaded canyon of the South Fork of Cave Creek was the best one-stop shopping place on the continent for owls—elf owls, whiskered screech-owls, western screech-owls, and most importantly, flammulated owls.

  The flamm owl drove birders crazy. It was six inches tall and weighed only as much as $2.50 in quarters. It slept by day in the darkest nooks of the woods and hunted bugs at night with charcoal eyes that, like the rest of its body, blended perfectly with surrounding tree trunks and limbs.

  Birders found flamm owls only by being incredibly lucky, or by calling them in. Miller didn’t have time for luck; he was due back at the office in two days. So he once again hired Stuart Healy, southern Arizona birding guide extraordinaire, to help call in the bird. But now it was a federal crime to play an owl tape in the Coronado National Forest.

  So Miller and Healy stood in the dark and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Four-day workweeks, followed by three-day Big Year sprints, were taking a toll on Miller. He was falling asleep on his feet. He shuddered himself awake. He couldn’t afford to miss this bird. He hustled back to the car for his reserve of caffeine. Though the general store in Portal didn’t sell Jolt, it did carry bottles of iced tea. Miller fought back a yawn and gulped.

  Still no sign of any flamm owl. The tea wasn’t making him more alert, just more full and uncomfortable. He really had to go. He couldn’t take much more of this. He had to do something—quick.

  He raised the bottle to his lips and blew. It didn’t sound bad—deep, hollow toots. He blew again and again and waited, silently.

  Poot. Poot. Poot. Poot. Poot.

  Five times came the answer in the night. Miller froze. Healy froze.

  That was the owl!

  They waited on the edge of the woods for Mr. Flamm to show himself, but he never did. According to the rules of the American Birding Association, that made no difference. Miller had heard the distinct call of a flammulated owl. So had his expert birding guide.

  Though Miller really wished he had seen the bird, rules were rules. Ethically and morally, Miller could count it. It was a fine victory. No one else on a Big Year had a flamm owl. But now Greg Miller did.

  The only thing he felt strange about was using a twenty-ounce Lipton iced-tea bottle to get it.

  Neither Miller nor Levantin knew it at the time—they didn’t even know each other at the time—but that tea-bottle owl was important for another reason. For the first time in the Big Year contest, Greg Miller was ahead of Al Levantin.

  He left Arizona on July 13 with 658 birds for the year.

  Levantin ended the same day with 648.

  Miller, however, had two major problems. Once again, he was perilousl
y low on cash. He had underestimated the amount of money he needed for basics (rent, phone, gas, electric) and for birding (Alaska, Minnesota, Arizona, MBNA). Sandy Komito was spending as much as $12,000 a month on his Big Year, but Miller had only a $5,000 loan from the Bank of Dad to last him the rest of the year. The loan was running out. Miller had no idea what to do about that.

  His other major problem involved birds. He had two big holes in his year’s list. He needed California birds, and he needed seabirds. This was the kind of problem he enjoyed, because it had a solution, as long as his plastic held out.

  Back home for another four-day workweek at the nuclear power plant, Miller picked up the phone and called Debi Shearwater, the California pelagic tour operator and High Queen of the High Seas. As soon as Miller identified himself, Shearwater cut him off.

  I heard you’re doing a Big Year, Shearwater told him.

  Yes, I am.

  Did you know that Sandy Komito is doing a Big Year, too?

  I heard that.

  Is there anything I can do to help you beat him?

  Miller was stunned. He knew Komito had bothered some people over the years, but this was too much. Miller couldn’t understand how Komito had put himself on the wrong side of Debi Shearwater, the last person any serious birder wanted to cross. She simply controlled too much—too many boat trips, too many guides, too much of birding’s inside dope. Of course, that was Komito’s problem now. Shearwater felt sorry for Miller’s budget woes. Miller did not mind the sympathy.

  He booked his California trip and went back to work.

  On Thursday, July 16, while Miller cracked ten and a half hours of software code, Al Levantin was gliding in the field, doing comfortable trips for the easy summer birds.

  Levantin saw a Mississippi kite, gray and graceful, soaring over Winkelman, Arizona.

  It was Levantin’s 663rd bird.

  In his cubicle, as he battled another Y2K bug, Miller was squished back into third place.

  Just because Sandy Komito was ahead didn’t mean he was relaxing. He wasn’t good at relaxing. When someone once suggested that golf was a relaxing pastime, Komito took it up and golfed one hundred days in a row. For four years in a row. (He wore rain suits.) Relaxing was not fun. Fun was, after five weeks in Alaska, flying to southern Arizona in the dead of summer for a crack at a bird in the desert.

  The elf owl was the world’s tiniest, one-quarter the size of your run-of-the-mill great horned owl and smaller still than a house sparrow. Its diminutive brain was still sharp enough, though, to let others do all the work when it came to nesting. The elf owl mooched off woodpecker holes. If birders drove slowly at dusk through the stovepipe cacti of the Saguaro National Monument near Tucson and carefully inspected hundreds of gila woodpecker holes, they might find a single elf owl.

  Or they could just hang out below an old telephone pole at a $90-a-night lodge and look up.

  The elf owls of the Santa Rita Lodge were the most famous in North America. Every evening during nesting season, dozens of birders gathered in a lodge parking lot one hour south of Tucson and stared at two fist-size holes about thirty feet up a phone pole. The routine: sun went down, owl heads popped up, birders cheered (in properly muted tones). Thousands of people had scored their life elf owls this way.

  Joining a crowd of twenty below the telephone pole, Komito noticed a man acting strangely, wriggling a bit at first, then fully shaking his legs and slapping his ankles. Madera Canyon was an odd place for such a peculiar dance, especially a solo dance, and other birders gave the man a wide berth. Komito, however, knew exactly what was going on. Eleven years earlier, during his first Big Year, Komito had made the same mistake of standing atop a mound in Fort Lauderdale to get a better view of a black-faced grassquit. Without warning, Komito’s legs had exploded with hurt, and he’d danced the same dance as the man now writhing before him. Komito knew this man’s pain. He had felt it. He had suffered it.

  “Let the ants out! Drop your pants!” Komito urged him. “Take off your pants and brush them off. That’ll help!”

  “Aargh!” cried the man, who was too modest to take Komito’s advice.

  Luckily, and most importantly, human yelps of anguish did not scare away the elf owl.

  Halfway up a granite wall, Komito finally met his match.

  He was chasing a MacGillivray’s warbler through Yosemite National Park when, out of pure touristo awe, he glassed up the 3,000-foot face of El Capitan. He spotted three climbers somehow camping on sheer rock high above the valley. Komito, who never traveled anywhere without his own pillow and night shades, was amazed anyone could sleep in such a precarious place.

  “Take a look at this,” Komito told two nearby women. “There are people up there climbing up the wall.”

  “Yes, I know,” a woman told Komito. “One of them is my boyfriend, Mark Wellman. He’s a paraplegic.”

  Komito was dumbfounded.

  Wellman, paralyzed below the waist, was the climber who had captivated the world in 1989 by taking seven days, four hours, and seven thousand pull-ups to conquer El Capitan. That had launched his career as a motivational speaker. Two years later he ascended the 2,200-foot Half Dome of Yosemite. Now he was on El Cap again.

  Komito and the women watched the climbers pack their camp and start moving higher up the wall. Komito, who couldn’t resist swapping one story for another, told the women about his own Big Year adventure.

  For some reason, the women weren’t overly impressed. Silly Komito: this wasn’t Attu. For the first half of the year he had lived almost exclusively in the world of birders, where he was used to being the center of attention. In this other world, Komito earned only a shrug.

  Now was his chance. Here he was an outsider, and he finally got to ask the exact question that had so often been thrown at him:

  “Why is he doing it?” Komito asked.

  “Why do you birdwatch?” the girlfriend countered. She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s a rush. It’s the same as when I skydive.”

  Skydiving? Paraplegic rock climbing? Komito was out of his league here. He excused himself and continued up the trail, where he got his thrills finding a red-breasted sapsucker.

  After a four-day, 6,500-mile sweep of the Pacific Northwest, Komito returned home to a jarring phone call. Turn around right now and come back, the caller told him. There’s a Terek sandpiper working the surf in Anchorage.

  For nine and a half hours in the air, Komito stewed. This return trip to Alaska shouldn’t have been necessary. Six weeks earlier he had missed the Terek—a gangly Eurasian shorebird with stubby legs and a queerly upturned bill—after Levantin had ditched him on Attu to chase the pintailed snipe.

  Retracing four thousand miles of contrails was not his idea of a good time, but he had no choice. Greg Miller probably wouldn’t have the money to chase the Terek, Komito figured, but Al Levantin probably did. Komito was not about to grant Levantin a freebie, no matter the price.

  Komito would need more than money to catch the Terek. He needed luck. The problem with chasing shorebirds in Anchorage was that the shore changed all the time. Tides in Cook Inlet averaged twenty-six feet. Most birds working the surf at low tide were well beyond the range of standard 60x telescopes. Only fools ventured out for a closer look; several times a year police raced out for dramatic rescues of people, mostly wading fishermen, who were stuck in thigh-deep mud and frantically trying to escape the rising 5 mph tide.

  For Komito, the Terek would have to be a high-tide bird.

  At 9 P.M., the asphalt path around Westchester Lagoon was filled with joggers, cyclists, and in-line skaters; anyone who survived an Alaskan winter was determined to stretch out every possible minute of Anchorage’s nineteen daily hours of summer sunshine. Into this river of human Lycra waded Komito and Dave Sonneborn, the full-time Alaska cardiologist and part-time Attu guide who had phoned in the Terek tip to Komito. Reunited for the top of the tide, they were birdmen on a mission, snapping open their tripods and scoping
the lagoon. Though hundreds of peeps and plovers and dowitchers followed the brine up the bay, there was no sign of any Terek. The two men finally packed up at midnight and agreed to meet ten hours later, in the same spot, for the same tide.

  The Terek didn’t come in for that tide, either. Now both men worried—Sonneborn that he had called Komito across the continent for nothing, Komito that the bird had gone someplace where Levantin could find it. (Where was Levantin, anyway? Did he get the bird before Komito had even arrived?) After three more hours of fruitless scoping, Sonneborn left to fix a broken garage door. Komito eyeballed on.

  As the tide rolled out, weather rolled in. Temperatures dived into the fifties. Komito’s scope fogged. His body shivered. He walked for warmth and scanned the growing mudflats for any bird that looked like an odd man out.

  One hundred feet away, in a cluster of semipalmated plovers and semipalmated sandpipers, he saw it—an unpalmated Terek. He wanted to whoop for joy, but there was no one to whoop with. Sonneborn was still gone.

  Komito locked the bird into his scope and followed its frantic feeding. Five minutes passed, then ten and twenty. Where was Sonneborn? This was not good. Searching two days for a bird that magically appeared as soon as his partner walked away—Komito feared his credibility might never recover.

  The Terek took off. Komito’s heart sank. Fortunately the bird landed another hundred yards out the mudflat, but then it fed farther and farther away. Komito had to do something.

  He hustled up the trail and found Sonneborn glassing another length of the lagoon. Komito grabbed him.

  When they returned to Komito’s spot, the bird—the alleged bird—was gone. Komito was crestfallen. No matter what he said, he doubted Sonneborn would believe him. Komito didn’t help himself when he mistakenly turned a distant spotted sandpiper into the Terek. Had Komito blown the original identification as well? He apologized, but even that sounded like desperation.