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

by Mark Obmascik

  From behind a rocky point another bird emerged. It was the Terek—or at least what he thought was the Terek. He didn’t bother telling Sonneborn where. He just muscled the doctor’s eyeball into Komito’s scope.

  “Yes,” Sonneborn said. “I do see your bird.”

  It was Komito’s bird. Neither Levantin nor Miller had seen it. In fact, neither knew about it. The score was Komito 703, Levantin 663, Miller 658. Back when JFK was president, these numbers would have exceeded the life list of the immortal Roger Tory Peterson and all but one other North American birder. But now Komito, Levantin, and Miller each had bested those lifetime lists in less than seven months of a single year.

  For this remarkable pace, ornithologists could credit El Niño, or easy jet travel, or the information revolution that allowed a guy in New Jersey to find out about a new shorebird in Alaska within four high tides at Cook Inlet. Komito, however, was in no mood for anything analytical. He remained eighteen birds short of his old record. He spent his plane ride home dreaming of ways to find them.

  For Levantin, it was time for a gut check. This weekend he could stay home in Aspen at the peak of mountain wildflower season and enjoy Mahler and Mozart at the downtown music festival. Or he could fly two thousand miles to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and puke on another pelagic trip.

  He packed his bags with Dramamine.

  The music would be there when he returned, Levantin figured, but the seabirds wouldn’t wait. There were four or five easy species waiting to be seen out over the Gulf Stream. His sea strategy, though shaky, remained intact. If he was going to make any run at Sandy Komito, he had to have those birds. His head knew it. His heart knew it. His stomach just had to survive it.

  Dopey with seasickness medicine, Levantin staggered to the dock by 5:30 A.M. He didn’t like what he saw. Winds ripped at a steady 20 mph, with gusts beyond thirty. Even the bay frothed with whitecaps. The seas on the Atlantic side of Oregon Inlet—the the very thought made Levantin nibble another stoned-wheat thin.

  This time, his fear had company. On the dock dozens of birders wondered aloud about wave size. Somebody’s hat blew off. Levantin grabbed another cracker.

  At 6:15 A.M. came the announcement: No pelagic today. The seas were too rough.

  Never had a man traveled so far for so little and felt such relief.

  He sat on a bench to box up the wheat thins and listen to others bellyache about the canceled trip. Somebody had driven six hours last night to get here by dawn. That guy was really babbling.

  He had been counting on this pelagic for months and really wanted to see just the basic offshore Atlantic birds—greater shearwater, Cory’s shearwater, black-capped petrel, band-rumped storm-petrel.

  Levantin commiserated. He’d like to see those birds, too.

  The guy on the bench kept rambling. He didn’t know what to do now. The whole reason he had come here was for pelagic birds. He had already seen everything else in this area this year.

  He had?

  He had. The guy on the bench was doing a Big Year.

  Levantin’s gut felt as if it were outside Oregon Inlet. Somebody else besides Sandy Komito was doing a Big Year? Levantin had no clue. His mind raced. Who was this guy? Where did he come from? Levantin had never expected this. He looked back over at the guy on the bench and put on his best poker face.

  “A Big Year? That must be something,” Levantin bluffed. “How many birds have you seen?”

  Six hundred sixty-six.

  The guy’s name was Greg Miller and he was from Lusby, Maryland, and he worked as a software engineer at a nuclear power plant and was due back at work Monday.

  He was two birds behind Levantin.

  Two birds.

  The guy bubbled on. Now that the pelagic was canceled, maybe he would try to find a curlew sandpiper somewhere near here at Pea Island. Levantin tuned it all out. He congratulated the guy on his 666 birds and walked away.

  For the first time Levantin confronted a dark fear. He might not finish in second place. He might finish third.

  He still had time. He still had money. He still had tickets to the Aspen Music Festival, but they would be of no use now.

  FOURTEEN

  Forked

  Fear is a powerful motivator. Al Levantin most assuredly did not want to finish his Big Year in third place, so he blasted off on a birding bender. He got warblers in West Virginia; Atlantic seabirds off Cape Hatteras (he threw up); Pacific seabirds off Monterey (he threw up again); the continent’s smallest bird (the three-inch calliope hummingbird) on a 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado; and a Eurasian tree sparrow in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln.

  But no bird gave him greater pleasure than the fork-tailed flycatcher.

  When the tropical vagrant was first reported on Plum Island, a coastal spit north of Boston, Levantin dropped everything. This species was notorious for its one- or two-day visits, and he had to catch it fast. No concert that weekend; he was a birding fiend. Though a line of cars idled at the entrance, Levantin didn’t worry. Those vacationers were destined for Plum Island’s white-sand beaches. He was headed for Hellcat Swamp.

  At the parking lot he chanced upon three local birders, who took him straight to the flycatcher. There was no mistaking this bird: it was black-and-white with a freakishly split tail twice as long as its body—and it was perched on a post in the middle of a pond.

  Levantin was so pleased with his sudden victory that he did something unusual. He told the other three birders about his Big Year. The other guys were fascinated. The more Levantin told them, the more they wanted to hear. At first it felt odd telling other birders about his grand adventure—this was the first time he had ever done it with strangers—but it also felt exhilarating. He was out in the open now, talking up his obsession with the people who understood it. He had to admit: this was pretty fun.

  Just a few weeks before he had sat side by side on a bench with a rival and Levantin never even identified himself. Now he was blabbing all about his Big Year to total strangers. What had changed?

  What had changed was that Sandy Komito didn’t have the fork-tailed flycatcher.

  Greg Miller didn’t have the fork-tailed flycatcher.

  Al Levantin did have the fork-tailed flycatcher, and he had it first. That felt good.

  Greg Miller was sick. Ever since Attu, he had hacked a wet cough during the day and shaken with chills at night. He felt lousy all the time, but there was medicine for that. His main concern was a more consuming malady.

  For the past three days he had been paralyzed with flycatcher fever. He wanted to cure it—oh, how he longed for a cure—but he remained stuck in his cubicle. It wasn’t easy to work when a real rarity was just a short plane flight away in Massachusetts. But Miller had two more days and a few thousand lines of code before he could do anything about it.

  In the meantime, he checked. He called the Massachusetts Rare Bird Alert hot line to make sure the bird was still there. It was. He scrolled down the Massachusetts Rare Bird Alert Web page to see the exact locations of the latest sightings. Somebody had found the bird near the parking lot, someone else had found it along the dike, and another person had found it on a pole in a pond.

  A short line at the end of that report really made Miller’s temperature rise.

  On the day the flycatcher was found on the pole, it was seen by a stranger who had traveled thousands of miles just for this bird.

  This stranger was from somewhere out West. He was doing a Big Year.

  A North American Big Year.

  The amazing thing, this Web poster said, was that this Big Year birder already had seen 675 species this year.

  Miller didn’t need Jolt to understand that number.

  There was someone else out there doing a Big Year, and it wasn’t Sandy Komito.

  Who was it?

  Miller clicked his Netscape Navigator back over to www.travelocity.com. Whoever this third Big Year birder was, Miller wasn’t going to fall behind him by a fork-tai
led flycatcher.

  The only thing worse than messing with Sandy Komito’s sleep was messing with his sleep after he’d missed a bird.

  After a failed search for the fork-tailed flycatcher, Komito had retreated to his motel room and rested up for a repeat assault in the morning. At 2 A.M., he was jolted awake by a loud voice in the next room on the telephone. Komito managed to fall asleep again, but was awakened at 2:30 A.M. by the same voice on another call.

  The voice returned at 3 A.M., then a half hour later.

  Komito seethed.

  When Komito rose the next morning at six, he decided to get even. He picked up the phone and called the now-silent room next to him.

  “Hello, Charlie?” Komito boomed into the phone.

  A groggy voice replied, “What?”

  “Hi, Charlie!” Komito yelled.

  “This isn’t Charlie and you woke me up!” replied the voice, now angry.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Komito said, then hung up.

  That was wimpy. He could do better than that.

  After breakfast Komito picked up the phone in the motel lobby and rang the room again.

  “Good morning!” he boomed again. “This is your neighbor. It seems you called everyone last night but me. How come?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I told you, it’s your neighbor from across the hall. I heard you call all night in a loud voice and you kept all of us up.”

  The voice replied that he was using a speakerphone and he did not care one whit about Komito’s beloved slumber. His curse words grew louder and more frequent just before he slammed down the phone.

  Komito scrambled to his car and raced back out to Plum Island, where he found the fork-tailed flycatcher on top of a sign. He snapped a few pictures of the bird’s tail, but decided the guy back in the motel room still deserved to be forked.

  By 9 A.M., Komito was back in the motel lobby, posing as a guest and asking the desk clerk to ring his room—it was actually Charlie the voice’s room—with a wake-up call in another hour. When she agreed, Komito walked over to the lobby phone, punched in a number, and walked away while the phone in the voice’s room was ringing and ringing.

  He had his bird, and he had his revenge. The revenge was more fun.

  Miller’s fever subsided. His binoculars caught the flycatcher. Bird No. 682 was such a thrill—and such a relief—that Miller couldn’t resist telling everyone in Hellcat Swamp about it.

  One birder took particular interest. He did a double take on Miller’s name and asked him to repeat it. He asked if Miller was the guy doing the Big Year. When Miller confirmed it, the other birder said he had a special message to deliver:

  “Sandy Komito says hi.”

  Five hundred miles from home in the middle of a swamp and Miller was receiving a social nicety from, of all people, Sandy Komito? What was up with that? How did Komito know he’d be here? Did Komito have people watching him? Had Komito been here? Did he have this bird?

  Did Komito have 682, too?

  FIFTEEN

  Conquest

  Greg Miller knew he was close to Sandy Komito. He could feel it. His first five days here in California couldn’t have been better. Even the disappointments were turning into triumphs. When monster waves canceled that Monterey Bay pelagic, Debi Shearwater personally chaperoned Miller deep into the foothills for a Lawrence’s goldfinch. (The High Queen of the High Seas hardly ever went inland; she must really have a thing about Sandy Komito.) Now Miller was knocking them off again—a mountain quail and white-headed woodpecker (No. 692 and No. 693) in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles, a hermit warbler (No. 694) just off the 8,800-foot summit of Mount Pinos north of Santa Barbara.

  He had found every West Coast mountain species that he needed. But under the pines of the McGill Campground he was confronted with something completely unexpected—a van of birders from New Jersey.

  One of the van guys relayed a message: “Sandy Komito says hi.”

  It was the third time Komito had planted the same head-game time bomb for Miller. (Besides the fork-tailed flycatcher in Massachusetts, Komito had made sure Miller was also greeted during his failed chase for a whiskered tern in Cape May, New Jersey.) Miller would not let the opportunity pass again. He asked about Komito’s Big Year.

  Last time anyone in the van had heard, Komito was at 712, 713, something like that.

  Seven hundred twelve! Miller was close to Sandy Komito. If a Monterey Bay pelagic ever got off, and if he could pick up a few Rocky Mountain birds, and if his money held out. Miller might actually be able to take him. For the first time in weeks, his sinuses cleared.

  The Jersey birders wished him luck. Miller sat alone in his rental. Sandy Komito says hi. How nice of Sandy Komito to consider Greg Miller. Maybe Greg Miller could give Sandy Komito something to think about.

  The second Miller walked on the boat at Monterey, Debi Shearwater buttonholed him. She was ready. He was ready. They had company. The New Jersey birders were on board, too, carrying along the usual salutation from Komito.

  Not far offshore the buzz on the deck was about the sheer weirdness of this trip. Sandwiched on the water between two dense bands of fog was a raft of hundreds of black-vented shearwaters, a fairly common species, but unusual in these numbers. Hurricane Isis had slammed Mexico just two days earlier. Though Isis was brutal—10 dead, 2,300 homeless—these powerful Pacific storms did push birds up the coast. Miller hoped they weren’t all commoners.

  Off the bow someone shouted, “Two o’clock,” and two divers with dusky underwings, Craveri’s murrelets, zoomed by. They were No. 697. A few minutes later the stern was crossed by the hunchbacked pirate of Antarctica, the south polar skua, the very bird on the license plate of Komito’s Town Car. If that wasn’t a sign, what was? It also was No. 698. Miller was in the zone. He was feeling it.

  Miller milled about the boat. They were a few miles offshore, and the Pacific was strangely warm and calm. Back toward shore, the fog had lifted. Views were longer now.

  Pumping low over the ocean was a flesh-footed shearwater. That bird nested in New Zealand. What was it doing here? That was No. 699, his third new bird in two hours. This was no ordinary pelagic. Beyond the bow a blue whale spouted twenty feet above the water. While Miller and the Jersey boys jockeyed for the best cetacean views, somebody cried, “White bird on the water!”

  One hundred tons of whale was forgotten like yesterday’s newspaper. Miller ran with all his might to the starboard side of the bow. Oh, the curse of a short person on a pelagic—everyone in front was a full four inches taller than Miller. “Down in front!” he roared. No one moved. Frantically he muscled bellies, shoulders, arms, heads—anything—out of the way. Still no clear view. From up top Shearwater cried, “Red-billed tropicbird!”

  Desperation.

  Where?

  Panic.

  Needed it. Wanted it. Had to have it.

  Got it.

  Shearwater hurtled out and crushed Miller with a hug that would cost good money from a chiropractor.

  “That’s not seven hundred for a life list!” Shearwater bellowed to the boat. “That’s seven hundred for this year!”

  After all the hugs and high fives, handshakes and hoorahs, Miller sauntered over to the Jersey birders with a message of his own:

  “You tell Sandy Komito that Greg Miller says hi.”

  Where he was, Sandy Komito wasn’t saying hi to anyone.

  With a death grip on the handlebars of his Honda ATV, Komito blasted through the horizontal rain on a treeless island in the Bering Sea. Even the Eskimos were staying home this morning. Komito was forty miles from Siberia, four thousand miles from home, and searching for lost Asiatics. He was finding more than he bargained for.

  The weather, for one, was brutal. Something about the arctic circle made rain feel like flying forks. Back home in Jersey it was ninety degrees. Here the wind tears in his eyes were freezing.

  At least there was no danger of becoming mired in
mud. There was barely dirt here. Saint Lawrence Island was a hundred-mile pile of dark pea gravel that rolled like ball bearings every time Komito stepped. He nearly fell a million times. He’d shelled out to rent the ATV, which was fun if you didn’t mind whiplash. It blew a flat. He offered an Eskimo teen $5 to fix the tire, but groused that the kid pumped air slower than a girl. The teen—surprise, surprise—ditched Komito, who then blew two hours running down the guy who’d rented him the ATV. The renter took his time fixing the flat. Even in a 30 mph wind, locals could smell desperation.

  The population center here was a subsistence village of 660 called Gambell. In a good year the Eskimo Yupiks killed a bowhead whale. In a bad one they lived off seal and seabirds. The only significant outside income came from visitors who wanted to see the same wild animals that Eskimos ate.

  There was no eerier place in North America to find birds. The premier locations for songbirds were the three centuries-old boneyards, where arctic warblers perched on bowhead ribs and wheatears waited on seal spines. Every day by 10 A.M. or so, Eskimo men trekked from Gambell to dig trenches in the boneyards; a three-hundred-year-old walrus tusk was a prized source of ivory that could be carved and sold for the price of three months of ATV gas.

  Another sweet spot was the town dump. Komito was a landfill connoisseur, but the one on Gambell was truly memorable—thirty feet high, two hundred feet long, and smoldering from a fire that burned all summer. The smoke was fueled by a daily parade of locals dumping five-gallon honey buckets filled the night before. The place smelled worse than fried walrus liver. Wagtails liked it, though.

  Looming above it all was 614-foot Sevuokuk Mountain. Sea cliffs of this mountain provided nests for unbelievable numbers of seabirds, hundreds of thousands of auklets, puffins, and murres that blackened the sky off the end of the island’s western point. Yet Komito kept finding himself drawn to a more ghoulish sight. Because of permafrost, Gambell residents did not bury their dead. Jutting from the slopes of the mountain were dozens of plain wood caskets, some intact, others not, with generations of the dead. It gave Komito the creeps.