He couldn’t answer that. He just wanted it. Even if he hadn’t missed that great gray owl, he’d be out here today. One year on the road and he was in his groove. He was chasing.
This time, it wasn’t even much of a chase. He found the bird, a white-cheeked pintail that should have been down in the Caribbean, nibbling in wetlands fed by a sewage plant just up the road from one of south Florida’s biggest retirement condo complexes. The only excitement came when Komito spotted the bird and others didn’t. He wanted to make sure he had witnesses, so he stuck around until everyone had seen his No. 745.
Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, Komito waited at home by the phone. It didn’t ring. The hot lines were silent. No bird was being seen in North America that he hadn’t already seen.
He spent a quiet night at home with his wife. He didn’t try to stay up until midnight.
On December 31, 1998, Sandy Komito, owner of the new Big Year record, set his alarm for 5 A.M. The next morning would be a new year, and he was rising before dawn to go birding.
Epilogue
When the American Birding Association published Sandy Komito’s Big Year total of 745 birds, competitive birders gasped. His number was almost beyond belief. Though some called it the birding equivalent of the moon shot, that wasn’t fair. People had walked on the moon after Neil Armstrong, but no one would manage to see even seven hundred Big Year species in the years after Komito, Greg Miller, and Al Levantin. Komito hit the magic combination of the strongest El Niño on record and the trip of the century on Attu. He also accomplished all his travel in a different, friendlier world; it would not be easy to log 270,000 last-minute miles through the increased security of today’s borders and airports. For all these reasons, many top birders say Komito set a record that may never be broken.
Five months after the Big Year, Komito’s wife earned her degree from a community college. To celebrate, Komito took her on an around-the-world trip. While she went sight-seeing in a city, he’d bird the backcountry. They would met at the end of the day for dinner. They had a wonderful time. Back home, his dawns remained reserved for birding. He found no great gray owls.
Al Levantin stayed retired for twenty-two months in Colorado before succumbing again to business. When another executive resigned, he filled in as acting president and chief executive officer of CDI Corporation, the world’s largest search and recruitment organization, with $1.6 billion of business from 1,325 offices in eighteen countries. He ran the company for a year before announcing another retirement, his fourth. He said this one was his last. He summoned the courage for another offshore birding trip in Monterey Bay, where, with the help of a Scopolamine patch applied behind his ear six hours before dock time, he saw birds without seasickness.
Greg Miller’s father died of congestive heart failure in November 2000. Six months later, Miller himself was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, a form of cancer that usually strikes children. He was hospitalized for forty-five days. From the window of his seventh-floor hospital room, he spotted twenty-six bird species, including a peregrine falcon. He celebrated his release from the hospital by completing a 2002 Big Year inside his home state of Ohio. He finished in third place, with 285 birds. He followed that with an Ohio Big Month in January 2003, but finished second, with 130 birds. He is trying to pay off bills from his 1998 North American Big Year through his fledgling business as a birding guide. On his first trip he took two college students six thousand miles in a car on spring break and showed them 311 species in nine days.
After a long Aleutian winter, Larry Balch returned to Attu in the spring of 1999 to find Mr. Pants still flying on the wind-sock pole above main base. The next year, regulations and letters from the U.S. Coast Guard, Federal Aviation Administration, and Fish and Wildlife Service made it clear to Balch that his birding tours on Attu were over. When Balch left the island for the last time in the fall of 2000, Mr. Pants still flapped proudly in the wind, testament to the durability of Sandy Komito’s Big Year record—and the power of polyester.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Full disclosure: I did not personally witness a single day of the 1998 Big Year. This account is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with participants and witnesses, plus fieldwork in many of the places they visited. My biggest thank-you goes to the three contestants themselves, who supplied me with their personal journals, receipts, and notes to help re-create this description of their grand adventure. I end this project in awe of their stamina both traveling the continent—and answering my questions. Sandy Komito repeatedly performed the amazing feat of making me laugh at 5 A.M. before coffee. Al Levantin’s enthusiasm is remarkable and inspiring. Greg Miller has the most indestructible sense of optimism I have ever found. I am grateful to each of them.
While reporting this book I relied on the old credo of trust but verify. If a contestant recalled that he saw a bird a half hour before dawn with a half-moon still in the sky, I checked out government records for that day’s sunrise and moonset. Much corroborating evidence also came from eyewitnesses. I learned much about the men from the women who know them best, Bobbye Komito, Ethel Levantin, and Greg’s mother, Charlene Miller. I was also greatly helped with advice and stories from Michael Austin, Larry Balch, Benton Basham, Bob Berman, Glen Christensen, Dale Coleman, Dave DeLap, Ted Floyd, Bob Funston, Dan Gibson, Larry Gilbertson, Stuart Healy, Leroy Jensen, Jennifer Jolis, Kenn Kaufman, Stuart Keith, Geoff LeBaron, Cindy Lippincott, Ted McBride, Harold Morrin, Floyd Murdoch, Marion Paton, Gerrie and Lloyd Patterson, Carol Ralph, Craig Roberts, Scott Robinson, Bill Rydell, Debi Shearwater, Macklin Smith, Dave Sonneborn, Joe Swertinski, and Jim Vardaman.
The formulation and completion of this book required valuable adult supervision. I thank my agent, Jody Rein, a perfectionist with a wonderful sense of humor, and my editor, Leslie Meredith, who can say “red-bellied woodpecker” and “dangling participle” in the same sentence—and magically make writing better.
Nobody put up with more difficult conditions during this project than my family. My parents, John and Alice Obmascik, flew to the rescue when I needed help the most. My sons, Cass and Max, have the brawn to blast down ski runs, the finesse to tell a mountain from black-capped chickadee, and the heart to give big hugs on my worst days. My wife, Merrill, gave me patience and inspiration exceeded only by love. This book is dedicated to her.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Birding is the most literate of outdoor pastimes; few birders would ever consider going into the woods without a trusty field guide. While researching this book, I learned most birders are picky about their field guides and the ways they use them. To identify species, beginners and intermediate birders rely mainly on bird pictures; experts depend heavily on text descriptions, which offer more detailed information. The field guide most popular with top competitive birders is the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. It has excellent maps, outstanding descriptions, and more rarities than any other top guide. The drawback: it’s complicated to use. Putting so many species in one book means you have to thumb through many pages to find the more common birds typically encountered afield. For ease of use, especially by novice or intermediate birders, it’s hard to beat the time-honored Peterson field guides, which use arrows on paintings to highlight key identification marks, or Kenn Kaufman’s newer Birds of North America, which combines Peterson-like ID arrows and an excellent indexing system. In recent years, The Sibley Guide to Birds has become the reference standard for many birders. Though it contains few exotics—many species that figure prominently in The Big Year aren’t even mentioned in Sibley—it does offer terrific paintings of most North American birds in several plumages and positions. The problem with Sibley is its bulk; I find it too clunky to lug 545 full-size pages into the field. David Allen Sibley tried to solve this weight problem with separate, smaller guides for Eastern and Western species, but these new books are still too big to cram into my back pocket. Maybe I’m the one who needs to lose the weight.
Here are other books and publications I used for research:
Able, Kenneth P., editor. Gatherings of Angels: Migrating Birds and Their Ecology. Ithaca, New York: Comstock Books, Cornell University Press, 1999.
Audubon, John James. John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings. New York: Library of America, 1999.
Audubon, Maria. Audubon and His Journals. New York: Dover Publications, 1960.
The Birds of North America series. American Ornithologists’ Union, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Blaugrund, Annette. The Essential John James Audubon. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.
Devlin, John C., and Grace Naismith. The World of Roger Tory Peterson: An Authorized Biography. New York: New York Times Books, 1977.
Durant, Mary, and Michael Harwood. On the Road with John James Audubon. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1980.
Kaufman, Kenn. Birds of North America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
______. Kingbird Highway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
______. Lives of North American Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Komito, Sanford. Birding’s Indiana Jones. self-published, 1990.
______. I Came, I Saw, I Counted. Fair Lawn, N.J.: Bergen Publishing Co., 1999.
Lane, James A. A Birder’s Guide to Southwestern Arizona. Denver: L&P Photography, 1974.
______., and Harold R. Holt. A Birder’s Guide to Denver and Eastern Colorado. Sacramento, California: L&P Photography, 1973.
Migration of Birds. Revised by John L. Zimmerman, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 1998.
National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, 1st ed., Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1983.
Pettingill, Olin. A Guide to Bird Finding East of the Mississippi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.
_______. A Guide to Bird Finding West of the Mississippi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Peterson, Roger Tory. Birds Over America. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1948.
_______. A Field Guide to the Birds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.
_______., and James Fisher. Wild America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Rydell, William B., Jr. A Year for the Birds. Minneapolis: Bullfinch Press, 1995.
Sibley, David Allen. The Sibley Guide to Birds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior. Illustrated by David Allen Sibley and edited by Chris Elphick, John B. Dunning Jr., and David Allen Sibley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Vardaman, James A. Call Collect, Ask for Birdman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.
Weidensaul, Scott. Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds. New York: North Point Press, 1999.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Obmascik has been a journalist for two decades, most recently at the Denver Post, where he was lead writer for the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and winner of the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism. His freelance stories have been published in Outside and other magazines, and he has aired numerous political stories on public affairs and television news programs. An obsessed birder himself, he lives in Denver with his wife and sons.
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