Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

  In the few hours after the ship docked in Ushuaia, before flying on to Santiago, Chile, I hoped to track down some Patagonian bird specialties in nearby Tierra del Fuego National Park. An Argentine birder named Esteban Daniels, whom I had contacted months before, had agreed to help—but now that the day had come, would he remember me? I said a round of hurried goodbyes to the ship’s staff and crew, grabbed my backpack, and walked down the gangway onto Ushuaia’s industrial dock. There, outside the pier’s security checkpoint, awaited Esteban and a friend, a keen photographer named Rogelio “Roger” Espinosa. I was ecstatic to see them—and relieved. Over the next couple of hours, Esteban, Roger, and I stopped by the local landfill, then made our way to the park, where we found my most-wished-for bird species of the day: a pair of red, black, and white Magellanic Woodpeckers, the largest woodpecker in South America. We clocked thirty-seven new bird species—bringing my year total so far to ninety-one—before heading to the local airport in midafternoon.

  After a quick flight to Santiago, I sped through immigration, skipped the baggage claim, and headed straight for Exit 3, where Fred Homer, exactly as planned, awaited in a green hat. So far, so good! Fred and I crashed at his house in Santiago, where Fernando picked us up in the early morning hours, and now the three of us were hot on the trail of the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover.

  The road continued to climb, skirting around a shallow reservoir in a broad valley of rock and dirt, which was birdless except for a lone Andean Gull flying in lazy circles.

  “A couple years ago I came down here,” Fred said, “and, maybe three hundred meters from this spot, saw something on the road ahead. As I got closer, I realized that it was the rear axle of a lorry, implanted into the road surface. When you looked around, there were bits of lorry all over the place. I guess it went off the edge above and just fell to pieces.”

  All plant life ceased as we ascended into the upper El Yeso Valley, flanked on both sides by chiseled peaks in ochre and umber. The sky up here looked polarized, like the deep blue you see through sunglasses. Snowfields clung to the mountaintops, almost at eye level, and I could see bluish, crevasse-wrinkled glaciers hanging from steep slopes above us. Every so often we passed a Vía de Evacuación (“Evacuation Route”) sign, illustrated with a friendly stick-figure image of mother and child walking in front of an exploding volcano.

  Fernando turned at an unmarked junction at about 10,000 feet and followed a side track until it petered out into boulders. The three of us jumped out and walked a little farther to the only speck of green in this valley, where a snowmelt stream fanned into a bog of squishy, carpetlike vegetation.

  This, Fernando said, is the realm of the DSP, and he led us straight into the bog. Surrounded by the stark landscape, Fernando looked the part of a rugged biologist: checked shirt, khaki cap, glacier goggles with mountaineering flaps around the temples, work pants, low-slung binoculars, and a slightly unkempt beard. He wasn’t much older than me and shared the same bent for fieldwork in remote places. He had quit working as a landscaper to focus full-time on bird research. Now he was in his element, scanning for movement.

  Fred wandered behind us in the sunshine, smiling, enjoying just being out here. A few years ago he’d moved to Chile, after retiring in Britain from a career in financial services, and set up a bird-touring business as an excuse to spend more time watching birds. He wore a gray vest with lots of pockets over a collared T-shirt, aviator shades, and a wide-brimmed hat with braided leather accents; his trimmed beard was 25 percent pepper, 75 percent salt.

  Halfway across the bog, I almost stepped on our target. Fernando pointed toward my feet, and I looked down just in time to see the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover staring up with beady-eyed curiosity. It was completely unafraid as an animal a hundred times its size blundered toward it, and I wondered if this behavior might have something to do with the bird’s low population. Nobody knows how many sandpiper-plovers are out there, but the best guess is about 2,000 individuals scattered over an area half the length of South America. They don’t have many predators, at least not in human form, and part of the DSP’s charisma is its totally blasé attitude—as if it knowingly trusts you.

  An impossibly cute, fuzzy chick emerged from behind some nearby rocks and the two birds slowly waddled off together, probing for bugs with their droopy beaks. They wore matching green and red plastic bands on their right legs, and the adult had a red and yellow combination on the left. Fernando noted down the colors, adding another data point to the DSP project—and I chalked up species number 123 for my Big Year list.

  The sandpiper-plover is listed as near-threatened because of its vulnerable populations. In the high Andes, insidious effects such as atmospheric disturbances and climate change could have serious impacts on the DSP’s habitat, but it’s hard to tell without enough data. Fernando hopes that more surveys will document patterns, which might eventually help with conservation efforts. We lingered until lengthening shadows reminded us that, despite its star status, the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover still counted as only one species.

  “It would be pointless to bust a gut to see Chile’s most rare and beautiful bird,” Fred said, “if you could, in the same duration, find ten locally common and ugly ones that you weren’t going to see elsewhere.”

  He was right, of course. When all birds are created equal, no bird is worth a significant amount of time. It’s an age-old tradeoff: you can go narrow and deep, or broad and shallow, but you can’t focus in all dimensions at once. I took one last look at the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover, and we drove off to see how many ugly Chilean birds we could find.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Later that evening, Fred and I sat on his backyard patio in a leafy Santiago suburb. Fred served up a bowl of pasta and a fresh salad and poured us each a glass of red wine. The last rays of daylight caught the upper branches of a tree next to the patio. January is the hottest month of the year in Chile, and the afternoon’s warmth hung in the air. We’d returned before dark to try for a Rufous-tailed Plantcutter that sometimes visited Fred’s yard at dusk. As we waited, it was nice to sit back after a long day in the mountains.

  “I’m not really a very serious birder,” Fred said, “in the sense that I like watching birds, but I don’t particularly care what the species is. I just like watching them. And, of course—today was a prime example—it takes you to some very nice places.”

  That’s what I like about it, too. Birding is always an adventure, and it gives you focus when you travel, instead of staring yourself glassy-eyed at too many tourist attractions. Fred got hooked on birds from one of his sons, who caught an interest at a young age. Although his son’s attention passed on to other things, Fred has been addicted to birds ever since.

  “It was like a relay race—he handed off the baton, and I kept going,” he said.

  The sun was setting, its last rays of light fading from the trees. The evening air felt cool and refreshing after the blasting mountain sunshine and dust. Just then, from the corner of my eye, I caught a movement.

  “Could you hand me my binocs?” I asked.

  Even in the dim light, there was no mistaking this bird: chestnut crown and breast, dark cheeks, white wing bar, serrated beak. A plantcutter! The plump little bird, named for its tendency to shred and eat leaves, had returned at dusk, as Fred predicted. It peered down at us for a minute before fluttering off to its nighttime roost. I was delighted with its brief visit, the sensation heightened by sharing it with Fred, a person I barely knew but with whom I already felt a deep connection. We thoroughly embraced the moment.

  “A nice glass of wine, a delicious dinner,” Fred said. “Now this is birding!”

  3

  Cerro Negro

  WHEN I TOUCHED DOWN in northwest Argentina, the arrivals area of the tiny airport in Jujuy (pronounced hoo-HOO-ey) was deserted. I wandered around for a few minutes with my backpack and binoculars, then walked outside and sat down on the curb to wait. The few other passengers from my flight drifted into cars
and drove away, leaving me in an empty parking lot. Would anybody pick me up?

  I was a little fuzzy on the plan here. A birder named Freddy Burgos had invited me to visit his province for the next four days, but because Freddy speaks no English, I had been writing to him in my shaky Spanish. As far as I could tell, using Google Translate to fill in the gaps, Freddy had suggested a camping trip, but the details were vague. Maybe I hadn’t quite grasped his instructions—was I supposed to meet him somewhere? I had no idea what he looked like, what his phone number was, or where he lived. At least the weather was nice, warm and sunny. Fluffy white clouds drifted over the airport’s brick facade, perfect conditions for camping—if indeed that was the plan.

  Sixteen days into the year, my bird list stood at more than 300 species, right on track for my 5,000-species goal. The pace had picked up dramatically when I arrived in central Argentina two days before. In Buenos Aires I met thirty-year-old birder Marcelo Gavensky and his friend Martin Farina, a twenty-eight-year-old dog trainer and paleontology student, and the three of us dashed up to the marshy cattle country of the Entre Ríos province, about 125 miles north of the city. On our first day, we found 146 species of birds—more than I’d seen in four full days in Chile—108 of which were new.

  The grasslands were fantastically productive. Between sips of hot mate (pronounced MAH-tay), Marcelo proudly told me about La Alianza de Pastizal, a conservation group that encourages ranch owners to practice sustainable grazing techniques. The idea is that, with the right methods, ranchers maximize profits with fewer cows, leaving a lighter impact on the landscape: certified, ecologically sensitive beef can be sold at a premium in Europe, and the Argentine market for it is growing. Shipping overseas isn’t a perfect environmental solution, but well-managed estanciasare the key to protecting habitat in this region, which has no designated parks or reserves. We saw dozens of prehistoric-looking Southern Screamers, a few towering Maguari Storks, and scattered, ridiculously pink Roseate Spoonbills in the fields. Around one corner, a five-foot-tall Greater Rhea stalked past—South America’s answer to the ostrich.

  After that quick visit, I crashed for a couple of hours on the floor of Marcelo’s one-room apartment in Buenos Aires, with my feet in the kitchen and head wedged under the dining table, then bid adiós to central Argentina and caught an early flight to the northwest. Now, low on sleep, I sat outside the Jujuy airport and wondered what had happened to Freddy.

  I was about to try sending him an email message from my phone when a small bird flitted around the departures area, and I jogged over to get a better view. It had a warm, brownish body, a gray face, and wings that flashed a rufous-red color in flight. This bird was definitely something new, but what? It behaved like a flycatcher, perching and sallying after insects, occasionally hovering to go after bugs in the corners of the eaves.

  I closed the email browser and opened my phone’s photo gallery. Packing a six-foot-high stack of heavy reference books around the world was out of the question, so before leaving home I had painstakingly scanned dozens of field guides and saved the images as digital files on my smartphone. In an album titled “Birds of Argentina,” I swiped through illustrated plates to the flycatcher section and quickly found a match: the Cliff Flycatcher, a common inhabitant of South American forests and of airport lampposts, was bird number 338. This fine specimen was still flitting around twenty minutes later when a white pickup truck sped into the parking lot and stopped at the curb. Four young people jumped out, smiling and gesturing, and one of them extended a hand.

  “Noah,” he called, “yo soy Freddy!”

  He was about my height, five nine, with a squat, stocky build. His hair was straight, jet black, and shaggily cut, long enough to cover his sideburns and the back of his neck, and he had a pointy beard at the tip of his chin, perfect for stroking—as I soon discovered he loved to do. He wore a military-green long-sleeved shirt, black field pants, and hiking boots. His most striking feature was his smile; he couldn’t seem to wipe it off his face.

  Freddy had brought along some friends, and as they clustered around, a lot of excited Spanish suddenly went flying past my ears. They were apologizing for the delay in picking me up, something to do with groceries and supplies, and introducing themselves all at once: Claudia Martin, José Segovia, and Fabri Gorleri. I was excessively glad to be among them, reassured by their welcoming kindness.

  I threw my pack into the bed of the pickup, which was piled with enough gear to outfit a mountaineering expedition. What exactly had Freddy planned for the next four days? The five of us squeezed into the pickup’s double cab and peeled out. As we left, the Cliff Flycatcher sallied in front of the windshield to pick off an insect, and from the back seat I pointed it out.

  “Sí, sí,” said Freddy, who was simultaneously driving, navigating, and eyeing our gear to make sure nothing blew out. “Hirundinea ferruginea.”

  It took a minute to realize that this was the bird’s scientific name.

  “Right, a Cliff Flycatcher!” I said. Everyone looked blank.

  Of course, they had no reason to use English common names for birds. Most Latin American birders don’t use Spanish common names either, because they aren’t well standardized; instead, Spanish-speaking birders learn the international scientific classifications, a system in Latin that scientists around the world use to understand each other. This was going to make things interesting in the field, where new sightings come fast and furious.

  Freddy drove straight out of town, and as civilization receded behind us, the truck turned off the highway and began to ascend a gravel road into lush east Andean foothills. Gradually I absorbed bits of information. Freddy worked as a biologist in Jujuy, and Claudia, his girlfriend, was a botanist with an interest in all natural things. José and Fabri were students at a university in eastern Argentina and had come more than six hundred miles by bus to join us. All four of them were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three and shared a love of birds and adventure.

  When Freddy received my first email, he thought it would be a great opportunity to go camping at Cerro Negro, a seldom-visited mountain range with some special birds. No roads lead into the high elevations there, so we’d have to hike in more than ten miles and climb thousands of feet up a tortuous pack trail. Freddy had arranged for three mules to carry our stuff so that we could spend four nights in the Yungas cloud forest and Pastizal grassland above tree line, sleeping in tents. He said he’d packed plenty of food. We made a brief stop at a village to collect a driver who would return the pickup, and arrived at the trailhead in early afternoon. The road ended at a river that sliced through dense, green forest, with bare mountain peaks visible above the valley.

  Sure enough, three mules—one white and two brown—appeared with their owner, a campesino in jeans and rubber boots, who lashed our bundles of gear to their saddles. I hoped Freddy had packed an extra sleeping bag, because my silk liner wouldn’t keep me warm at high elevations. The mule team went ahead while Freddy, Claudia, José, Fabri, and I spent an hour meandering around the river. The sun had disappeared behind a layer of clouds, which was beginning to look worrisome, but birds kept popping into view.

  “Cypseloides rothschildi,” Freddy shouted, and I saw a cigar-sized bird with sickle-shaped wings zooming overhead. It looked like a swift, and I scrolled through the field guide on my phone, trying to confirm the scientific name and its English equivalent. Aha!—Rothschild’s Swift, a nice regional specialty and year bird number 342.

  “Psittacara mitratus,” said Fabri, which I translated as a Mitred Parakeet, another new one.

  “Empidonomus varius!” Claudia called out.

  At the same time, José, looking in the opposite direction, announced, “Progne elegans!”

  “Sporophila lineola,” Freddy added.

  “Ay yay yay,” I said.

  I tried to ask them to wait while I looked up each bird name, but it was no use. Birds don’t hang around to be identified, and I did my best to keep up
with the onslaught of sightings, jotting down scientific names in a notebook for later reference when we hit a big canopy flock. Almost every bird in this part of Argentina was new to me, so I appreciated the help of these local experts in identifying fast-moving targets.

  A pair of Torrent Ducks occupied this stretch of river, needing no translation. I’d seen one in Chile, so the species had already been counted for the year, but I paused for a few minutes to admire how they braved the whitewater. Like most ducks, the male had strikingly different plumage than the female—he was black and white with a red beak, while she was gray and orange—and they had long, slender bodies, streamlined for life in rushing water. The birds swam effortlessly through churning rapids, using their feet to propel against the flow. They appeared to be hunting for aquatic insects, inspecting the undersides of each boulder as they went.

  I glanced up to see Freddy, pants rolled up past his knees and hiking boots swinging loosely around his neck, wade into the current. He turned and waved.

  “Vámanos!”

  Time to start hiking, or we’d arrive in camp after dark. The trail entered the forest on the far side of the river. There was no bridge.

  Claudia, José, Fabri, and I removed our shoes and plunged in, taking extreme care with each step. The stream was ice cold, running fast, and up to my thighs. Knee-deep water moving at just four miles per hour can knock a person off balance, and one slip on these slick boulders might send any of us floating away down the river. I’d taken the precaution of lining my backpack with a waterproof garbage bag, but didn’t relish the thought of getting soaked before even starting this hike.