The whole bath took just a few seconds. There was something magical about it, as if catching a fairy in an unguarded moment. I wondered how few people on Earth have ever watched a hummingbird bathe—a rare treat. We retraced our steps to the lodge. Lisa appeared and checked her watch.
“Just give me a minute,” she offered, “and I can take you to look for a couple of staked-out birds nearby—including that Sunbittern. We’ll be quick, because I know you guys need to keep moving.”
While Lisa ran off to grab her keys, I pulled out my phone to check email on the lodge’s Wi-Fi network and found a message from John Cahill, a young birder in Guatemala. I’d never met John but knew who he was. His family had moved to Guatemala when he was five years old, and he’d grown up learning the birds of his adopted country. Now nineteen, John was so obsessed with birds that he had dropped out of high school to do his own Guatemala Big Year in 2014, recording an impressive 651 species while spending all but twenty days of the year in the field.
“How is the Big Year?” he wrote. “Are you planning to be in Guatemala? I’d love to show you some of the regional endemics and get you a step closer to 5,000!”
Reading John’s email gave me goosebumps. Less than a day had passed since I’d learned of Hugo’s death in a car accident, and soon I’d be arriving in Guatemala with no one to meet me. John had no idea that I had been planning to go birding with Hugo there. It really felt like Hugo’s spirit had reached out and guided John to me. I silently thanked Hugo for sending this gift: now I had a new plan for Guatemala and a new friend to meet.
In the good company of Roy and Johan, I spent several more days exploring Costa Rica’s rich birdlife. When it was time to say adiós, I had seen 413 species in the country—158 new for the year—and averaged an incredible 22.5 new birds per day. My year list stood a little over 2,265 species, and I had reached an interesting milestone: I had found half of the birds in the entire Western Hemisphere before even setting foot in North America.
Costa Rica was followed by five whirlwind days with John in Guatemala—mostly in the highlands, where we saw more Resplendent Quetzals and actually got erupted on by a volcano. The Big Year rolled on, as life does, while millions of birds migrated north, as they do every year, flying free to chase the spring.
✧-✧-✧
A couple of months later, in June, while I was tearing through Europe, Roy sent me a short message. He was in high spirits after taking a trip with friends into the Darién Gap in eastern Panama to look for nesting Harpy Eagles. Not only had the group seen the Harpy, but they had also observed nesting Crested Eagles—an even rarer raptor that I had missed. Roy was so happy that his report brought tears to my eyes.
A year after that, I heard that Roy celebrated the birth of his second daughter, then was diagnosed with cancer again, this time in the mouth. He underwent an eight-hour operation to remove most of his jaw, but didn’t pull through. I learned of his passing from Lisa Erb.
“We are all very sad here in Costa Rica to have lost such a great naturalist, guide, artist, and friend,” Lisa said. “His wife told me that his trip with you was a very special moment for him.”
Lisa sent me a photo of the three of us—Roy, Johan, and I—smiling on the terrace at Rancho Naturalista. In the picture, Roy is wearing a T-shirt that says, “Caution: This person may talk about birds at any moment.” When I looked at the photo, memories of my days with Roy in Costa Rica came flooding back.
Life’s tragedies often come with blessings. With death, there is also life. The same month that I heard about Roy’s death, Johan emailed me with the exuberant news that he was to have a second child, a son.
“Regards, my good friend,” he said. “Just want to share with you that my wife Lauren is pregnant—it will be a baby boy and we are going to call him Noah! Noah Felipe Fernández Roman.”
“Congratulations!” I replied. “How did you decide on the name?”
“We like your name,” he explained, simply. “When someone asks him about it, Noah will have a great story to tell.”
9
Home
AFTER AN EXHILARATING five-month run in South and Central America, I began to admit to myself the possibility not only of reaching the goal of 5,000 birds by the end of the year, but of substantially exceeding it. Barely a third of the way through the year, at the beginning of May, I was averaging 19.5 species a day—well above the 13.7 average needed to hit 5,000. If I could keep up this pace—and oh, how I hoped I could—the final tally might be a lot higher than anyone, including me, had guessed it could be.
But I tried not to think too hard about numbers as I left Central America and continued my northward migration to Mexico. To play the long game, I had to focus on small increments. And now I was entering the difficult “long middle” of this project—too far from either the start or the end to contemplate more than one step at a time.
I had a satisfying two weeks chasing the specialty birds of Mexico, divided between the southern state of Oaxaca and a lengthy transect across the north end of the country. In Oaxaca I met up with Eric Antonio Martínez, an astute local birder who once led bird walks for tourists from cruise ships. He introduced me to eye-popping endemic birds as well as their gastric equivalent—the mouth-watering endemic black mole (pronounced “MO-lay”) that is the signature dish of Oaxaca, rich in chocolate, sesame, peppers, and spices. One afternoon, atop the majestic ruins of Monte Albán, the ancient Mesoamerican city that stands on a flattened hilltop above Oaxaca, Eric and I watched a Slaty Vireo while the calls of Rock Wrens echoed from the pyramids. I wondered whether these birds had sung during the human sacrifices that occurred here 2,000 years ago.
Afterward, on the Pacific Coast in Mazatlán, a birder friend of Eric’s named René Valdés hatched a bold but unexpected plan for us: we would drive straight across northern Mexico rather than hang around a resort town where bikinis outnumbered birds. That way, I could fly to the United States from Monterrey and have the chance for a few northeast Mexican species on the way. A few years ago such a road trip would have required crossing nearly impenetrable terrain, but René explained that an extraordinary new highway had just been pushed through the mountains, and he was chafing to explore its birding potential.
Until recently, traveling between the cities of Mazatlán and Durango meant braving the “Devil’s Backbone”—an accident-prone, tortuous road across the rugged Sierra Madre mountain range. The landscape is so rough that when the road was constructed in the 1940s, mules were needed to carry supplies for the workers. Deep in the barrancas—steep gullies isolated by sheer topography and thick forests—lawlessness and wilderness have generally prevailed; for the past decade, the region has been largely controlled by drug cartels of the Sinaloa and Durango states, and traveling through the area was traditionally slow and dangerous.
But with the completion of the $2.2 billion superhighway in late 2013, the Devil’s Backbone was dramatically tamed. What had been a heinous eight-hour journey now takes just two and a half hours, much of the trip spent zipping through sixty-two tunnels and across 135 bridges. It is among the most amazing engineering feats of a country that knows a thing or two about engineering, all the way back to the pyramid-building age. The new four-lane freeway maintains an even 5 percent grade through unimaginably wild canyonlands, mostly by brute force; in one forty-five-mile section, a full eleven miles are tunneled through solid rock. At its crux is the cable-spanned Baluarte Bridge, which connects the states of Sinaloa and Durango and, at a vertigo-inducing 1,300 feet above the ground, is now the highest bridge in the Western Hemisphere—tall enough to fit the Empire State Building underneath with room to spare. It took more than a thousand workers several years just to build the bridge, in an area so remote that the first surveyors had to ride four hours by horseback to reach the site.
René and I set out from Mazatlán on May 16, and we rolled into the Sierra Madre with no traffic, no delays, and not a pothole in sight. The surface was smooth as glass, a w
elcome change from months of bumping around the teeth-jarring roads of rural South America. As we entered the mountains, the road seemed to lift off; its surface rarely stayed at ground level, and I had the feeling of swooping and diving around each obstacle like a bird in flight.
René told me that, soon after this highway was opened, most of the copper wiring was stolen from its tunnels, so security guards had to be posted at strategic spots. The road was also patrolled by federal police, who had rarely ventured up here before and who hoped to use the new access to combat illegal drug activities. For years these mountains were an unregulated haven for marijuana and opium poppy farms; Durango had become a flashpoint of conflict between the rival Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas gang, and Durango City was briefly named one of the ten most dangerous cities in the world for its grisly murder rate. Besides speeding up commute times, the national government believed that this highway would bring modern development and the long arm of the law to an unruly region.
We stopped at several places to look for birds, not knowing exactly what we might find.
“This is all new territory for birders,” René said. “We’re still exploring what might be out here.”
At the Baluarte Bridge, we parked and hiked down a gravel spur and watched a pair of Military Macaws fly gracefully through the canyon, their long green bodies mere specks beneath the bridge’s lofty span. A Zone-tailed Hawk soared in a nearby thermal zone, and a Happy Wren sang happily from a thicket.
Down the road, at another side track, René and I stopped again to explore the scrubby forest on foot. A few minutes in, we rounded a corner and abruptly came face to face with two men armed with rifles. The men asked why we were walking there. René talked with them briefly and they continued on their way. Afterward, René told me that guns are technically illegal in Mexico except for hunting rifles, and that these guys were probably farmers out looking for game. A few minutes later we started hearing shots, seemingly at random, from several different directions; one went off uncomfortably close, right under a nearby tree. What the heck? We couldn’t see anyone and I started to get nervous, but then realization dawned: the tree was covered with a vine that bore some type of air-filled fruit, and the fruits were exploding in the midday heat. Every time one popped, it gave off a sharp sound like a gunshot.
We arrived in Durango City—still a dusty cowboy town in the style of John Wayne and Clark Gable—by late afternoon, in time for a little birding in the surrounding hills. René wanted to find a Striped Sparrow, a Mexican endemic, and we had good looks at several before dusk, along with some old North American friends such as Acorn Woodpeckers, Western Bluebirds, and an Eastern Meadowlark. As darkness fell, we patrolled a dirt road among the pine trees, hoping to find a couple of nocturnal birds before calling it a day.
The Striped Sparrow put my year list at exactly 2,499 species—one short of the halfway mark. This was the best possible news, for it meant that my strategy for the year was working even better than I had planned. I originally expected that I would reach this milestone before leaving the Americas, and I hadn’t yet touched United States soil. With a couple hundred more new species waiting for me in the States, I was feeling optimistic when, with my high-powered LED flashlight aimed into the dark Mexican forest, I spotted a speck of red eyeshine on the ground.
Spotlighting for animals at night, you’re looking for their luminous eyes. Eyeshine is technically an effect of the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue behind the retina of some vertebrate animals that reflects light, allowing the eye’s photoreceptors a second chance to process incoming signals. This gives nocturnal species their superior low-light vision, and the tissue is highly visible: if you direct light at an animal with a tapetum lucidum, its eyes will seem to glow in the dark. The color varies by species, and you can often guess the type of animal by its eyeshine. Cat and dog eyes glow iridescent green; horses and cows are blue; fish are white; and coyotes, rodents, and birds are red. (Primates, including humans, don’t have a tapetum lucidum, so you won’t see any eyeshine by spotlighting a person. The redeye effect in powerful flash photos is a reflection of blood vessels at the back of the eyeball.)
“René, do you see it?” I asked.
Instinctively, he leaned over my shoulder. To see eyeshine, you have to line up your own eyes with the light source.
“Yes, it’s probably some type of nightjar,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get a little closer.”
The two of us snuck toward the red glow, which was at ground level in an open area of the forest. As we approached, I began to make out the outline of a bird sitting on bare dirt. It had the typical shape of a nightjar, as René had predicted: horizontal, angular, with a chunky head at one end and a short tail at the other.
Nightjars, in the family Caprimulgidae, are a unique group of birds represented by about a hundred species on six continents. All of them are nocturnal, eat insects, are cryptically patterned, lay their eggs on the ground, and can be frustratingly tough to encounter. Some people call nightjars “goatsuckers,” for the old folk tale that these birds steal the milk from goats at night (yet another bird myth promoted by Aristotle and later reinforced by Pliny). Several types are possible in northern Mexico, so we’d need a good look at this one to distinguish its field marks. Would we be able to get close enough?
René and I dropped to our knees and crept toward the nightjar, which sat unmoving on the ground. I kept the flashlight beam aimed at it, trying to discern the patterning of its plumage. It had a stocky shape with a hint of white in the throat, blackish cheeks, and buff-barred wing feathers, but mostly it just looked brown, like pretty much all nightjars do.
I snapped a fuzzy photo, crawled closer, snapped another photo, and wormed toward the bird until it was just a few feet away. Still, René and I couldn’t decide if it was a Buff-collared Nightjar or a similar-looking Common Poorwill. I pulled out my phone, opened an app with the Mexican field guide, and compared the two illustrations side by side with the bird sitting in front of us. It didn’t seem to mind.
“It looks all brown,” I said. “I don’t see any orange color on the nape.”
“Ye-e-es,” said René, sounding uncertain. “A Buff-collared Nightjar should have some color around its neck. But I dunno, it might be hidden by the feathers.”
I inched forward until, to my surprise, only about a foot remained between my nose and the bird’s bill. It still made no move to fly, apparently hypnotized by the beam of the flashlight. I’d heard that nightjars could sometimes be lulled in this way, but had never tried it before. Slowly, I reached out my left hand and, holding my breath, lightly stroked the feathers on top of the bird’s head while it sat absolutely still, unblinking and unflinching.
My photos might show enough for a positive identification, I thought, but there was one way to be absolutely sure. Gently, I closed the fingers of my hand around the bird’s body, using a technique I’d learned handling hundreds of bird species as a researcher for projects in various countries. The bird’s head poked between my index and middle finger while its body rested comfortably in the palm of my hand, protected from sudden movements or injury. It didn’t struggle when I picked it up, and it felt like palming a fluffy tennis ball off the ground.
René leaned in to inspect every feature. With my free right hand, I carefully extended one wing, spread out the tail feathers, and examined the underparts while the bird stayed frozen. Its eyes were open, and I could feel its heartbeat with my fingers, the only confirmation that it was alive.
“It’s definitely a Common Poorwill,” René concluded. “The patterns on the neck, wing, and tail are distinctive.”
I looked up at him and smiled.
“That’s it, then!” I said. “The 2,500th bird!”
To hold this halfway mark in my hand, as a living, breathing creature, underscored how little its number conveyed the thrilling, real-life experience. For a few more seconds I examined it, enjoying the rare privilege of such a close encounter with a fascinat
ing species. The Common Poorwill is the only bird in the world known to enter torpor for extended periods; in some places, poorwills have been shown to maintain a catatonic state, like hibernation, for several months during winter. Maybe that explained this bird’s extraordinary calmness.
To set it free, I uncurled my fingers so that the poorwill balanced on my flattened palm. When I switched off the flashlight, I could feel it there, letting its eyes readjust to darkness. After a minute, the bird seemed to awaken from its trance; its little feet scratched against my skin, and then, with a soft flutter, it spread its wings, took flight, and disappeared quietly into the Durango night.
✧-✧-✧
Two days later, on May 18, I landed in Houston, Texas, with shaggy hair, a farmer tan, and a thick coating of Mexican dust on my clothes. It was strange to think that my Latin American leg was already over. I handed my passport to the immigration officer and watched him flip through the stamped pages: Antarctica, the Falklands, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico.
“Doing a bit of traveling, huh?” he asked. “What have you been up to in all these places?”
“Birdwatching,” I said, hoping he’d just let me through.
“Huh,” he said, not looking up.
I’d lately discovered that a disheveled, single male traveler with a backpack and a passport full of stamps tends to raise eyebrows at immigration points, and I’d honed my story. Oddly, the sillier it sounded, the more people seemed to believe it, and so, instead of vague explanations like “I’m a tourist” or “traveling to see friends,” I just told the truth. When asked, I offered that I was trying to set a world record of birdwatching. Most border officers couldn’t think of any follow-up questions. Who would make up such a ridiculous cover story?
I had learned my lesson the hard way in Jamaica, the only place during the year where immigration really detained me. On the entry form, I put “writer” as my occupation. When the officer read the form, he jumped right in with questions.
Birding Without Borders Page 14