None of this seemed to bother United in the least. Didn’t they realize that time was of the essence? I had become a slave to time, and my blood was boiling. The airline that boasts the most flights to the most destinations around the world had offered me no flights to any destination, and in so doing had landed me with my second zero day of the year. Wasting time in airports wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned for my last stop in the Western Hemisphere.
At least the previous day had gone well. After leaving home in Oregon, not to return until this year was over, I’d landed in Ithaca to meet Tim Lenz, a full-time programmer for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, eBird, which I was using to track my sightings for the year. Tim spends his free time birding his brains out and knew where to find the species I sought in New York, partly because he’d catalogued them all in eBird. He was wiry, precise, and about the same age as me.
The two of us were near Cayuga Lake, looking for common birds such as Upland Sandpipers and American Black Ducks, when Tim received a WhatsApp message on his phone.
“Wow,” he said, suddenly at full attention. “It looks like someone just reported a Brown Pelican flying over the lake. That’s, like, the first inland record for New York! We’ve got to go see that bird!”
“Nice!” I said, and then I paused. “But, Tim, I just saw thousands of Brown Pelicans on the Pacific Ocean last week, where they’re supposed to be. I don’t need one for the year list. I do need to see American Black Ducks today because it’s my last chance . . .”
Tim looked stricken. In this situation, it wasn’t immediately clear which should take priority: a mega-rare species in New York for his life list or an ultra-common addition for my Big Year list.
“But it’s a Brown Pelican!” he protested. “Do you realize how unusual that is? This might never happen again!”
I sympathized. In Oregon, whenever a rarity is reported, I leap to see it without a second thought. That’s the nature of birding. You have to go for it because you don’t know if it’ll ever happen again. Still, for me, for the Big Year, this pelican sighting was a distraction.
“Maybe we can do both?” I suggested. “Do we have time to race over for the pelican, then go find some black ducks?”
“Yes!” Tim said. “Let’s go for it!”
He pulled a big U-turn on the highway and, in moments, we were speeding toward Cayuga Lake on our new mission.
As we drove, Tim’s phone blew up with WhatsApp messages from other birders on the pelican trail. Because Ithaca hosts Cornell University, with its famous Lab of Ornithology, the city is packed with birders—and all of them were now looking for the same Brown Pelican. Sightings were reported in real time via instant messages. Someone saw it flying south along the lake; someone else reported it a few miles away. The bird, for its part, apparently was roaming aimlessly around the forty-mile-long lake, probably wondering where it had taken a wrong turn from the ocean, unaware that its cover was blown.
A message pinged from Marshall Iliff and Tom Schulenberg, two of Cornell’s elite birders, who suggested we head for a yacht club along the lakeshore. They were stationed up the lake and had just watched the pelican fly over their heads.
“It should pass by there in a couple of minutes if it continues straight,” they said.
Tim got us to the marina in a hurry, and we ran onto the docks, scanning the skies. No pelican. How fast can a Brown Pelican fly? We stood there, trying to make hypothetical calculations of speed and distance, when Tim saw a speck on the horizon.
The long bill, dumpy body, and prehistoric-looking wings—even in distant silhouette—confirmed that we had our quarry. As the pelican approached, we raised our cameras like anti-aircraft gunners. The bird lumbered directly overhead, bomber style, giving full-frame views.
Tim was ecstatic.
“No way!” he said. “A Brown Pelican on Cayuga Lake!”
In another minute, it had disappeared in the direction of downtown Ithaca, where the WhatsApp reports kept coming. Someone reported it over the farmers’ market, then a student on the Cornell University campus ran out of class and managed to see the bird fly over.
“That’s quite a tick for the campus list,” said Tim, with a connoisseur’s appreciation.
We eventually found the American Black Ducks, for my benefit, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that pelican and what it represented. On any scale smaller than the world, a Big Year is all about chasing rarities: if, say, you decided to limit your Big Year to New York State, then this Brown Pelican, or any other rarity, would be a must-see. Drawing the boundaries at the state line automatically puts you in reaction mode, with the imperative to tear off in any direction to witness one lost bird at a time. I have nothing against this sort of birding—I do it all the time—but some critics liken such pursuits to ambulance chasing, and at best it is a game of diminishing returns. Once you’ve seen all the common birds in a given area, it takes a lot more work and expense to find new ones.
The best way to avoid chasing rare birds is to take on the whole planet. You can go where each bird is supposed to be instead of waiting for a lost vagrant to show up on your doorstep. The world is the only scale that doesn’t reward rarity hunts. I liked the idea that, by thinking globally and birding locally, I was helping to reinvent the Big Year as a way to appreciate the most common birds in their proper habitats. It seemed almost subversive, akin to a graffiti artist who paints murals instead of spraying his initials everywhere.
Well, it would be, I thought, if I could ever escape from New York. The global approach didn’t work so well if you couldn’t get out there.
Waiting for my flight, I’d watched the clock in despair as my next planned layover, in Iceland, shrank. By the time I finally saw New York City receding through my airplane window, the prospects in Iceland didn’t look good: instead of a much-anticipated day and a half there, I’d now have only a few brief hours, and those hours would fall, naturally, in the middle of the night. With my new connection, I was scheduled to land in Reykjavik at midnight and take off again at 7 A.M.
My heart sank when I first saw the flight times. I figured Iceland was a write-off. But then I remembered something: at the height of summer, the sun stays up in the far north. It was June now, almost the longest day of the year. In Iceland it wouldn’t get dark at all, which meant that, theoretically, I could still do some birding there on my short layover.
I contacted Yann Kolbeinsson, whom I had planned to meet in Reykjavik.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m supposed to land at midnight. I know that’s a crazy time to go birding, but are you up for pulling an all-nighter? Otherwise I’ll try to find a taxi and drive around for a couple of hours.”
Yann quickly replied.
“Don’t worry!” he said. “I’ll pick you up when you get here, and we’ll find as many birds as we can.”
And that’s just what happened. I arrived in Reykjavik a few hours later and found Yann standing in the moody, low-angled light of the midnight sun. He was a little taller than me, with brown hair and friendly features. In his pickup, we headed into the tundra surrounding the airport, just outside the city, to see what birds were around.
When I thanked him for meeting me so late, he brushed it off. Only later did I learn that Yann had driven five hours from his house in northern Iceland to meet me in Reykjavik, and then, after birding with me through the night, took a nap in his truck in the airport parking lot, drove five hours back home, and went straight to work the following day.
“It was worth it,” he said, “to help with your Big Year! I wouldn’t miss it!”
The land was treeless, volcanic, almost devoid of life, but Yann knew where to find the birds. We stopped at several points along the rocky coastline, where Iceland Gulls and Arctic Terns hovered over rafts of Common Eiders. Then, at about 3 A.M., we walked to a cliff with a colony of seabirds, including a Thick-billed Murre and, by great good luck, one Atlantic Puffin—a counterpart to the Tufted Puffin I’
d seen in Oregon, and an iconic symbol of Iceland. The puffin crouched on a ledge outside its nesting crevice, its brightly colored bill sticking out like a navigational beacon.
I wondered how these Arctic birds get any sleep in the constant light of summer. They seemed to stay awake at all hours, catching naps whenever they felt tired. A few of the seabirds were snoozing where they perched on the rocks, but many others were energetically flying around, in defiance of the clock. I could relate. It had been days since I’d had a good night’s sleep in a bed.
As my watch ticked toward 5 A.M., Yann and I scoped a large, marshy area on the outskirts of Reykjavik where Eurasian Wigeon, Whooper Swans, and other waterfowl gathered in large numbers. It was the most bird-filled spot we visited, and the greenest. Behind the wetland, an impressively large white building with a red roof stood alone on the flats.
“That’s the presidential palace,” Yann said.
“Wow,” I said. “Imagine the yard list!”
The sun was rising again behind a veil of clouds, and its dusky light brightened into a new day. At sixty-four degrees of latitude, just a couple of degrees from the Arctic Circle, I had reached my farthest north for the year. It seemed fitting to celebrate this mark by staying up all night.
From here, things could only go south. I still had a long way to go, people to meet, and birds to see. This brief interlude in Iceland would later seem like a strange dream, sandwiched between North America and Europe, but for the moment my spirits were soaring.
By the time Yann dropped me off again at the airport, just before my connection to Norway, he had shown me thirty-six new bird species in less than seven hours. All of them were common in Iceland but rare elsewhere, which proved the point all over: you can wait forever for birds to come to you, but it’s more sporting—and more logical—to go where they are.
The delay hadn’t been too costly, thanks to Yann’s help. We might have seen a few more species given an extra day, but in just a few hours we’d cleaned up practically every bird I’d hoped to find. After the Iceland all-nighter, on the 160th day of the year, my list stood at a respectable 2,786. I boarded my flight on Icelandair, where the mood lighting evoked the aurora borealis, the executive seats were called “Saga Class,” and the attendants were all blonde, and sank deeply and gratefully into my seat. As the barren lands of Iceland slipped under the wings, I closed my eyes, imagined the president in his palace surrounded by ducks, and let sleep carry me softly into the eastern sky.
✧-✧-✧
My only other significant airline snarl of the year came between Spain and West Africa, after a quick tour of the birds of Europe. In Norway, I joined a friend, Bjørn Olav Tveit, author of A Birdwatcher’s Guide to Norway, whom I’d randomly met a few years earlier at a birding spot in Oregon, where he happened to be vacationing. In Turkey, in the shadow of gigantic Easter Island–type statues near the top of Mount Nemrut, I chalked up the 3,000th bird of the year, a Tawny Pipit, with an enthusiastic young birder named Emin Yogurtçuoglu. And in Spain, Gorka Gorospe generously introduced me to some of the country’s wealth of birds and presented me with a clever Big Year T-shirt he had designed himself. Nearly halfway through the Big Year, with the Americas and Europe under my belt and three-fifths of the way to my goal of 5,000 species, I still couldn’t quite believe that my plans from a year ago were running like clockwork. Not a single local birder had left me stranded—in fact, birders around the world were embracing the spirit of this Big Year, going all out to contribute whatever they could.
But things went awry on the journey to Africa. When I checked in for what should have been an easy hop, I discovered that my flight to Ghana had flown the previous day. A day late and more than a thousand dollars short, I spent the rest of that afternoon haggling with agents before making a haphazard series of connections from Spain to Ghana by way of Germany and Ethiopia. It wasn’t pretty, but it got me there.
As it turned out, the reroute wasn’t a total loss. Faced with a painful five-hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany, during the daylight hours, I wondered if I might salvage some birds there instead of cooling my jets at the airport. When I opened Facebook on my laptop and typed “my friends in Frankfurt” in the search bar, a few names popped up, including one I recognized immediately: Peter Kaestner.
I’d long known about Peter but had never met or corresponded with him. Among world birders, Peter is legendary. For the past thirty-four years, he had worked for the U.S. State Department in more than a dozen countries, including Namibia, Colombia, Malaysia, Guatemala, Egypt, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, India, the Solomon Islands, and Afghanistan, specifically requesting postings in bird-rich destinations. As a strategy for observing a lot of birds in a lifetime, it’s hard to beat, and by the mid-1980s Peter had seen a representative of every bird family in the world—the first person ever to do so. At one point he boasted the world’s second-highest life list, and with more than 8,500 species, his is still ranked among the top ten. He even has a bird named in his honor: the Cundinamarca Antpitta, which I’d heard in April in Colombia, also known as Grallaria kaestneri.
I’d no idea that Peter was now posted in Germany, where he served as section chief at the U.S. Consulate General. It would be a thrill to meet him. I dispatched a short note before boarding my flight to Frankfurt, only half expecting a reply. A couple of hours later, when I touched down in Germany, I switched on my phone to find a text message: “We’re waiting outside!”
Surprised and delighted, I ran out of the terminal and found Peter, who had come straight from work, dressed in a suit and running shoes. He had brought his wife, Kimberly, and they ushered me into their car.
“How long have we got?” Peter asked, as we pulled away from the curb.
“Just a couple hours,” I said, and explained that, on this short layover, it would be difficult to find even one bird in suburban Frankfurt that I hadn’t already seen.
“I think our only reasonable target here is the Gray-headed Woodpecker,” I said, “which I missed everywhere else.”
“Hmm,” Peter said, and conferred with Kimberly. “Let’s try a patch of forest near here, where we might run across a woodpecker.”
We spent an hour rambling through a woodsy park, but there was little activity in midafternoon. The fresh air was welcome, though, and it was fun to talk to Peter and Kimberly, who had been following my progress.
“I’m glad to meet you,” Peter said after a while, “because a world Big Year is something I’ve thought about but never taken seriously. But look, these woodpeckers are a slim chance. Isn’t there anything else we can look for?”
“Well,” I considered, “I suppose there is one other bird in Frankfurt, but it’s hardly worth pursuing.”
“Which one?” Peter asked quickly. “We might as well try.”
“You’re going to laugh,” I said, “but I haven’t seen an Egyptian Goose yet this year, and I think there is a feral population here. Right?”
Peter winced.
“Yes,” he said, “Egyptian Geese are everywhere downtown. If that bird stands between you and a zero day, then we might as well go count one now.”
With my time rapidly running out in Europe, the three of us drove to Frankfurt’s historic center on a semiwild-goose chase. Technically, because Egyptian Geese have been established in Germany for years, I could count them, but they aren’t native to Europe. Birders regard these introduced populations as trashy, and I would soon see plenty of wild Egyptian Geese in Africa. But it was still a tick—and one new bird today, mathematically speaking, would be infinitely better than zero.
It was absurdly easy to find the geese, which were loafing in an urban park on the Frankfurt riverfront when we pulled up.
“Ugly birds,” Peter said, “but there you go!”
The three of us spent a few more minutes wandering downtown, admiring the more rarified sights of Frankfurt: the Frankfurt Cathedral, the famous Römer building, and a Monet exhibit. It was difficult to grasp that tomorrow
I’d wake up south of the Sahara. These transitions between places and cultures always seemed strange, but they were getting to be strangely routine.
With a quick selfie in front of the cathedral, my United States–Europe leg wrapped up. Peter and Kimberly wished me well as we returned to the airport. I had one goose and two new friends to show for my serendipitous layover in Germany, and I was bound at last for Africa.
Birding the world requires a stack of field guides far too heavy to pack. I scanned all of these into digital files for reference during the year.
Bob Keefer
With relatively few bird species, Antarctica was not exactly a strategic addition to the itinerary, but this Big Year wasn’t just about numbers. Who could skip the world’s coldest, windiest continent—and its friendly Gentoo Penguins?
Noah Strycker
If you’re going to see the world, you might as well start at the end of it. Working as a seasonal onboard naturalist, I kicked off the new year by driving a Zodiac in Antarctica.
Courtesy of Noah Strycker
Birding by mule team in Argentina proved a winning game plan for picking up Aplomado Falcons, Tucumán Mountain-Finches, Maquis Canasteros, Zimmer’s Tapaculos, and other incredible birds in the back corners of Jujuy province.
Noah Strycker
The most powerful raptor in the Western Hemisphere, Harpy Eagles are rare residents of the South American rainforest. After a looooong wait at this nest in Brazil, I was rewarded with spectacular looks at a three-foot-tall Harpy with a seven-foot wingspan.
Birding Without Borders Page 16