Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

  Noah Strycker

  Following a breakdown in the central highlands of Peru, Quechua potato farmers saved the day. Seventeen-year-old Rolando ferried me down the mountain on his dirt bike.

  Courtesy of Noah Strycker

  In a year of highs and lows, this was definitely the highest point: Peru’s Ticlio Pass, at 16,000 feet. Traveling here from sea level in less than twenty-four hours was a little rough, but the birds were worth some altitude sickness.

  Courtesy of Noah Strycker

  Torrential rains, landslides, floods, accidents, and breakdowns were just part of the Big Year experience. In remote Peru, the van became mired in mud with two flat tires, a dead battery, and a missing bumper—all at once.

  Noah Strycker

  The Giant Antpittas of Ecuador are notoriously secretive. The fame of this one, named Maria, quickly spread when birders learned that a local logger/farmer named Ángel Paz had trained it to come to his call.

  Noah Strycker

  Big Year transportation included plane, car, taxi, bus, jeepney, motorbike, quad bike, sleeper train, bullet train, ship, speedboat, ferry, Zodiac, outboard canoe, raft, bicycle, and foot power—but by far the most unusual was “La Brujita” (literally, “The Little Witch”) in Colombia, which turned an old railway into a highway using special carts powered by motorcycles.

  Noah Strycker

  In a magical moment near Durango, Mexico, this Common Poorwill—the year’s 2,500th bird—posed for up-close views.

  Noah Strycker

  Eternal summer sunlight allowed twenty-four-hour birding in Iceland. The home of the country’s president proved a good spot for watching swans, ducks, geese, and other waterfowl.

  Noah Strycker

  Keen birder Kalu Afasi enjoyed a bird’s-eye view on a hanging walkway at Kakum National Park in Ghana. This treetop trail system transformed the once-obscure forest into a premier eco attraction.

  Noah Strycker

  On safari, even the birds can be enormous. This Southern Ground-Hornbill stopped traffic in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

  Noah Strycker

  The year was not just for the birds. In Africa, other wildlife—including these lions in the Serengeti of northern Tanzania—often stole the show.

  Noah Strycker

  A pair of Sri Lanka Frogmouths, looking like plush toys in a clump of dead leaves, counted as record-breaking species number 4,342.

  Noah Strycker

  It was especially satisfying to set a new Big Year world record in record-crazy India. Bishop Kuriakose Mor Eusebius, in full regalia, was on hand to mark the occasion with a selfie.

  Courtesy of Noah Strycker

  This Siberian Crane, species number 4,863, drifted off course to a farmer’s field in Taiwan, where it lingered for a year and became a celebrity, complete with souvenir stands and its own government-sponsored security guard.

  Noah Strycker

  The world’s third-largest bird after the Ostrich and the Emu, the Cassowary is a murderouslooking creature. This one had two chicks in the forest outside of Cairns, Australia.

  Noah Strycker

  Not seen alive since the mid-1980s, this Golden Masked-Owl was discovered on an oil palm plantation on the island of New Britain in 2015.

  Noah Strycker

  The last bird of 2015, near midnight on December 31, was this Oriental Bay-Owl in the Assam province of northeast India. This may be the first-ever photograph of a wild bay-owl in India—an exciting way to wrap up the Big Year.

  Noah Strycker

  After ten months on the road, I celebrated my 5,000th species, a Flame-crowned Flowerpecker, with local birders on Mindanao Island in the Philippines.

  Noah Strycker

  11

  Kalu

  PRACTICALLY NO ONE VISITS West Africa during the wet season, for good reason: the week before I arrived in Accra, the bustling capital of Ghana, severe flooding killed more than 150 people in the city. The coastal rainforest that grows like a sweat stain around the crook of Africa holds some of the world’s greatest biodiversity and dozens of endemic bird species, and it generates a tremendous amount of rain. Because of my linear itinerary, I had no option but to visit during the monsoon. And so, on a dark and humid morning in late June, I pushed my way through the crowd in Accra, soaking in my first impressions of a wet and wild country.

  From out of the horde of taxi drivers and hangers-on emerged a man who seemed to know me. He put out a hand and beamed.

  “Noah, welcome to Ghana!”

  “But how did you recognize me, Kalu?” I joked.

  In this throng, my blond hair stuck out like a neon sign.

  “Come, let’s go find our driver,” he said, and led the way toward a busy parking area.

  I’d contacted Kalu Afasi months ago after finding him through the BirdingPal website, but we’d exchanged only a few emails, so I was glad to see him now. He was thirty-eight years old, thin but athletic looking, with close-cropped hair and toned arms. He wore a T-shirt, loose khaki pants, and scuffed white tennis shoes.

  “I waited for you here yesterday,” he said. “I guess you were delayed?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I replied. “I sent you a message, but maybe it was too late. My flight was canceled, so I spent yesterday in Germany, of all places.”

  “Don’t worry! We are here now! It is all good! Here, let me introduce you to our driver, Yaw.”

  A smaller man appeared from a parked 4x4 and insisted on loading my backpack into the trunk, which was full of water jugs and other gear.

  “He’s called Yaw, which means ‘born on a Thursday,’ ” Kalu said. “So if you forget, you can just call him ‘Thursday.’ ”

  I laughed, but Kalu seemed to be fascinated with birth days of the week. He asked which day I was born on, and I admitted I wasn’t sure. Later, when we met a man who said he was born on a Saturday, Kalu looked chagrined.

  “Bad luck,” he said. “On Saturdays you must get up early to work on the farm because there is no school. That is not a good day to be born.”

  The three of us, under Yaw Boateng’s steady hand, merged into Accra’s congested traffic and navigated south under a dirty gray sky.

  The road was jammed with tiny hatchbacks, beat-up passenger vans, and buses, many of them painted red and yellow. On both sides of the street, wooden stalls under umbrella canopies sold charcoal, cell phones, plantains, desk fans, toilets, sound systems, dresses, eggs, shoes, cement bricks, mattresses, electrical plugs, ice cream, bicycles, T-shirts, plastic containers, and anything else one might pop out for. Every so often we passed a dense market of fruit, vegetable, and meat stands doing a thriving open-air business. Many people balanced objects on top of their heads—pineapples, bowls, gas cans. Most were brightly dressed: schoolchildren wore crisp uniforms, women had flowing fabrics and flip-flops, and men sported spotless white shirts as if defying the red earth beneath their feet. Goats, dogs, and chickens dodged traffic, and extensive mud puddles attested to the recent rains. The air was thick with humidity, wood smoke, exhaust, and the heavy smells of sewage and cooking.

  The country of Ghana, wedged between Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Togo, is a tall rectangle sitting on the horizontal part of Africa’s western coast. Among its neighbors it is a small but relatively stable nation and has been popular for birders because of its accessibility and diversity. In a short trip, it’s possible to reach the ocean, mountains, wet and dry forest, and even, in the northern part of the country, wide savannas and grasslands.

  Kalu sat shotgun, twisting in his seat to talk above the engine noise.

  “I was happy to receive your first email,” he said, “because hardly anyone comes to Ghana this time of year. And I like your project. To travel the world and look at birds, what an amazing journey!”

  “It’s good to be in Africa,” I said. “This is the only continent I have never visited before, so everything is new today.”

  “Especially the birds!” said Kal
u.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Almost all of the birds here will be lifers for me.”

  He looked pleased.

  “We will see how many we can find in eight days,” he said. “Basically, our plan is to start in the wet forests in the south—that’s where we are heading now—then work our way north to the interior. I think maybe we can get three hundred species.”

  “Just hope it doesn’t rain too much,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about the weather!” Kalu replied. “We can’t control it, and these days we can’t even predict it. For the past few years, the wet season has been very strange; nobody knows when the rains will come. The climate is changing here.”

  I’d heard versions of this story in an unsettling number of places this year, and many of the birders who accompanied me had complained about unpredictable seasons. It was difficult to tease out other effects, like deforestation and overharvesting, but my view of global climate change had shifted lately after hearing enough local people talk about it. It wasn’t just something for academics and politicians to argue about; these changes were already affecting those who depended on the land and environment.

  We rode in silence for a while as Yaw piloted our 4x4 away from the city’s congestion. Busy street scenes gradually gave way to open fields, skinny cows, palm trees, and kids on motorbikes.

  I gazed out the window and thought about the coming months. After Ghana, I was scheduled to visit Cameroon, South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda before moving on to Asia. For me, all of these destinations were new, and Africa felt like the most exotic place I had yet traveled to. Its people, culture, landscape, and birds were so different from anything I’d ever experienced that I wasn’t sure what to expect. The feeling of hyperawareness had returned after a relaxed stretch in the United States and Europe. For most of the rest of the year, I’d be passing through rural, tropical developing countries, and now I slipped back into the vigilant mindset I’d cultivated earlier in Latin America.

  One of the benefits of returning to the tropics, I reflected, would be a more regular schedule. Each day near the equator includes a glorious twelve hours of darkness, which meant I could start catching up on the sleep that I’d sacrificed during the long days of northern summer. Also, because of Ghana’s bumpy roads and diverse forests, the pace of travel would slow down. Kalu had arranged for us to stay in the same hotel, called the Hans Cottage Botel (yes, with a B), for the next two nights, and I appreciated the chance to sleep in the same bed twice for the first time in nearly a month—and maybe even rinse out my grimy, sweat-stained clothes.

  For my first session of African birding, we stopped on an unmarked gravel road through scrubby fields, at a place called the Winneba Plains.

  “Let’s spend a couple of hours walking here,” Kalu said. “Tomorrow we’ll reach the forest, but this habitat has a few species we won’t see anywhere else.”

  The two of us wandered down the track while Yaw stayed with our vehicle. Birds appeared everywhere, many with unfamiliar names: gonoleks, tchagras, and whydahs. A Guinea Turaco, dressed in green with black and white eye shadow, took flight with a startling flash of red wings, swooping across the path in front of us. I struggled to keep up, reveling in the feeling of being a little overwhelmed. Even the most common birds, such as Bronze Mannikins and Pied Crows, were fresh and exciting.

  “Oh, look, look!” said Kalu, flinging his arm to gesture at a large bird lifting above the grass. “A Black-bellied Bustard!”

  We watched the bustard fly with laborious wingbeats until it dropped behind a distant set of bushes. It looked distinctive, the size and approximate shape of a peacock, minus the tail, with white wings and a dark body, spindly neck and long legs.

  “That is the bird I was most hoping to see here,” Kalu explained. “Bustards are so good at hiding in the long grass, sometimes they are tough to find. Good thing it decided to fly just now!”

  After two hours, we had recorded thirty-eight species, thirty-six of which I’d never seen before. As my introduction to Africa, Ghana was giving me a crash course. It felt almost like being a beginner again.

  ✧-✧-✧

  That evening at dinner, I asked Kalu how he first became interested in birds. We ate at a restaurant with no walls. I faced a large bowl of fufu: a ball of pounded cassava dough floating in a soupy mixture of vegetables, spices, and chunks of gristly goat meat. Instead of utensils, I had been given a smaller bowl of tap water to cleanse my fingers.

  “Just use your right hand,” Kalu said. “Break off a piece of the dough and dip it in the broth. Delicious!”

  I soon got the hang of eating soup one-handed, without a spoon—messy, but tasty.

  Kalu took a bite, delicately rinsed his hand, and launched into a fascinating story.

  “I am originally from Nigeria,” he said, “where my father is a traditional king of sixteen villages. He is a very powerful man. I have a brother and sister, but I am the oldest, so I was supposed to become the next king there.”

  He paused.

  “But I don’t want to be a village ruler—too much drama! And can you imagine a king who watches birds all the time?”

  Another pause.

  “Anyway, when I was younger,” Kalu said, “I wanted to do something else. So I started playing football, what you call soccer. Eventually I joined a Champions League in Nigeria, and then, sixteen years ago, moved to Ghana to play for a professional Champions League here. My dream was to join a national team—in fact, I was going through the process of becoming naturalized in Burkina Faso to play for their national football team, but that fell through. I never quite reached that level, but I did play professionally for a few years, and traveled all over Africa for matches.”

  Kalu was not particularly interested in birds until one day, sitting down in an Internet café here in Ghana, he signed up for a website that connects pen pals. The site matched him with a sixty-two-year-old birdwatcher from Denmark who had been making regular birding trips to Ghana since the 1990s. The two corresponded, and Kalu joined the Danish man on his next visit to Ghana.

  That wonderful trip was an eye opener. Kalu’s Danish friend taught him to examine field marks and identify each species, and he gave Kalu a book with illustrations of common African birds. Kalu, inspired, started going out on his own, and became so obsessed with birds that he missed physical therapy appointments and football practices, and got suspended from the team.

  “When we were training on the beach, I’d be off looking for birds,” he said. “That’s how I got suspended.”

  Kalu decided to retire from football and become a birdwatching tour guide. He had too many injuries—a shoulder that often popped out of its socket, bad knees—and saw a new opportunity in birding. He saved his paychecks, bought a pair of binoculars, and then, when he figured he had enough, told the football team that he wanted to quit. It wasn’t a smooth transition. Because he was still under contract, the football club took him to court to keep playing. And when his family realized what was happening, they organized a surprise “intervention” at Kalu’s house to ask if he was going crazy.

  “They couldn’t believe I was looking at birds all the time,” he said.

  The next time the Danish man came to Ghana, Kalu joined him again, this time as a bird spotter. The Dane was so impressed that, when he returned home, he listed Kalu’s name and contact information on BirdingPal—where I had discovered him—and Kalu started receiving requests to help other visitors. He was hired by an ecotour company for a while, learned the trade of guiding tourists, and eventually decided to go out on his own. He is now a full-time guide specializing in birdwatching tours, booked solid through the high season from October to May.

  His family saw that it was good business and now they support Kalu’s new profession.

  “When did you last go back to Nigeria?” I asked, goat soup running down my forearm.

  “It was two years ago, to help with a tricky situation,” Kalu said. “Recen
tly a lot of people in my village have converted to Christianity, including my father. Nearby, we have a patch of forest that has never been disturbed because, according to traditional beliefs, it is home to the gods. Nobody would dare hunt anything in that forest. But now people think that the devil lives there, and they want to burn down the forest to get rid of the devil. They also destroyed some nearby shrines that were more than a thousand years old.”

  Kalu looked serious.

  “You don’t have to believe in it anymore, but why destroy those things? Just leave them. They could be interesting for tourists! And the trees have nesting hornbills, which need large cavities. Burning them down would only hurt the wildlife.”

  We concentrated on our soup for a while, using the fufu like Indian naan bread to scoop up the meat and vegetables. In Africa, as I would soon discover, it is traditional in many places to eat with your hands, and the food is typically simple and delicious: plain starch, meat, and veggies.

  “Well, it’s great to hear that you can make a living from birding here,” I said.

  “Yes,” Kalu said. “Of course, it hasn’t been so easy this year because of the Ebola crisis. Five of my tours were canceled, almost my whole season—a year’s work. I am calling this the ‘Year of Ebola.’ ”

  Several months had passed since the outbreak, which killed 12,000 people in West Africa in late 2014 and early 2015. Before my Big Year started, I thought I might run into Ebola in Africa. As it turned out, throughout the epidemic, the country of Ghana did not record a single case—the United States had more Ebola than Ghana did—but the scare crushed tourism across the entire region. People in countries as far away as Kenya and South Africa later told me that they had trips canceled, too, even though they were thousands of miles away.