Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

  Later, adding up the day’s sightings, I discovered that the Gray Go-away-bird (named for its “Go ’way!” catcall) was bird number 3,500—a new milestone, and I hadn’t even realized it! That number hardly captured the thrill of exploring Kruger National Park with a van of happy birders. It was true that my list motivated me to explore the world and measure progress, but the list itself was no more descriptive than a phone book—a crude proxy for riches beyond numbers or words.

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  In late August, in northern Tanzania, I wrapped up my African safari with several days in the Serengeti. The landscape here is much different than the bushveld of South Africa: wide open plains, baobabs, silhouetted acacias, the kind of long vistas where your eyes can get lost with your soul. East Africa is deservedly famous for its savannas, and the Serengeti epitomizes this landscape—in the local Maasai language, the word means “the place where the land runs on forever.” The Serengeti’s reputation can transcend even its own expanse: in a list compiled by USA Today and Good Morning America, it was chosen as one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World,” alongside polar ice caps, Mayan ruins, and “the Internet.”

  By now I was on a first-name basis with the African megafauna. I had spent the past couple weeks in South Africa, birding first with Wayne Jones and then for a few days around Cape Town and the Western Cape with two sharp young birders, Ethan Kistler and Callan Cohen. I followed that with a great run in Madagascar, with Jacky Ratiantsihoarana, and in Kenya with a bird expert named Joseph Aengwo. Now, in Tanzania, I was joined by three friends from Oregon who hadn’t yet experienced a full-on safari: Harv Schubothe, Kelle Herrick, and David Heath. The four of us met a local birder named Anthony Raphael and a driver, Roger Msengi, who packed us into a modified Land Cruiser, and our group rolled straight toward the Serengeti.

  It was a relief that everyone had arrived OK. To help share the costs of the Land Cruiser, driver, and accommodations, I had recruited other birders for this leg—the only place where I went out of my way to sign up birding companions—and was delighted that the three Oregonians had agreed to come along. But when I wired thousands of dollars for the trip months ahead of time, a hacker cleverly diverted the funds to an account in Uganda. I never got the money back despite an extended bank investigation. The Tanzania outfitter’s ground agent sent me a series of messages admitting that the company’s email had been hacked, unfortunately, but blamed me for sending the money to the wrong place and insisted that I wire more (to their proper account this time) or the trip would be canceled. The whole costly business left such a bad taste that I would have canceled if I hadn’t already convinced three of my friends to join me.

  As it turned out, maybe I should have canceled anyway.

  The reason was serious: after a productive stretch elsewhere in South and East Africa, I had just about run out of birds. With a sinking heart, I realized that I’d already seen almost all of the northern Tanzania species in Kenya and other countries. The bird life of East Africa had seemed so diverse that, when plotting my route, I hadn’t thought twice about scheduling weeks here. Now, locked into a twelve-day trip, it was obvious that the pace of new sightings would dramatically slow down. There was nothing I could do about it.

  Such is the tradeoff of planning ahead: a fully booked itinerary allows more time in the field instead of working out the logistics en route, but it also permits less flexibility. For the most part, I was committed to arrangements I’d made nearly a year ago, before leaving home. Back then, lacking a blueprint or optimal schedule to follow, I had laid out a logical route based on my best guess. During the Big Year, as I was learning, I couldn’t easily change plans without letting people down, and I was keenly aware that many local birders had gone out of their way to give their time as guides and hosts. If I’d badly overestimated my time in Tanzania, I would just have to make the most of it.

  As the days progressed, the number of new species dwindled. In twelve days in Tanzania, I found only 80 new birds—on several days, just one—dragging down my daily average for the year. Nonetheless, I hit a huge milestone—my 4,000th species, a Mountain Gray Woodpecker in a shade-grown coffee plantation—and savored the sights and sounds of this beautiful country. Tanzania abounds in big wildlife and landscapes, from the Ngorongoro Crater—by some measures, the world’s largest caldera—to Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. The actual Serengeti was like a movie of itself: the place where millions of wildebeest migrate across crocodile-infested rivers, the land that inspired The Lion King, and the home of Maasai warriors. Fossils discovered near Serengeti National Park suggest that some of the first humans lived on this spot. Two million years later, this landscape remains timeless.

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  The bird I got most excited about in Tanzania was the Karamoja Apalis. The name evokes nothing for most people, perhaps not even for most birders, and that’s exactly why I wanted to see one: it’s a birder’s bird, an aficionado’s tick. In a country with a reputation for large wildlife, I held out for a tiny, obscure creature.

  The Karamoja Apalis is quite small, less than five inches long including a slender tail, and weighs less than two nickels. It’s not much to look at, pale gray above and whitish below, with white patches on the wings and a diminutive bill. It vaguely resembles a New World gnatcatcher and is somewhat related, though the Apalis genus is closer to the cisticola family. But whatever the bird’s shortcomings in appearance, it makes up for with rarity. This species is one of Africa’s most range-restricted birds, known from only a few sites in Uganda (in the Karamoja region), south Kenya, and northern Tanzania, where it is confined to patches of whistling thorn woodland. It wasn’t found in the Serengeti until the 1990s and is still hard to see; to encounter one, you must know where to look.

  We set out for an eventful morning on the Serengeti Plains. In short order, our group found a leopard up a tree, a cheetah on a kill, and a pack of thirteen lions napping in the shade of an isolated acacia tree. To see the three big cats in one session was quite a trick, and I was as excited as everyone else (I counted twenty-seven safari vehicles parked bumper-to-bumper at the lion spot), but we were on the lookout for birds, too. I added several new species before lunch, including a Fischer’s Lovebird, Red-throated Tit, and Temminck’s Courser—an odd species of big-eyed, droopy-billed shorebird that prefers to nest on freshly burned grassland.

  In the afternoon, after a quick stop at a picnic area where Gray-headed Social-Weavers nested in a small colony, Anthony suggested we try for the apalis.

  “It’s in a more remote section of the park,” he said, “away from most of the tourists.”

  “That sounds great!” I said, and Harv, Kelle, and David readily agreed.

  “We can see other birds along the way,” Anthony said, “but the apalis is the main target.”

  Roger navigated our open-roofed Land Cruiser down a series of dusty dirt tracks, occasionally crossing streams and shoving through thorny acacia limbs, while tsetse flies—the big, blood-sucking insects responsible for transmitting African trypanosomiasis, better known as sleeping sickness—swarmed around us. The tsetses were slow and easy to swat, though one managed to crawl up my pant leg and chomp down. It felt like a horsefly bite. When I reflexively smacked it, the fly’s body exploded, smearing my pants with blood. Contracting sleeping sickness in Tanzania carries a low risk, but I didn’t want to push my luck; the disease involves a brain parasite that, left untreated, results in neurological symptoms and eventually death.

  It took half the afternoon to reach Anthony’s stakeout. By the time Roger stopped our Land Cruiser and turned off the engine, we hadn’t seen another vehicle in hours, which made a nice change. We disembarked next to a patch of thorny forest and began to look for little gray birds.

  The Karamoja Apalis prefers whistling thorn, a type of acacia tree that grows in sparse woodlands. This tree produces hollow, gourdlike thorns, which are occupied by symbiotic ants that help defend against herbivores. Becau
se appropriate stands of whistling thorn are found only in places with the right soil, the apalis has a very limited range.

  Finding this bird is mostly a matter of tracking down the right habitat. Once on the scene, it didn’t take us long to spot a Karamoja Apalis—species number 4,028—flitting among thorny branches. I snapped a few photos, put my camera down, and watched for a while as it grabbed several small insects, probing delicately, somehow managing not to skewer its eyeballs on the thorns.

  This bird was a real find, but greater satisfaction came the next day, when I signed the guest book at one of the park lodges. Flipping through the pages, all the notable sightings seemed to revolve around lions, leopards, and cheetahs, punctuated by the occasional hyena or elephant encounter. I didn’t even hesitate. In block caps, I wrote “KARAMOJA APALIS!!!!!” and went away with a grin stretching from one ear to the other.

  On the way back to Arusha I slouched next to Harv while Roger drove. Anthony occupied his usual spot in the passenger seat, and Kelle was in the back. David had left us to take a separate transport for Pemba Island, waving goodbye as he hopped into a different vehicle. As we drove along a deserted stretch of straight, paved highway that afternoon, we jabbered happily about our latest sightings and looked forward to the next stops.

  In an instant, with a sound like a cannon blast, the back right tire of the Land Cruiser blew out at seventy miles per hour and the vehicle, shuddering violently, left the pavement. It happened too fast for me to process, except that Harv and I hung on to each other as we hit the ditch. Roger didn’t try to swerve; instead, he guided us across the opposing lane, down an embankment, and into the bush alongside the road, where we came to rest in a cloud of dust. Luckily there was nothing to hit and no traffic.

  After a shaky moment, all of us climbed out to inspect the exploded tire, a heavy model designed for off-roading. Harv and Kelle hugged.

  “I’m glad you’re okay, buddy,” Harv said to me.

  We were a silent and sober bunch. I couldn’t help thinking what might have happened if not for Roger’s capable hands at the wheel.

  Within a few minutes Roger had replaced the tire. We were off again, the near-miss receding behind us, and the next bird somewhere ahead on the long Serengeti horizon.

  13

  A New World Record

  ON AUGUST 23, while I was in northern Tanzania, a new post appeared on the website of Arjan Dwarshuis, the Dutch birder who had announced months earlier his aim to travel the world for a Big Year in 2016. I had periodically checked Arjan’s blog since learning about him from Gunnar Engblom in Peru in March, but aside from a couple of minor clarifications, Arjan hadn’t posted much. The last update on his site was more than three months old when this new post popped up.

  “I’ve been very busy with planning my world big year,” he began, “and I am very, very pleased to say that the flights for the first three months are booked!”

  He added that he’d convinced friends to join him for parts of his trip, and that he was looking forward to getting started in a few months. The next paragraph snapped me to attention.

  “As Noah Strycker is doing extremely well on his world big year and will surely set an incredible, very hard to beat record, I had to step up my game,” Arjan wrote. “And so I did . . .”

  The post went on to explain, in detail, Arjan’s projected Big Year itinerary, set to begin the instant mine ended, at midnight on December 31. My jaw dropped as I read further. He had scrapped his original twenty-three-country map in favor of a route remarkably similar to mine: in all of South, Central, and North America, he now listed exactly the same countries I had visited, with added layovers in Suriname, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. His route was also similar in Africa and Asia, tweaked here and there to squeeze out a few more birds; most of the differences involved cutting adventurous destinations (Antarctica, Cameroon, Myanmar) and streamlining the number of days in places where I’d seen fewer species. Just like me, he announced that he would travel continuously for the whole year, contribute to a carbon offset program, track his sightings on an Internet database, and post regular updates with a blog. It was like reading about my own project through the words of someone else!

  Should I be flattered, uneasy, or excited by this development? I wasn’t sure. One thing was certain, though: I had some serious competition. Arjan would follow a bird taxonomy favored by Europeans, different from the Clements Checklist that I was using on eBird, so he would play literally by different rules and could count a couple hundred species not recognized by Clements. Also, with a leap year, he would have an extra day. But his biggest advantage, I reflected, would be the benefit of hindsight. Having watched my whole effort unfold, he could learn from my successes and mistakes, and he clearly meant to go after whatever record I set.

  Ah, well, I thought, you never can tell what the future will bring. If this guy was inspired to repeat my quest, so much the better—it would focus more attention on the world of birds and birding. Maybe we would even cross paths somewhere.

  But that was getting way ahead of things—I hadn’t even reached the record yet myself! As September approached, my time in Africa was winding down. After Tanzania, I spent twelve days in Uganda, where a phenomenal birder named Livingstone Kalema helped me track down 517 species of birds—including one of the country’s most-wanted birds, a Green-breasted Pitta, in the wild tangles of vines and greenery of the Kibale Forest, and incidentally my very first pitta. When I left Africa, my Big Year totaled more than 4,200, inching closer to the 4,341 species mark set in 2008 by the British couple, Ruth Miller and Alan Davies. They sent a nice message on Facebook when I was within striking distance: “Hi Noah, you are going like a train! Congrats. You must be on for 5,000 plus?”

  With four months remaining, I was pretty sure of reaching my goal of 5,000 species, but I couldn’t afford to slack off—not with somebody ready to challenge any bar I set—and I began to feel the first vague stirrings of a possible 6,000 species by year’s end. For now, I’d be satisfied with a new world record. Looking east, I set my sights on Asia.

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  The people of India are record fanatics. About 10 percent of all Guinness World Records applications come from India, and the country has its own set of record books: The India Book of Records, not to be confused with the Indian Achiever Book of Records or the Limca Book of Records. Indians go to extraordinary lengths to be recognized by these authorities—sometimes literally, like the man who hasn’t cut his fingernails since 1952 or the one with the Guinness record for longest ear hair (5.19 inches).

  On the whole planet, I couldn’t pick a better place than India to set a Big Year world record, and it looked like that was just where it would happen. When I landed at Cochin International Airport in Kochi on September 13, in the bird-rich south India province of Kerala, my list stood at 4,243 species, just 98 short of Ruth and Alan’s total. With more than a thousand species of birds to choose from in India, 80 percent of which I hadn’t yet seen, I figured I would pass that number within a week.

  For most of this year, I hadn’t dwelt on breaking the existing record, as my goal from the outset was to see 5,000 species, half of the birds on Earth—a nice, round, individual challenge, not measured against the efforts of others. This was such an intensely personal quest that I hated to define it by someone else’s idea of success; birding, after all, is not usually a competitive activity.

  But a Big Year is still a competition, and as I edged closer to the world record I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Buzz was building, too, with an upsurge of visits and comments on my daily blog at Audubon.org, messages of encouragement on my Facebook page, updates and discussions on online birding forums around the world, and requests for interviews from home and abroad. I responded as best I could, but it was hopeless; I couldn’t keep up with the virtual world while living so large in the real world.

  Actual and virtual reality intersected briefly in an unexpected way just before I arrived in India,
during a day of birding squeezed into a layover in the United Arab Emirates. Two top-notch birders—Mark Smiles and Oscar Campbell—kindly showed me around the sand deserts on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and Dubai while we baked in a slow oven of hundred-degree heat. The three of us found well over a hundred species of birds that day, including a rare find—a Green Warbler, crawling under a bush near an irrigated field, that was completely out of place, having been recorded in the UAE only about ten times.

  The gilt-edged UAE made for a surreal layover, sandwiched between rural Uganda and India. I cast my eyes up, up, up the Burj Khalifa—the world’s tallest building—while traveling on a twelve-lane freeway packed with luxury cars. As we watched the sun set over the Oman border fence that evening, Oscar mentioned that he’d just received an interesting email.

  “Hey, some birder said he’s doing a Big Year next year,” he said, “with a goal of seeing five thousand species, just like you!”

  “That wouldn’t be Arjan, would it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s his name,” Oscar said. “Do you know him?”

  “We haven’t met,” I said, “but I know who he is.”

  I had the increasing feeling that this Dutch guy was breathing down my neck—not just planning a similar adventure, but strategizing to go after me personally, and I had not even set a record yet! He was also starting to contact some of the same birders that I had connected with. In the UAE, of all places, people were saying hi to me for him. It was odd.