“Are you a birder?” I asked, unsure what else to say.
“I have an interest in all living things,” the bishop replied, “and I heard about your world record. I predicted you would pass it this afternoon, in spite of the rainy weather.”
“Well, thank you for the blessing,” I said, humbled by his words.
We sat down at the table with Harsha, Eldhose, and a reporter who introduced herself as Preetu Nair. She quietly scribbled notes in a small notebook while our little group sipped tea and chattered about birds.
It was an oddly formal and starched way to celebrate a birdwatching record—nothing like what we do in over-the-top America—but why not? Over the next hour, as I enjoyed my tea, scarfed delicious tidbits, and fielded questions from Harsha, the bishop, and Preetu, my initial elation began to subside and deepen into a warm glow. As far as I was concerned, all was right with the world. We rejoined the other birders outside, and, many selfies later, everyone dispersed for the evening. Only then did I realize that it had been a very tiring day.
But it wasn’t quite over yet: after dinner, I was fortunate to meet one more fascinating character, named Ben Mirin—perhaps the world’s only birdsong beatboxer. Ben, younger than me, happened to be traveling in India on a grant from National Geographic to perform compositions of local bird songs through beatboxing, and he had been texting Harsha during his visit.
“It helps kids get interested in the birds around them,” said Ben, who had scheduled shows at several schools in the area. “I record bird sounds in the wild, then use those audio clips to make beats that kids can relate to.”
He did an enthusiastic demonstration, sounding less like a human being than a drum machine accompanied by bird sounds.
“I heard about your Big Year today from Harsha,” he said, “and just thought I’d drop by. Congrats on the world record!”
As he said goodbye, I supposed that Ben’s mission was about as wacky as my own. The world record had brought some interesting characters out of the woodwork.
The next morning, feeling slightly hung-over on excitement, Harsha and I stopped for breakfast at a street café in a rural town. As we entered, something caught my eye: a newspaper stand prominently displayed the day’s headlines.
“Let’s grab a paper,” Harsha said.
On the front page of the Times of India, the world’s largest English-language newspaper, my photograph was plastered underneath the headline, “Thattekad Birds Help Noah’s Record Flight.”
“That must have been the reporter at Eldhose’s house,” I said. “I didn’t realize she was from the Times of India!”
The short story, with a special quote from the bishop, offered a straightforward account: “A reluctant smile dawned on the face of ornithologist Noah Strycker . . . Drenched in heavy rain and watched only by local bird watchers, [he] had set the world record for spotting [the] maximum number of birds [in] a year.”
It was official, then. India—so crazy for records—proclaimed a new world record.
14
Hit and Miss
ON THE AFTERNOON of October 10, meteorologists noticed a disturbed area of low pressure over the remote Enewetak Atoll, which lies between Micronesia and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The next day, as denser air rushed in, weather forecasters in Japan upgraded the disturbance to a tropical depression, and on October 12 the system intensified into a tropical storm. When it tracked west toward the Philippines, the storm was christened Lando, and by October 17 it had graduated into a full-fledged super cyclone, equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane, with winds exceeding 150 miles per hour and a glaring, twenty-five-mile-wide eye visible on satellite images. Lando bore down on the Philippine island of Luzon, where more than 50 million people dreaded its landfall.
As the super typhoon blew toward the Philippines, I was perched seven hundred miles to the north, in the mountains of central Taiwan, with Wayne Hsu, the Director of Conservation and International Affairs at Taiwan’s Chinese Wild Bird Federation. After a long and productive day of birding, Wayne and I sat in a hotel room, examining Lando’s updated forecasts on my laptop.
“You’re going to the Philippines tomorrow, right?” Wayne asked.
“Yes,” I said, “almost exactly where that typhoon is headed, to Luzon Island.”
“It’s supposed to hit tomorrow,” Wayne said. “They’re projecting several feet of rain and sustained winds over a hundred miles per hour when it reaches land.”
“And my plane is scheduled to arrive there a couple of hours later,” I added.
I felt more interest than stress about this development. If typhoon Lando slammed into Manila tomorrow, its impact on my travel plans would be trivial compared to the chaos for those who lived there. Besides, worrying about it wouldn’t help, and I had more immediate concerns—like how to squeeze out a few last birds during my waning hours in Taiwan.
At that moment, my species list stood at 4,854 birds, fewer than 150 shy of my goal. For almost ten months, I had imagined the moment when I would hit 5,000: what it might feel like to reach such an ambitious milestone, and how relaxing to know that nothing could take it away. I had even, at the suggestion of a friend, considered getting the 5,000th bird tattooed somewhere on my body. The breakneck pace had not let up since setting the world record in India, and I now found myself within striking distance of the big 5K. Perhaps I could pass it in the Philippines next week, if I ever got there. Meanwhile, I had Taiwanese birds to snag.
To that end, Wayne spread out a map of northern Taiwan. We had just spent two days with Wayne’s friend Kuan-Chieh “Chuck” Hung and a bunch of local birders who were tracking my Big Year through eBird. Word was definitely out by now about my adventure, and increasingly on my travels I encountered groups of birders, rather than just one or two. For me, these meetings never got old. It was energizing to share the world’s amazing array of bird life with local people who knew their birds and their patches well. Everybody pitched in to find as many of Taiwan’s twenty-six endemic bird species as possible during my short visit. We’d scored nearly all of them, including two fancy mountain pheasants—the Swinhoe’s, which is electric blue, purple, and white with a long tail; and the Mikado, which is the country’s national bird, depicted on the thousand-dollar bill and known in Taiwanese as the “Emperor of the Mist.” We’d also seen the endemic Taiwan Blue-Magpie, an elegant creature dressed in blue, red, and black with an exquisitely long tail, flying against a cliff in the Dasyueshan Forest after a spectacular, misty sunrise. Now, with just a few possible birds remaining, Wayne and I tried to figure out a logical route.
“Here’s where we are, in the mountains of north-central Taiwan,” Wayne began, gesturing at the map. “And your flight to the Philippines tomorrow, if it takes off, will depart from Taipei, on the northern tip of the country. But the only endemic bird you haven’t seen yet is the Styan’s Bulbul, which lives down south, so to find one we would need to make a long drive, then catch a domestic flight to Taipei for your international connection.”
“I suppose that’s possible, but it’s a lot for one bird,” I said, “especially for a bulbul that looks basically like other bulbuls I’ve already seen in Asia. Is there another option?”
“Well, ye-e-es,” Wayne said, as he uncapped a pen. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I believe I have a plan.”
He spent the next few minutes drawing dotted lines, precisely annotated with times and places, until the map resembled the schematics for a sophisticated heist. The new route sacrificed the bulbul, but we’d have a chance to encounter a much more charismatic celebrity if all went well. By the time we turned in for bed that evening, I looked forward to an eventful day on the morrow.
October had been rewarding so far. After leaving India, I continued east, first to the country of Myanmar—formerly called Burma—where local birder Gideon Dun spent a week showing me some of the area’s less-traveled sites. In Myanmar, “less-traveled” really means something: the nation was esse
ntially off-limits to foreigners from 1962 to 2011 during an oppressive military dictatorship, and only recently began opening up. Along with his brother, Moses, Gideon is a former hunter who played in a rock band before taking up birdwatching. Gideon and I rode his motorbike through the mountains, prowled for birds around the breathtaking thousand-year-old temples of Bagan—one of the world’s best-kept archeological sites—and waited out a flash flood after thunderstorms ripped through the hills one evening. Myanmar produced birds, but it gave the added impression of an expedition into the unknown.
From there, I moved to an entirely different environment in the Sichuan province of south-central China, where Sid Francis, a British expat obsessed with Eurasian birds and Chinese culture, hosted a wild road trip through frosted peaks, high ridges, and pristine river valleys. Sid and I topped out near 15,000 feet at Balang Shan Pass, admiring Golden Bush-Robins and Giant Laughingthrushes in two inches of fresh snow while prayer flags flapped and fluttered in a light breeze. By the end of the week, I came away with 215 species of birds and a new appreciation for China’s natural riches—not something you generally read about in headlines.
I’d originally planned to fly straight from China to the Philippines, but a chance encounter in South Africa earlier in July inspired me to squeeze in this quick visit to Taiwan. In South Africa I’d stayed a couple of days in Cape Town with Callan Cohen, a full-time guide who one evening invited a friend to dine with us. That friend turned out to be Adam Welz, a campaign director for the anti-poaching organization WildAid, who knew Wayne Hsu, partly because Wayne had worked with Greenpeace in Asia. I was instantly persuaded to visit Taiwan—and now, three months later, here I was.
Wayne got us up early on my last day in Taiwan. We met a group of birders at the mouth of the Bazhang River, on the southwest coast, where we intended to scan for shorebirds before moving north on a tight schedule. A couple of minutes after arriving, though, Wayne suddenly started shouting something about a whale.
“It’s on the beach!” he said. “Right at the mouth of the river!”
“A whale on the beach?” I replied, in confusion.
“Yeah, just aim your scope at that black thing,” Wayne said, gesticulating. “You can see the flippers and tail sticking up.”
Sure enough, I focused on the unmistakable silhouette of an enormous whale carcass on the sand about a mile away. It lay on its back, a dark shape with one pectoral fin jutting in the air, well and truly beached.
“Huh,” Wayne said. “This must be the same sperm whale that washed up two days ago, a few miles north of here. The Taiwanese coast guard towed it out to sea to get rid of the carcass, but I guess it floated back to shore.”
He snapped a photograph to post on Facebook, and within a few minutes a local news site had picked up the story.
“Look, my picture is in the paper!” said Wayne, showing us the grainy image under a Taiwanese headline on his phone’s screen.
“Hey, wasn’t there an incident with an exploding whale carcass in Taiwan a few years ago?” I asked, recalling a dim memory.
“Oh yeah,” Wayne said, “A big male sperm whale washed up near Tainan—it was fifty tons, the largest whale ever recorded in Taiwan—and died on the beach before anyone could save it.”
He told me the story ended badly after researchers, hoping to do a post-mortem, loaded the carcass on a flatbed truck and transported it through the city. A buildup of decomposition gases caused the carcass to explode, showering people and cars in blood and guts. Which maybe explained why this time the coast guard had tried to tow the carcass out to sea.
Wayne and I put the whale business behind us, said goodbye to the other birders, and hurried into Tainan just in time to catch a train—and not just any train.
“We could fly to Taipei,” Wayne explained, “but it’s faster to go by rail.”
I’d never taken a bullet train before, so it was exciting to board this futuristic-looking high-speed rail. My last experience on a train, in India, had been on a cramped sleeper car out of Delhi, which ran like a polluted cattle cart. By comparison, this one felt like a sleek jet plane on rails, if not a rocket ship: inside, it was designed exactly like a commercial airliner, with an aerodynamic exterior contoured like a fuselage.
Once beyond the city limits, the bullet train glided along its track with a soft hum, picking up momentum almost imperceptibly. On a straight stretch, I used the GPS on my iPhone to gauge our speed.
“Holy cow,” I exclaimed. “We are going a hundred and eighty-eight miles per hour!”
“Yeah,” said Wayne, with a wry smile. “That’s why the train is faster than dealing with airports.”
His phone rang, and he had a quick conversation in Mandarin while I watched the scenery fly past in a colorful blur. Wayne told me, with obvious relief, that a birder he knew would meet us in Taipei.
It took us just an hour and a half to reach Taipei, nearly two hundred miles to the north, where Wayne and I stepped off the bullet train to find Hunter, a kind man who had volunteered to spend his Sunday afternoon with us, waiting with his car. The three of us drove out of the city but didn’t get very far. On the outskirts of Taipei, on the shoulder of a busy highway surrounded by suburbs, we stopped to pay homage to a unique celebrity.
Wayne filled in the details. Nearly a year earlier, in January 2015, a young Siberian Crane had appeared briefly on Pengjia Islet off the north end of Taiwan, having drifted off course during its migration. This bird caused a stir in the birding community—the Siberian Crane is a critically endangered species with a global population of just 3,000 individuals, most of which migrate each year from Russia to eastern China, and it was the first time one had been seen in Taiwan. Pengjia Islet is under military control and cannot be visited by ordinary citizens, but the crane didn’t stay there long. Incredibly, three days later, it was spotted again in a farmer’s field outside of Taipei, within a short radius of several million people.
Pretty soon, the “little white crane,” as it came to be known by the Taiwanese, was splashed all over the news. Thousands of curious people turned out to see it. The crane usually stayed in one particular field alongside a well-trafficked road, where it found a good supply of food, and it didn’t seem to mind onlookers. When it dodged attacks from a stray dog and a passing hawk, local government officials feared for the bird’s safety; they recognized this graceful crane as an ambassador of goodwill toward Taiwanese–Siberian relations, and so they assigned it a full-time security guard. Someone installed a webcam to let people watch from home, and a Facebook page with 13,000 fans posted updates. When members of a film crew inadvertently flushed the bird while filming in the area for an unrelated TV drama, they were duly fined for environmental disturbance, and schoolchildren formed a human chain to keep people at a safe distance. Volunteer observers began logging the crane’s daily activities, hoping to figure out how to help it rejoin its flock. In the first couple of months, this one crane had an estimated 60,000 visitors.
Now, nearly a year later, the bird showed no signs of leaving, and it had become a bustling local attraction. When Wayne, Hunter, and I arrived, we found several dozen photographers stalking the bird next to a souvenir stand selling crane-themed knickknacks. Bright yellow signs in Mandarin and English warned “Caution! Drive Slow: Crane Crossing.” The crane itself took no notice; it paced around its favored field with the slow elegance of a ballet dancer, occasionally bending down to grab a morsel with its serrated bill.
The bird stood a stately five feet tall, entirely white except for a maroon-red face, pink legs, delicate black wingtips, and yellow eyes.
“It has lost the colors of youth,” Wayne said.
When the crane first arrived it was in juvenile plumage, less than one year old, with rusty feathers over most of its body. Now it was completely snow white like an adult.
Siberian Cranes can live to be eighty, if all goes well. But this bird might not have a home to return to. Almost all Siberian Cranes winter along the
Yangtze River in China, and their preferred wetlands were recently destroyed by construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest and most notorious hydropower project. That dam was an environmental catastrophe in many ways, and wild Siberian Cranes might eventually go extinct because of it. In a way, this crane was lucky to be here.
We watched for half an hour while the bird steadily paced back and forth, shadowed for a while by a friendly Little Egret. Did it miss the company of family and mates? I watched the bird’s yellow eye through my spotting scope, but its expression remained enigmatic.
Then, remembering Lando, I checked my phone. To my surprise, my redeye flight to Manila had been confirmed.
“It looks like I’m flying straight into a typhoon tonight,” I said.
“Guess we should get going, then,” Wayne said. “But I’m glad you had a chance to see this crane—it is the most famous bird in Taiwan!”
With one last, lingering look at the crane, we stepped into Hunter’s car and headed to the airport.
As it happened, that Siberian Crane stayed near Taipei for another few months. In May 2016, a year and a half after it had arrived, observers noticed the young crane becoming visibly restless. It made several short flights around the north coast of Taiwan, at one point taking shelter in a Taipei subway station while satellite news trucks broadcast its movements on local TV. Then, one day, it disappeared. Nobody knows whether it managed to rejoin its flock in China, or went to Siberia, or simply flew out to sea, searching for companions, unsure which direction to fly but compelled onward by the overpowering, universal instinct to return home.
✧-✧-✧
Super typhoon Lando swung north at the last minute to make landfall about ninety miles north of Manila, hammering northern Luzon Island with sustained 115-mile-per-hour winds and torrential rain. Nine million people lost power, more than a hundred thousand took refuge in evacuation shelters, tens of thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed, and forty-eight people were killed. One city reported 51.9 inches of rain in twenty-four hours—more than four feet.
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