Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

  On my arrival in Australia I had lost all hope of reaching 6,000 species. When I passed my original goal of 5,000 in the Philippines, I toyed briefly with the thought that another 1,000 might be possible by year’s end, but the pace slowed down in southeast Asia, and by the end of November I still needed 579 species to hit 6,000. It wasn’t going to happen.

  So I had decided to coast into the New Year without too much drama; I’d stay in Australia until time ran out, or maybe even fly back to the United States a day early to celebrate the end of my round-the-world trip at home. It would be disappointing to come close to such a big milestone without quite reaching it, but the year had already surpassed my wildest expectations, and I would be satisfied with any final number I hit.

  As I made my way around Australia, though, the birds accumulated faster than I could have dreamed—mostly because the Aussies I met were some of the most fanatical, committed, hog-wild birders in the world.

  “Don’t worry, mate, you’ll get your six thousand,” Del said in a confident drawl when I landed in Cairns.

  I laughed it off at the time, but two weeks later Del’s prediction was no laughing matter, and I now found myself in a tricky situation. The last bird I added on Christmas Day, a White-backed Swallow flying around the mine pit at Paynes Find, was officially species number 5,966, which meant I was exactly 34 birds shy of 6,000 with six days remaining. Could I do it? Back in Perth, as Frank and I ate our turkey pot roast at 9 P.M. after an exhausting nineteen-hour day, we wrote out a comprehensive list of Australian birds I hadn’t yet seen, and tried to figure out how I could get those 34 birds.

  Our list included several dozen species, but they were spread all over the continent, and many were rare or difficult to find. For instance, the Plains-wanderer, an endangered species classified in its own family, required a nocturnal off-roading trip to the remote interior of New South Wales. I didn’t have time to chase birds one by one, and Frank and I at last decided that the numbers didn’t add up. I’d covered the birds in Australia so well that it wasn’t likely I could find thirty-four more species by New Year’s in six days anywhere in the country.

  My heart beat faster. If not Australia, then where? I’d missed a few places during the year—Japan, Ethiopia, Namibia, Guyana, Cuba—any of which could add new sightings, but I’d get only one shot. Arranging a last-minute trip during the holidays would be difficult, and an extra ticket from southwest Australia, which isn’t close to anything, would be expensive. Was it worth trying?

  “Yes,” I told Frank. “I have to go for it!”

  Sleep could wait one more week. Late into the night on Christmas, I stayed up with my laptop, planning the next move. With thirty-four birds at stake, I had to get out of Australia. But where in the world should I go? So much for coasting into the New Year—this was going to be an all-out sprint to the finish.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Near the end of the first round-the-world yacht race, held in 1968–1969, a French sailor named Bernard Moitessier found himself very close to winning: he’d sailed solo on an uninterrupted journey of nearly six months at sea, and all he had to do was round Cape Horn at the tip of South America, return to England, collect the trophy, and bask in fame and fortune. But that’s not what he did. Instead, Moitessier kept going. He fired a message by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship to announce his withdrawal from the race, explaining it was because “I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” He sailed another two-thirds of the way around the world before finally putting in quietly at Tahiti.

  Some claimed he went mad, but Moitessier wrote in his engrossing memoir that, after so many solitary months at sea, he just couldn’t face the prospect of returning to Europe. He yearned to keep sailing, on his own terms.

  Moitessier’s decision had long fascinated me. I couldn’t understand how, after such an intense effort, he could find it easier to keep going than to finish. But now, as I neared the end of my own round-the-world journey, I caught a glimpse into Moitessier’s mind during that yacht race. The idea of stopping—and returning to regular life—was hard to contemplate. After a year of watching birds, I didn’t want to do anything else.

  Other birders have had the same feeling. After Sandy Komito set a North American Big Year record in 1987 with 722 species, he wasn’t satisfied—so he did it again in 1998, upping his own tally to 748 birds (as portrayed by Owen Wilson in the movie The Big Year). The reigning Australian Big Year champion, John Weigel, made a supreme effort to see 745 Australian birds in 2012, then repeated the challenge in 2014 and finished with 770 species. Even then Weigel couldn’t stop: in 2016, after my round-the-world trip wrapped up, he embarked on his third Big Year, this time in North America.

  How glorious it would be to keep flying free. When all your energy is focused on a single purpose, nothing else seems to matter. That feeling can be incredibly seductive.

  As the saying goes, though, nothing is as good as the first time. I knew from the beginning that I would give my all to this world Big Year, and then I would do something else. This year was a step toward the next stage of my life, whatever that might be. With my thirtieth birthday just a month away, I would go home and move on, and I wasn’t interested in repeating the quest just to reach a higher number.

  This had been a fantastic year. Visiting a lot of places, meeting a lot of birders, seeing half the birds in the world, and setting a world record, I had accomplished my goal and then some. My mission was not philanthropy—I didn’t feel comfortable pressing people for money—nor was it meant to be a commentary on worldwide habitat destruction and conservation, though I witnessed plenty of both. It was, pure and simple, a celebration of birds, in all their fascinating detail, and how fun it is to watch them.

  Unlike Moitessier, I longed for the green grass of home, and for the day when I didn’t have to wake up before dawn or crawl through a muddy rainforest.

  With six days left, only one piece of unfinished business remained—the 6,000th bird. That goal completely consumed my thoughts, and I didn’t dwell too much on the aftermath. Next year could take care of itself. I was determined to live this one to the last minute.

  ✧-✧-✧

  The website eBird.org, which I use to keep track of my sightings, introduced a neat feature in 2015: in any given area, it filters the birds you’ve seen against what others have reported. You can, for instance, make a list of all the species in Azerbaijan that would be lifers, and sort them in descending order of likelihood. It works for life lists, year lists, month lists, even day lists. That feature was fantastic for me because I could instantly see what I was missing in different parts of the world.

  When I ran the numbers on Christmas, three countries stood out: Guyana, Ethiopia, and India. Each of them showed about a hundred species possible on a quick trip (plus some rarities) that would be new for my year. I briefly considered other options, like hopping across the Pacific to Hawaii, but it soon became clear that, to maximize new sightings, these three far-flung destinations were it. I was surprised that India made the list, as I’d already spent two weeks there earlier in the year.

  This brought up an interesting question: when, exactly, should the year officially end? I’d kicked it off on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is in the same time zone as Argentina, and it stood to reason that a year should be measured from where and when it starts. But that was on the other side of the International Date Line. If I stayed in the Eastern Hemisphere, the 365 days wouldn’t fully elapse until midday on January 1, local time—and yet it didn’t feel right to continue birding past New Year’s. By going west to east, my year would thus be cut to 364 and a half days. If I had traveled east to west instead, taking advantage of the date line, during a leap year, the year might have been extended to nearly 367 days.

  Guyana, Ethiopia, and India each offered logistical difficulties. Reaching Guyana would require a very long flight from Australia, and getting to the remote forest wouldn’t be easy on extremely short notice. Ethiopia was more
accessible, but I couldn’t find a single local birder who could help. That left India, a giant country with overwhelming diversity. In September I’d visited south and central India but had missed the relatively remote northeast corner, assuming I’d see most of those specialties elsewhere in Asia. Now, according to eBird, I could add dozens more species in the state of Assam, squeezed between Bhutan, China, and northern Myanmar. Skipping northeast India the first time had been a strategic mistake, but maybe now I could rectify it and catch my 6,000th species there.

  Choices, choices . . . What to do? I checked my watch and saw that it had ticked past midnight. Christmas morning was just dawning in Oregon, sixteen hours behind the time in Perth. Realizing that I hadn’t yet talked to my parents for the holiday, I picked up my cell phone and called home.

  My mom came on the line.

  “Merry Christmas!” she said. “It’s so good to hear your voice! How are you doing?”

  I told her about Paynes Find and the tractor-tire Christmas tree. My parents had followed my Big Year with laser intensity, quietly supporting the trip any way they could—which often meant listening at all hours to my enthusiastic reports of odd birds.

  It was strange to think that I’d left home on Christmas exactly one year earlier, and now I was only a week away from returning to Oregon.

  “Have you figured out where you’ll be for New Year’s?” she asked.

  “Kind of,” I said, hesitating. “Well, actually, I don’t know. The practical thing would be to stay here in Australia and maybe stop in Hawaii on the way home, but I don’t think I’d get enough birds that way to hit six thousand. It looks like I’d add the most species in northeast India—but that would be crazy! Flying to India, even if I could do it at the last minute, would probably zero out my account for the ticket.”

  There was a pause.

  “So, you’d see the most birds by going back to India?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “assuming I could get to the Assam province, in the northeast corner. I think I could manage it, but it’d be tight.”

  “Okay, hold on,” she said, and seemed to confer with my dad away from the phone.

  I wondered what was happening—was something wrong? Then she came back on the line.

  “You’re so far away that we can’t give you a physical Christmas present this year,” she said. “But we want you to follow your dream to the very end—so we’re going to buy your plane ticket for this trip to India, and now you don’t have any reason not to go!”

  For a minute, words failed me. The thought of such a generous gift hadn’t even crossed my mind, and it was so much more than any present under a tree. From the time I first became interested in birds as a ten-year-old, my parents had encouraged me every step of the way, and that support meant the world to me. Now, when I was talking myself out of splurging on this last-minute extension, they were right there cheering me on.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “It’ll be New Year’s in India!”

  “Merry Christmas!” she said, sounding delighted.

  So many people had helped me in so many ways this year, I’d spend the rest of my life happily repaying favors. But this was, by about 4,300 miles (the distance from Perth to Dibrugarh), the best Christmas present I’d ever received.

  Immediately, I emailed a bright twenty-four-year-old Indian birder named Ramit Singal, whom I’d met in Delhi in September. Within hours, Ramit had made arrangements for us to join a couple of others for a New Year’s Eve birding bash.

  And so, after celebrating Christmas in the heat of the Australian outback, Frank dropped me off at the Perth airport and I flew straight to central Asia in the dead of winter. The transition was fast and surreal. It took some fancy footwork with visas and flights and a brief layover in Singapore, but soon I was gazing across glaciated peaks of the Himalayas as I touched down in Dibrugarh, the so-called “Tea City of India.”

  When I walked off the plane on the afternoon of December 28, I abruptly realized that I’d just landed for the last time before the New Year. Since the beginning of January, I’d taken 112 flights, on 77 different days, totaling 100,514 miles—not including the additional miles by car, taxi, bus, motorbike, quad bike, jeepney, sleeper train, bullet train, ship, speedboat, ferry, Zodiac, outboard canoe, raft, bicycle, and on foot. It was bittersweet to think that the next time I took off, I would be done.

  Ramit met me with two other birders, Binanda Hathibaruah and Bidyut Gogoi, and the three of us shot straight for the mountains above Dibrugarh. On the subfreezing morning of December 29, we woke up at 3:30 in a building without heat or electricity in the snow-covered Mishmi Hills, at 8,000 feet. Because all of India is on one time zone, this far east the sun would set just after 4:00 P.M., so we had to make the most of the precious midwinter daylight.

  As the first rays lit up snowfields in a panorama of pink and gold, birds began to stir. Some were species I’d seen two months earlier in Myanmar and China, but many were new—the ones on my eBird target list. Shivering and stamping our feet to stay warm, Ramit, Binanda, Bidyut, and I picked out three new fulvettas, two yuhinas, and a sibia, followed by a teeny Rusty-throated Wren-Babbler, a Mishmi Hills specialty about the size and shape of a mouse. We worked our way down a single-lane dirt road, gradually descending into lusher forest at lower elevations, where mixed-species flocks flitted in the midcanopy.

  At 11:15 A.M. Binanda spotted a weird bird called a Yellow-rumped Honeyguide in a rocky clearing. Small and finchlike with a gray body, lemon-yellow forehead, and namesake yellow rump, this species eats mostly beeswax gleaned from honeycombs of the Himalayan honeybee. Male honeyguides maintain territories around active hives and mate with multiple females, which lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. They are tough birds to find, perhaps because their main habitat requirement—beehives—is so specific.

  This was the one I’d been waiting for. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, jump up and down, and do the victory dance—but I was afraid that might scare the bird away. Instead, I turned slowly to Binanda and flashed a conspiratorial thumbs-up.

  “Six thousand,” I whispered. “That’s the six-thousandth bird!”

  Ramit and Bidyut, fully appreciating the significance of the moment, clustered around and exchanged serious handshakes.

  “Congratulations,” said Ramit.

  “Yes,” said Bidyut. “And what a great species!”

  “Look, the honeyguide is showing his rump,” said Binanda, and we all turned to train our binoculars on the bird, which perched with its back to us. For the next few minutes, it moved deliberately from branch to branch, patrolling its territory, while we watched in contented silence.

  That the culmination of my yearlong world tour, into which I’d invested all my creativity and resources, was embodied in this obscure gray bird on a nameless hillside in a remote province of India seemed perfectly appropriate. Birding is about appreciating life’s infinite details—and if subtlety is beauty, then a birder will never run short of wonder. That number 6,000 did not seem like a conquest—it felt like a fresh beginning.

  Many things had come together near the end: the productive stretch in Australia, eBird, a generous Christmas present, and these three local birders glad to spend their New Year’s season with me in India. To surpass my original goal by a thousand species less than two days before the clock ran out was pretty sweet. But the real prize, looking back, was the friendships I’d made—the hundreds of people who, at one point or another, had taken the time to share their sheer love of birds.

  ✧-✧-✧

  If I had a bird for every time someone said, “You did a lifetime of birding in one year!” I could retire right now—my life list would be complete. Fortunately, I haven’t quite reached that stage yet. Though it may have seemed like a lifetime, only one year passed, exactly the same year that everyone else had.

  This distinction is worth noting: instead of compressing a whole existence into one year, I’d rather say I expanded one year to it
s maximum potential. It is worthwhile to do something intensely for a year, to really dig deep and get to the meat of it, and I came away from my Big Year with a clearer picture of the state of birds and birding in our world. Anyone could do the same; we all have opportunities to follow our interests. How we spend our days is an ongoing choice. Most of my own life still lies ahead, and I’m happy, at this point, to have pursued this dream when I had the chance.

  The beauty of a year list is that at the end of December it resets to zero—unlike a life list, which expires when its author does. So when people comment about a “lifetime of birding,” I gently point out that I am still very much alive and won’t stop anytime soon. On New Year’s Day, my list would start from scratch.

  Officially, the last new bird of 2015 was a Silver-breasted Broadbill, seen just before sunset on December 31, which capped my list at 6,042 birds—58.3 percent of the world’s recognized species. Nobody had ever before recorded half the world’s birds in one year, and to pass 6,000 exceeded my grandest expectations.

  The number itself was ephemeral, though. Global bird taxonomy is in such flux that nobody agrees on how many species exist on Earth. The Clements Checklist counted 6,042 while the IOC World Bird List put my tally at 6,144. Both of those figures would become obsolete a few months later when new species splits were announced, and within a year a groundbreaking scientific paper would suggest that ornithologists have been far too conservative: using new techniques, a group of researchers estimated that there are actually 18,000 bird species worldwide, nearly doubling today’s accepted totals. Sorting out all those cryptic splits will likely take decades of painstaking lab work, so the global bird list will keep inflating into the future, and the numbers will keep changing.