The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession

by Mark Obmascik

  Rosy-finch hunting required a certain flair. Whenever Levantin glassed the streets on rosy-finch runs, he tried to go with another local birder, Linda Vidal. A man in the backyard with binoculars was always suspect, but a man with a woman in the backyard was much less likely to be phoned in to police as a pervert. Unfortunately, Vidal was busy today. Levantin was on his own and didn’t have much time.

  Not far away, Levantin saw something moving. He knew just where to go.

  Amid all the manses of Snowmass, 249 Faraway Road stood out for one reason: it was ugly. Battleship gray, built across from the neighborhood’s bear-proof garbage Dumpster, the house was a rental that turned over tenants. At some point some years ago, one of those tenants had put up a bird feeder. Whoever lived there now kept it filled.

  Today 249 Faraway Road had sunflower seeds, tall, leafless aspens—and a pulsating flock of three hundred rosy-finches. Lev-antin was awed. In the snow their feathers shimmered with a stunning iridescence, like a summer hummingbird on steroids, dipped in raspberry and cinnamon and dark chocolate. Some birders struggled a lifetime to find the three species of rosy-finches. Lev-antin nailed them all in his hometown on his first day. Could there be any better way to start a Big Year?

  Months ago, Levantin had already pondered and answered that question. He raced home, grabbed his suitcase, and kissed his wife good-bye.

  At 4 P.M. his United Airlines flight lifted him from the winter of Aspen to the shirtsleeves weather of the South Texas coast. In his carry-on was the list of forty-five species he had seen that day. He felt good about his list. He felt good about his year. Greg Miller sat alone in his apartment. It was New Year’s Eve, and his television clattered with laughter and the pop, pop, pop of champagne corks. Miller was too sad to celebrate. Earlier that day, on December 31, 1997, his divorce had turned final.

  Even though Miller knew many marriages ended in court, he still felt shrouded in shame. He had met his wife in a Bible fellowship class after studying to be a preacher at Oral Roberts University, and he had vowed in front of his God, church, and family to stick with her no matter what. When their cuddling gave way to sniping and snarling, Miller was working two jobs. Thinking that was the problem, he quit his weekend duties as pastor for the Voice of Victory World Outreach, where he preached to four evangelical churches around the Washington, D.C., beltway, and tried limiting his weekday hours as a workaholic software jock for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Co. He and his wife tried being a couple again and went through three marriage counselors in four years. Finally Miller believed that he had found a source of their problems: he was too fat. He had loaded 220 pounds onto his fivefoot seven-inch frame, and his wife, a personal fitness trainer and aerobics instructor, complained about it—a lot. So Miller decided to save his marriage by running, of all things, the famed Marine Corps Marathon. When he started training, he couldn’t finish one of his wife’s aerobics classes; a one-mile run was completely out of the question. But he started slow and walked when he got tired and gradually worked himself up to the point where he could do a twenty-mile jog without stopping. His wife had never even tried that. He still weighed a rotund 195—no matter how much he exercised, he couldn’t break his McDonald’s habit—but he felt ready for the marathon. On race day, it rained. He got soaked. Then the temperature plunged. He got chilled. By mile fourteen, both feet had blistered out, and Miller could barely walk, much less run. He wanted to quit, but told himself that he wasn’t a quitter. He had given up a whole summer of weekends training for this run, and he was going to finish the Marine Corps Marathon because it was going to save his marriage. Runners passed him. He suffered. He finished in six hours, three minutes, twice as slow as the winner. Hardly anyone was even left at the finish line besides his wife. He promised never to do a marathon again. He was still fat, and his marriage was still busting up.

  His wife didn’t even show up for the last court hearing. Miller moved one hundred miles away to Lusby, Maryland, and took another software job with the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. He worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, partly to forget the pending legal action and partly to avoid being home. His apartment was a former two-car garage, with a sliding-glass door where cars once entered. The floor was covered with burnt-orange shag carpeting that wasn’t thick enough to keep a dropped plate from shattering. Not that he used plates very often. Because the stove and oven didn’t work, Miller lived on microwaved food. His dormitory-sized refrigerator had a freezer section that fit either one personal pan pizza or two Hot Pockets. His weight ballooned again. He had lost all the furniture in the divorce, but one wall of his new bedroom was covered, floor to ceiling, with unpacked boxes. The living room had only a nineteen-inch color television and a beanbag chair. He spent a lot of time in the beanbag chair.

  Now it was New Year’s Eve, and the paperwork said his ten-year marriage had officially ended that very day. Forty years old and alone and no children—he hadn’t pictured life this way. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wondered whether he should call someone, but his wife was gone, his friends were out, and his parents … well, his father was a devout Christian in the Amish town in Ohio where Miller had grown up. Miller wanted to feel better. He wasn’t sure that calling his father would make anybody feel better.

  The television kept showing partyers in Times Square. Miller had no champagne in the fridge. He turned off Dick Clark and those happy, loving couples and fell asleep by 11 P.M.

  At work in the nuclear power plant, Miller was known as the Jolt Guy.

  On the rim of his office cubicle he had lined a row of empty twenty-ounce bottles of his favorite drink, Jolt Cola. Every bottle boasted that it was loaded with “all the sugar and twice the caffeine” of Coke or Pepsi. Miller downed at least one Jolt a day—three on really bad days—and his workspace had become a castle ringed with sixty red-and-gold turrets. As a new employee in an office with a Dilbert-like maze of identical gray cubicles, Miller enjoyed working inside an instant conversation starter. It was hard to ignore the irony of a Jolt tower in a nuke plant. Occasionally, though, someone reminded him that each Jolt packed the caffeine of three cups of coffee and probably wasn’t very good for his health. Miller didn’t like to be reminded about his health.

  The truth was, Miller was prone to binges. He ate feasts, he ran marathons. And now he was spelunking into the darkest depths of a work binge.

  Miller’s job was to make sure that millions of lines of software code were ready for Y2K. Years ago, when programmers wanted some procedure or test to be run forever, they entered a simple 00 in computer code. Today, however, 00, or the year 2000, was less than two years away. Miller was in a race to hunt down the 00s and all other Y2K bugs before the new millennium. So he tested a few thousand lines of code, he swilled a few Jolts. It was tedious work with no room for error: there was a good reason why nuclear power plants had become the poster child for the news media’s Y2K scare stories. Though Miller often joked that he had no life, he saw less and less humor in his wisecrack.

  What kept him sane through all this was birds, or at least the thought of them. Ever since he had identified his first bird at the age of three—female American goldeneye; his father, a birder, had taught him well—Miller had loved to chase birds. Birding time was free time, playtime, the time when he and his father could prowl the woods and talk and come home tired but exhilarated. These days Miller was mostly just tired. But he always kept his binoculars and spotting scope in the back of his Ford Explorer, just in case he drove by a bird that was worth looking at. Of course, when he arrived at his windowless office before sunrise and left after sunset, he never quite knew when, or how, he might actually see a bird. Maybe an owl would swoop by.

  Miller stared at his computer screen. More code, more scans, more tests. He had already worked fourteen days straight, seventy-nine hours this week alone, and now it was Sunday. Numbers blurred into each other. He needed at least six more hours of code-crunching today, but he could hardly think.
r />   Actually, he could think.

  He stood up, rolled back his chair, and whipped on his coat. He didn’t have enough time to walk, but if he drove fast enough he might make it. His urge felt so powerful that he nearly forgot his Cleveland Indians hat.

  He raced a half mile from his office to an overlook of the nuclear plant’s outflow into Chesapeake Bay. The cooling-tower water was ten degrees warmer than the bay, and baitfish basked here. Above the baitfish, seabirds circled. They were hungry.

  The cooling pond of a nuclear power plant wasn’t exactly on the National Audubon Society list of birding hot spots, but Miller would take what he could get. Gulls shrieked. He squinted into his spotting scope. It wasn’t easy pressing his face close enough for a clear view, but far enough to prevent body heat from fogging the optics.

  Through the scope was a circus of bird activity. There were herring gulls and laughing gulls and great black-backed gulls and—whoa!—what was that bird? It was a gull, definitely, with gray wings and dark tips, but wasn’t that a dark ear spot? Laughing gull—a nonbreeder, maybe? No, this one was too small, and with a patch on the head, not streaking. Little gull? No, too big. Black-headed gull? Nah, those legs were pink, not orange.

  No question: it was a Bonaparte’s gull, named after the nephew of the great conqueror himself. Nice bird, dependable visitor to the mid-Atlantic, but a good identification challenge nonetheless.

  Miller stopped himself. He was breathing, really breathing. His face flushed. He opened his winter coat.

  He remembered this feeling: he was back in the hunt.

  On Christmas, his brother had given him a birding book, but Miller had stuffed it in a box without cracking the spine. He feared that book. He was already on a work binge. He didn’t have time for any other kind.

  He returned to his desk and called up some more code, but his mind wandered. Tonight, he told himself, I’m going to find that book and I’m going to read it.

  TWO

  A Birder Is Hatched

  A few minutes after I first met Sandy Komito, he was looking for an angle.

  He was driving me in his beloved Lincoln Town Car to his favorite steak house, a stand-alone joint in the New Jersey suburbs, when he saw there was a line for valet parking. The line offended two of his sensibilities. He didn’t like to wait, and he didn’t like to turn over his car to a stranger.

  So he cleared his throat, reached in the glove compartment, and pulled out a handicapped placard. There was no way Komito was hurt; in fact, after hours of phone interviews I had concluded that he was probably a lot tougher than me. But he hung the blue-and-white wheelchair logo on his rearview mirror and parked in the free space right next to the front door of the restaurant.

  I was too shocked to say anything. As I watched him walk straight past all those cars still idling in line for valet parking, I tried to feign a limp. Komito greeted the maître d’ with a smile. I grasped one essential truth:

  Sandy Komito didn’t give a hoot what anybody thought.

  His wife, it turned out, had been given the handicapped card years ago because she suffered from horrible back pain. But now she was out of town with friends. In Komito’s mind, it was ridiculous for a place with valet parking to offer a handicapped spot at all. Why should the ticket to a primo parking spot lie wasted in the darkness of a glove box just because his wife was on vacation?

  It’s embarrassing to admit, but Komito nearly had me convinced that it was okay to take advantage of the system. His power of persuasion was that strong. He looked me in the face with those sky-blue eyes and soothed my guilt with that assuring deep voice, and the next thing I knew, he had me feeling like the most important person in the universe.

  Then the waiter came—and Komito ordered his salad chopped. Mine came that way too.

  I don’t eat my salad chopped into one-inch squares. I don’t know anybody else who does. But Komito has his own tastes, and I found being with him was like riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the amusement park—it’s fun if you don’t get too queasy. When Komito was at the table, waiters seemed to linger longer, just to overhear his stories. He was a ham and proud of it. He was as brash as Oscar Madison and as fussy as Felix Unger.

  He also was fun in the field. For our first birding trip, he took me a few miles from his house to the Hackensack Meadowlands, the notorious swamp that had been filled in, dumped on, and raked over ever since New York City gazed west and saw unclaimed industrial profit. The Meadowlands were an amazing place. Birds moved everywhere—terns soaring, egrets wading, wrens burbling, swallows diving. Komito, however, was hacked off. A few years back the government had built a posh glass room above the swamp for weddings, and now the engineers kept water levels in these tidal wetlands artificially high. For happy brides, that meant lots of graceful mute swans in the background for wedding pictures. For Komito, however, it was a man-made travesty. Mute swans were not native birds. He wanted the swamp as nature intended—with skittery shorebirds teeming on miles of stinking mudflats.

  When I told Komito that the Hackensack Meadowlands certainly offended my sense of smell, he huffed. That wasn’t swamp gas, he said. It was the landfill over the hill. Or maybe Jimmy Hoffa.

  We walked a few twists and turns on the dikes above the swamp and found a wonderful surprise—a big containment basin that the engineers hadn’t flooded. There were hundreds of shorebirds—dowitchers drilling the mud like two-legged sewing machines, sandpipers scrambling for snails, herons prowling for baitfish. Just as Komito tried to teach me the difference between greater and lesser yellowlegs—the longer bill curls up slightly on a greater—something startling happened. All those shorebirds suddenly took flight.

  I stood slack-jawed, watching hundreds, no thousands, of birds fly up from places that I couldn’t even see. Komito set me straight. There’s only one creature that can scare the hell out of that many shorebirds, Komito said, and it’s a peregrine falcon.

  Sure enough, ten seconds later, a big, dark bully muscled in from up high. It was Mr. Peregrine himself, swooping down for a late lunch.

  Now Komito stood as gape-mouthed as I. He had witnessed this same natural phenomenon hundreds of times before, but still couldn’t contain his awe. He had the zest of a ten-year-old boy.

  So did Greg Miller. But Miller didn’t wait for me to learn that same fact about him. He told me first.

  When I met him in his apartment, boxes were everywhere. Some were being used for storage. Others served as tables and coat hangers. I knew he hadn’t changed apartments for months. Miller must have seen the puzzled look on my face, because he offered an explanation:

  “A long time ago I decided that the people with their priorities straight are ten-year-olds. When you’re ten, you want to spend the whole day playing. You know everyone has some obligations and some work to do and that’s okay. But play comes first and work comes second.”

  In Miller’s mind, unpacking was work. He grabbed his scope and tripod from the top of a box.

  “Let’s go play.”

  Miller’s car had been conking out lately, so we took my rental. We drove to a field near his home with some woods and parked. I slammed the driver’s side door and Miller said, “Dickcissel.”

  Huh? Where?

  “There, about fifty feet in the field, by that tall thistle.”

  Just as I raised my binoculars, Miller blurted again.

  “House wren, over there. Northern cardinal, in those oaks. Indigo bunting, across the way. Song sparrow right next to it.”

  Something seemed fishy here. Miller hadn’t even raised his binoculars.

  He was birding by ear.

  At first I suspected he was pulling one over on me. But he stood with me patiently until I klutzed my way with my binoculars and finally focused on the dickcissel, wren, cardinal, and song sparrow that he had first heard. (The indigo bunting, brilliant blue in the afternoon sun, I found by myself, thank you.)

  What sounded like a plain old chip note to me was clearly a chipping s
parrow to him. He called out warbler species that were too far away for me even to find field marks. I put down my binoculars and started watching Miller. His ear was incredible. He picked off calls one by one and paused only at the ones overwhelmed by car or jet noise. I wanted to take him to the symphony, just to see him figure out the manufacturing date of the Stradivarius being played in the third-violin seat.

  Miller thrived off others’ enthusiasm. When he saw my astonishment over his aural birding, he got even more excited and insisted that we drop everything to teach me to separate the grinding buzz of a marsh wren from the chatter of a sedge wren. He was patient. He was playful. There was nothing threatening or intimidating about him. He was the kind of guy who got a lot of hugs without trying.

  His goal was to wring every possible ounce of joy from life. We stopped birding one day to go to an Indian restaurant, where he ordered the spiciest dish on the menu, chicken vindaloo. The waiter asked Miller if he was sure he wanted something so hot. Yes, he did. Miller told me he had grown up eating a lot of bland food, and now he loved to make up for lost time. Sure enough, when the food came, it was a scorcher. His eyes teared. His nose dripped. He coughed. Sweat beaded on his bald forehead, and his cheeks flushed. Frankly, I got worried about him.

  You okay? I asked.

  He could hardly talk. He nodded his head. He took another bite.

  I got the feeling that when Greg Miller started something, he finished it.

  With Al Levantin, the challenge was keeping up with him.

  Out the door of his house and up his private road, Levantin was at nine thousand feet and climbing fast. At the first switchback he marked a wren’s nest. At the second was a swallow in a woodpecker hole. Higher still darted a mountain bluebird.