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

by Mark Obmascik

  In the depths of the Great Depression, Peterson’s book, with its forest-green cover and bufflehead flying below the title, sold out in one week. So did the next press run. And the next. Eventually more than 2 million copies of his field guide were sold. Peterson was so rich he never had to work again.

  But he did—he worked and worked and worked. His original idea of using field marks to identify a species spread from birds to wildflowers to butterflies to reptiles to seashells to rocks—more than four dozen guides in all. The Peterson Field Guide series became some of the greatest-selling nonfiction titles of all time. Birders soon stopped talking about taking their field guide into the field; they simply carried their Peterson.

  Of course, Peterson did more than just paint and write. He evangelized. He preached the gospel of birding in Omaha, and twelve hundred filled an auditorium. Another sixteen hundred heard the good word in Kansas City. In Detroit, officials feared an overcrowded hall, so they tried to limit his audience by giving only one day’s public notice for his lecture. More than a thousand showed up anyway. With their Petersons in their pockets and binoculars around their necks, these birders looked around the packed meeting halls and realized: Hey, there are a lot of people just like me.

  In Peterson, many birders also saw themselves.

  Son of an immigrant Swede, Peterson was mocked as a boy for his “nuttiness” about nature. He even began one of his books, Birds Over America, with a confrontation at home:

  “So, you’ve been out after birds again!” my father snorted. “Haven’t you seen them all before? And look at your clothes—nobody with any sense would stay out in the rain.” Puzzled, he shook his head. “I swear, I don’t understand you,” he added reproachfully.

  I never could explain to him why I did these things; I never quite knew myself.

  Peterson’s father, Charles, was a cabinetmaker; Peterson couldn’t build a birdhouse. His father drank too much, called his nature boy a “damn fool,” and whupped him with a razor strop; Peterson was so afraid he’d look like his father that, as a teen, he tried to ward off baldness by rubbing his scalp with Grover’s Mange Cure. (His hair survived.)

  He grew up in the furniture-making town of Jamestown, New York, as a “Green Swede”—an immigrant supposedly so dumb that he would eat green bananas—often pitted in gang fights against immigrant Italians. He had few friends. He was so quirky that he missed the historic landing of the first airplane in his hometown because he was watching two grasshoppers copulating. But thanks to Jamestown’s Junior Audubon Society, led by his beloved seventh-grade teacher, Miss Blanche Hornbeck, Peterson found solace in birds.

  When Peterson told these stories, audience faces beamed back with smiles of recognition. Yes, these were tales of an outcast. But could all these people, in all these auditoriums, with all these similar life experiences, all be outcasts, too?

  If anything, Peterson romanticized the outcast path. In 1953, he joined with Britain’s most famed naturalist, James Fisher, for a thirty-thousand-mile trek across the New World. Launching their hundred-day adventure amid a kittiwake colony in northern Newfoundland, the two loaded a station wagon with duffels, a portable blind, and a giant rooftop parabolic reflector that amplified birdcalls.

  And then the buddies drove.

  They marveled at wood-warblers pouring through the Blue Ridge Mountains on migration. They retraced Audubon’s footsteps through the sooty tern rookery on the Dry Tortugas. They reveled in the wondrous comeback of egrets—once on the brink of extinction—to the Flying Gardens of Avery Island, Louisiana. Along the way, they swilled an addicting Southern concoction called Coca-Cola. Though the two ornithological icons enjoyed unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the continent’s greatest museums and endangered-species habitats, Peterson and Fisher never became grizzled enough to lose their schoolboy enthusiasm; both men stood speechless for ten minutes after their first view of the Grand Canyon. When Fisher saw his first California condor, soaring magnificently on ten-foot wings above the desert, he turned to Peterson and exclaimed, “Tally—most incredibly—ho!” In their three months of day-after-day travels, the men claimed to argue only once, when Peterson nearly slammed into another driver on a hairpin turn somewhere on a lonely mountain road in Arizona. When the trek finally ended with 2 million murres on Walrus Island off Alaska, they told their story in a book, and documentary film, called Wild America.

  One footnote in Wild America was devoured by a certain kind of birder. “Incidental information,” Peterson wrote in small type after an asterisk at the bottom of a page. “My year’s list at the end of 1953 was 572 species.”

  It was the line that launched an exodus from the reading chairs, movie theaters, and auditoriums of the birding nation. Soon hundreds wanted to follow in Peterson’s bootprints. They wanted to take the brakes off their obsession. They wanted to bird North America.

  They wanted to do a Big Year.

  Wild America was published in 1955. The next year, a twentyfive year-old Englishman named Stuart Keith, fresh out of Oxford, was so enthralled with the travelogue that he decided to repeat it himself. With his Peterson in one hand and Wild America in the other, Keith took off in his ’53 Ford station wagon. Looking for longspurs on the side of the road in Texas, he was hooted at by cowboys. One of his most pleasant memories was driving sixty miles from San Bernardino to Pasadena—the heart of today’s Southern California sprawlurbia—and smelling nothing but sweet orange blossoms the entire way. Keith fell so in love with America during his Big Year that he moved permanently to this side of the Atlantic. His decision was helped by the fact that, with a Bohemian waxwing over Christmas vacation in Edmonton, Alberta, he scored 598 birds that year—twenty-six more than Peterson.

  The Big Year ante was upped.

  For Keith, it felt lonely at the top. In an Audubon magazine story describing his new record, Keith noted that his life list of North American birds, 625 species, was second only to that of the great Roger Tory Peterson, who reported 633. “I know of no other birders who have seen more than six hundred North American species and only three who have seen more than five hundred,” he wrote.

  Oops! Within weeks of his 1961 article, Keith was bombarded with dozens of letters from birders reporting that they, too, were proud owners of life lists with more than five hundred species. Nineteen people, in fact, reported at least six hundred species. Keith fared no better than No. 10 among overall life listers, and a previously anonymous birder, Ira Gabrielson of Washington, D.C., turned in a list with 669 life birds—more than even Peterson himself. In a 1963 Audubon article headlined, “The 600 Club: America’s Top-Ranking Birders,” Keith confirmed that a student had indeed surpassed the teacher. But he also felt obligated to defend listing from serious ornithologists who believed that racing to tick birds off scorecards was silly, wasteful, and demeaning.

  “Bird listing is a sport,” Keith wrote, “and as such, it needs no defense, any more than baseball or bowling. Nobody feels guilty about spending a day at the World Series, nor is an evening bowling considered to be wasted. Why, then, should people worry that their day’s listing hasn’t contributed anything to ornithological knowledge?”

  For the first time, the nation’s premier conservationist magazine had published a defense of listing—while reporting the names of its leading practitioners. Meanwhile, other news about the sport advanced. A zoology professor, Olin Pettingill of Carleton College in Minnesota, began publishing how-to guides about the best places on the continent to track down birds. With 659 pages on bird-finding east of the Mississippi and 709 pages about the West, Pettingill promised that his “thorough coverage of bird haunts will bring bird students to think of this book as the ornithologist’s Duncan Hines.” At the time, Hines was famed as the traveling salesman who reviewed and endorsed restaurants with his personal seal of approval. But Pettingill’s own comparison to Hines, who eventually sold out his name to grocery cake-mix makers, turned out to be prescient: competitive birders followed Pett
ingill’s birding instructions as if they were precise recipes. Want to see a smooth-billed ani? Go to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. Elegant trogon? Cave Creek Canyon, Arizona. Great gray owl? Stop at Sax-Zim Bog, Minnesota—in the winter.

  When Pettingill started feeding tidbits of information to hungry birders, they only cried out for more—more detail, more directions, more local contacts. Jim Lane filled the niche with a series of two-hundred-page books, each for a particular state or even just a particular section of a state. Where the Pettingill guides merely stated that the Great Plains intersection of Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma was a good place to look for lesser prairie chickens, the Lane guides instructed birders to go “east from Campo on a gravel road for eight miles. Turn right or south for two miles, then left or east again. After nearly three miles, you will see a TV tower on the right. Continue past that for 1.3 miles to a small bridge. Just before crossing it, turn right down a dirt trail along the west side of the gully and go 1.3 miles. The strutting grounds are about one hundred yards ahead on your right. Stay in your car. Repeat, stay in your car or the birds will fly away.”

  Birding was no longer solely for ornithologists and over-the-top hobbyists; now vacationers could do it, too. But if much of the mystery was stripped from the rare-bird hunt, so, too, was the adventure. The Pettingill and Lane guides made it possible to build a big list of birds without much stumbling, bumbling, or even basic knowledge about birds. Though these species could be found in many places, the guides promoted a paint-by-numbers approach to birding, and many people rarely saw the need to look for birds outside the predrawn lines.

  The information revolution was born. So was a debate: Was this birding, or a game?

  Hundreds, then thousands, were having too much fun to care. Realizing that the National Audubon Society was more interested in promoting environmental causes than big birding lists, the hardest of the hard core in 1969 formed the American Birding Association. Meetings were reminiscent of an Alcoholics Anonymous session, except that everybody here was proud of their addiction—and looking for more.

  Tales were swapped. Road trips were shared. Competitors were eyed.

  The American Birding Association soon set ethical standards—a bird “must have been alive, wild, and unrestrained when encountered” to count on a list—and also established geographic boundaries for listing. For Big Year counts, the area was the United States north of Mexico, plus Canada and ocean waters up to two hundred miles offshore. The Bahamas, Hawaii, and Greenland were excluded.

  Roger Tory Peterson was still the patron saint of birders. Less than two decades after his landmark drive through wild America, though, his Big Year record had become little more than a speck in the rearview mirror of birders speeding across the continent.

  No one raced faster than Ted Parker. By the time he had earned his driver’s license, Parker’s peers in the underground world of teenage birders already recognized him as a superior being: not only had he memorized the field marks of most North American birds, he could play basketball, too. By 1971, his final semester at McCaskey High School in southeastern Pennsylvania, Parker decided that his best remaining lesson would be to master the continent’s birds. He played hooky for a series of three-day weekends and saw all waterfowl that regularly wintered within three hundred miles of his home; he launched other extended field trips to Ontario, Illinois, and South Carolina and found great gray owls, greater prairie chickens, and red-cockaded woodpeckers. Luckily, the mop-headed eighteen-year-old also found a supervising grown-up, Harold Morrin, forty-eight, a local finance executive, to accompany him on these long trips away from his parents. (Parker’s father, who was as fanatical about golf as his son was about birds, stayed home on the links.) Morrin and Parker shared a love of birds and road trips, but the older teacher soon became in awe of his young friend, whose amazing ear allowed him to identify virtually every North American songbird by its call—or just a mere chip note. Serious, intense, and driven, Parker enrolled at the University of Arizona at Tucson in September and vacuumed up dozens of Southwestern and Pacific Coast specialties. He ended 1971 with 626 species, shattering Stuart Keith’s fifteen-year-old record by 28 birds. A Big Year had become a young man’s game.

  When the birding world learned that the new continental record had been set by a mere teenager, many had the same reaction: Hey, I can do that!

  Floyd Murdoch was a university doctoral student who wanted to visit dozens of national wildlife refuges for his dissertation on the history of bird protection. Kenn Kaufman was a high school dropout who wanted to hitchhike his way across America. In 1973, both decided to do a Big Year.

  When they first met on a January boat trip twenty-five miles off the New Hampshire coast, neither was pleased to see the other. Still raw from a recent divorce, Murdoch, thirty-one, was strapped for cash and forced to rely on his ’64 Buick Century, the Blue Goose, to carry him around the country. Just as he started to feel sorry for himself as a suffering underdog, along came Kaufman, an eighteen-year-old from Wichita with an unemployed father and a habit of pouring Little Friskies braised-liver cat food into a cold can of vegetable soup and calling it dinner. Murdoch was clean-cut and neatly dressed with wire-rim professor’s glasses; Kaufman had brambles for a beard and looked and sometimes smelled as if he had slept in a Dumpster. Though he originally believed his Big Year could be a David-and-Goliath battle, Murdoch suddenly found himself cast in the wrong role. He didn’t like it. At one point, on a rough boat ride back from the Dry Tortugas, Murdoch found himself standing next to an extremely seasick Kaufman—and wistfully entertaining a dark way of ending the competition. “To show my good birdsmanship,” Murdoch later wrote in Birding magazine, “I held on to Kenn’s belt as he hung over the rail. Just a gentle shove and then there was one?”

  Kaufman’s wanderlust quickly captured the imagination of the birding world. Thumbing rides 69,200 miles back and forth and back again across North America, Kaufman was jailed two days in Virginia on hitchhiking charges; menaced with a shotgun by an Oklahoma rancher who hated longhairs; slugged by a drunken gold miner on the streets of Nome; and swept by a rogue wave from a Texas jetty into the Gulf of Mexico. He didn’t have a driver’s license—gas was too expensive, anyway, during the 1973 Arab oil embargo—but tired travelers still let the scraggly hitchhiker steer their vehicles through twelve states and two provinces. (Kaufman crashed a new Torino GT in Louisiana and skidded a VW bus into a ditch in the Yukon). He was so desperate for cash that he sold his blood and cashed in his life insurance. He slept under highway bridges. He ate cat food often enough on the docks of offshore boat trips that birders suspected his real goal was for a wealthy birder to take pity and buy him an expensive tour ticket. Incredibly, Kaufman spent less than $1,000 on his Big Year.

  It wasn’t enough. In the end, Murdoch won the contest with a new record of 669 North American species—three more than Kaufman. (Kaufman actually saw the most birds that year, but the extras came during a cross-the-border detour to Baja, Mexico.) In a postmortem for Birding magazine, Murdoch regretted that he wasn’t more selfish. “I had a plan, but let others’ interests change it too often,” he wrote. “As a result, at least five birds were missed because I spent time helping other people get birds instead of working on my own list. Moral of the story: BE GREEDY! You will lose a lot of friends and make a lot of enemies, but you will get a bigger list.”

  Kaufman was more sanguine. During his Big Year, he met his wife-to-be in Kenmare, North Dakota, at the first American Birding Association convention—“where birding heroes outranked rock-and-roll idols, football stars, and politicians”—and established himself as one of the continent’s foremost field birders. Kaufman’s memoir of his Big Year, Kingbird Highway, turned him into the mythical hero who got mobbed at birding conventions.

  Some were impressed by Kaufman; others were inspired. In 1976, during his junior year at Dartmouth College, Scott Robinson watched his classmates taking off a year to travel through
Europe or live as a Rocky Mountain ski bum or work an internship on Wall Street. Robinson decided to do a year for the birds. Grubstaked by a grandmother who gave him $2,500, a brownand white Dodge van, and orders to chase his dream, Robinson retraced much of the old perimeter route—down the East Coast, across the Gulf to Texas and Arizona, then up the Pacific Coast—first promoted by Peterson and Fisher in Wild America. By early May, he had posted a startling 600 birds, nearly 150 ahead of Murdoch’s record-setting pace, but he had a problem. In the frenzy of spring migration, he had promised to put his Big Year on hold to help a professor with a research project. For two and a half months, he remained stranded with the professor in the decidedly unbirdy White Mountains of central New Hampshire. When Robinson finally emerged, however, he revolutionized the concept of Big Years with one simple twist: instead of continuing his traditional birding field trips, he started chasing rarities. In the first part of his Big Year, Robinson had met enough birders to be admitted into an informal network of rare-bird alerts, the avian version of a Baptist prayer circle, which spread the news about sightings of unusual species across the continent. Armed with a $500 Eastern Airlines ticket that allowed him to fly unlimited segments almost anywhere in America, Robinson started knocking off toughies one at a time—a loggerhead kingbird in the Florida Keys, a ruff at Big Sur, a Montezuma quail in Arizona. The Big Year record was his.