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

by Mark Obmascik

  Komito positioned himself in the perfect spotting position and waited for the others to scare the birds to him.

  After a few hundred yards of lugging rock-filled milk jugs through ankle-deep water and thigh-deep grass, some in the dragline started muttering about the Bataan Death March. But even a short rest would give a chance for a desperate rail to outrun its pursuers. They trudged on.

  Finally a bird flushed out. It looked like a rail, but flew low enough to prevent a positive identification. Half the dragline high-tailed it to the general area of landing.

  A circle quickly formed and closed tighter. And neater. And tighter.

  By the time three dozen birders were actually moving in a circle in the swamp—Komito hadn’t tried anything like this since falling victim to the hokeypokey at a wedding reception—the rail was finally spotted. It was black, brown, yellow, and mottled, and it looked as if it had been squished between bricks. Narrow flanks allowed it to squeeze through such dense cover. These flanks were the reason people talked about being as thin as a rail.

  To justify his decision to stay outside the dragline, Komito joined the circle around the bird and put his camera in. He took his camera out. He put his camera in and clicked it all about. He got his yellow rail and he turned himself around.

  That, he thought, is what it’s all about.

  The yellow rail fled.

  Greg Miller made it to High Island without a speeding ticket. That was saying something. More than two hundred miles in less than three hours through a nasty storm—there was nothing like the chance of a High Island fallout to focus his attention. The hardest part came after he finally reached the boardwalk. His adrenaline kept getting in the way of his birds.

  He was able to calm himself enough to spot something chest-high up a hackberry. It was a female ruby-throated hummingbird, perching long enough to digest her latest load of bugs and nectar.

  For Miller, it was the first ruby-throated hummingbird of the year.

  For her, it was a brief rest. Five hundred miles after crossing the Gulf, she would stuff herself with more food and, once again, migrate on. She might fly as far north as Canada. She had to find a man.

  TEN

  The Big Yak

  Five miles at sea, on a course for the Dry Tortugas of Florida, Al Levantin was riding the wake of history. All the great birders had traveled this way. In 1832, John James Audubon had sailed the seventy miles from Key West to the Tortugas and found five new species for his landmark Birds of America. On their buddy trip 121 years later, Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher had boated the old Audubon route and discovered rare boobies. This was where, in the heat of their Big Year competition, Floyd Murdoch had contemplated pushing Kenn Kaufman overboard, and Benton Basham had scored his first neotropical rarity. Though Jim Vardaman took a plane to the Dry Tortugas instead of a boat in his big-money Big Year, he was so pleased with the birds of the coral atolls that he served himself a triumphant dinner of one can of Vienna sausages, one box of crackers—and a double bourbon.

  Levantin, alas, was in no mood to celebrate. Doubled over the stern rail of the Yankee Freedom, he was vomiting his guts out. Seasickness again. Oh, the pain, the misery, the embarrassment. How could this be happening?

  The first time he had grown green at sea, on that January pelagic in Monterey with Sandy Komito, Levantin had chalked it up to the jitters. After he had recovered, he did his research and loaded up on all the mal de mer remedies—pills of Dramamine and Bonine for the stomach, Scopolamine patches for the ear, and acupuncture bands for the wrist. He tried big breakfasts and no breakfasts. He ate only pasta for dinner until somebody advised him to switch to all-protein steaks. Others urged ginger, honey, or three tablespoons of bitters. He nibbled pretzels and stoned-wheat thins and drank plenty of water and got lots of sleep.

  Everybody had a seasickness cure. Nobody’s worked.

  He couldn’t set foot on a boat this year without losing his lunch, and breakfast and dinner, too. The California ferry to Santa Cruz Island, the Cape Hatteras trip to the Gulf Stream, Monterey the second time, and Monterey the third—his stomach never had a chance. All the seasickness literature warned against two things: never look through binoculars and never look at a book. But no mortal could get seabirds without magnification or field guides. Levantin needed pelagic birds. He wished the consequences were cheaper.

  Now Levantin was dry-heaving his way to the Dry Tortugas. Seasickness was the great equalizer. Sure, he might be a business chief executive with a mansion near Aspen, but on the hundred-foot Yankee Freedom he was just another chum-maker. It was impossible to put on airs in this position. Would any of his employees spot him?

  At this point, Levantin could not have cared. It’s not easy being green. He felt like dying. His only solace in the back of the boat—as soon as he felt queasy, he moved quickly away from the in-your-face head winds at the bow—was that he wasn’t alone. The stern of every pelagic trip had a Technicolor choir. They were kindred spirits, these Dukes of Hurl, and they had heard all the cracks about bad sailors. Napoleon conquered Europe but never his ferocious seasickness. Harry Truman was a landlubber, too. Even Admiral Lord Nelson, the greatest naval commander in British history, the hero who vanquished both the French and Spanish fleets in a singular war at Trafalgar, suffered from seasickness so bad, and so consistent, that he rarely planned battles until he had spent at least three days at sea.

  “Want a surefire cure for seasickness?” asked one stern sufferer to another. “Go stand under a tree.”

  At least Levantin tended to recover quickly. After contributing to the sea, he would drink a little water, rest a little while, and within a half hour or so, be ready for a little birding. On a pelagic trip, getting sick was something many people did at some point. But missing a bird because of it was unforgivable.

  So he suffered, lay down, and then tried, ever so feebly, to raise his Leica glass again. With a black-and-white seabird far out above the rolling waves, he played peekaboo—binoculars up until his stomach soured, binoculars down until it calmed—long enough to see that the bird was massive, fork-tailed, and soaring almost effortlessly. Fortunately, he didn’t have to use the binoculars again; there just weren’t any other fork-tailed seabirds with eight-foot wingspans.

  The magnificent frigate bird was Levantin’s 500th species of the year. It was April 23, and he was eighteen birds ahead of Sandy Komito’s record-breaking 1987 pace.

  To celebrate, Al Levantin pampered himself.

  He sat down.

  On his sixteenth-century search for the fountain of youth, Juan Ponce de León discovered seven small islands in the tropical seas north of Cuba. Though the coral isles were rich in sea turtles (the Spaniard collected a hundred for dinner; hence the name Tortugas), Ponce de León found no magical fountain there (he died a few years later) or even freshwater (hence the name Dry Tortugas).

  The Tortugas have offered up a mix of natural riches and manmade trouble ever since.

  Sailors had good reason to fear the islands. Pirates such as Jean Lafitte gathered on Garden Key to plot attacks on passing merchant ships. Seamen who outran the pirates still had to contend with treacherous currents; the Tortugas’s shifting web of shoals and reefs are today littered with hundreds of shipwrecks.

  By the mid-1840s, the U.S. Army grew interested in the strategic advantages of the Dry Tortugas and imported slaves to build a fort. First slaves and later enlisted men struggled for fifteen years to build an outpost impervious to military attack. The walls of Fort Jefferson were ten feet thick, forty-five feet high, and millions of dollars overbudget. By the time the top layer of stone was finally laid in 1862, other engineers had invented a powerful new weapon, the rifled cannon, that could demolish fort walls in a single eight-hour assault. Fort Jefferson, the Gibraltar of the Gulf, was a bust.

  Determined to make something out of its wasted investment—some estimated that the fort had cost $1 a stone—the government turned the whole complex into a prison and
first filled it with hundreds of Civil War deserters. Soon, though, it also incarcerated some even more notorious, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of President Lincoln.

  As a prison, the Dry Tortugas failed terribly. The sewage system was designed to empty into a self-cleaning moat, but ocean tides were rarely strong enough to flush out the waste. The result was an island prison ringed with a doughnut of turds that bobbed and stewed in the tropical August sun. In 1867, yellow fever struck more than half the four hundred prisoners, and the prison doctor died. One survivor worked mightily to fight the epidemic. His name was still Mudd, but he won a pardon from President Andrew Johnson for saving the lives of dozens of inmates. There was no saving Fort Jefferson. Fed up with the disease, hurricanes, and general hardship of a place seventy miles from civilization, the army abandoned it in 1874. The navy revived it a few years after as a coaling station for ships on patrol, but technology soon rendered that use obsolete, too.

  The Dry Tortugas did excel at one thing: producing birds.

  When Audubon first arrived at the Tortugas on a government ship, the captain warned the birdman with this bit of hyperbole: “Before we cast anchor you will see them rise in swarms like those of bees disturbed in their hive, and the cries will deafen you.” Sure enough, when the revenue cutter cast anchor, Audubon reported seeing a “cloudlike mass arise over Bird Key…. On landing I felt as if the birds would raise me from the ground, so thick were they all round, and so quick the motion of their wings.”

  The sailors had been here before. They carried sticks and, like explorers slashing through the jungle with machetes, cleared themselves an eye-level path. In less than half an hour, the men had knocked down more than a hundred terns and filled baskets with their eggs. “I considered them delicious, in whatever way cooked,” Audubon wrote, “and during our stay at the Tortugas we never passed a day without procuring ourselves a quantity of them.”

  Others had the same idea. During Audubon’s visit, a crew of Spanish eggers arrived from Havana and collected eight tons—tons!—of tern and noddy eggs. Unless Audubon himself had lapsed into hyperbole, that was nearly a quarter million eggs. Sailors said they would sell their load in Cuba for the princely sum of $200.

  Needless to say, when Al Levantin landed at the Dry Tortugas 166 years later, the tern and noddy populations had been severely dented. Instead of millions of birds, a mere hundred thousand or so nested. They remained a stupefying sight with a prodigious sound. Still, Levantin could only wonder what used to be. Bird Key was no more; the catastrophic Florida hurricane of 1938 had submerged it and two other islands. Yet Fort Jefferson stayed hulking over the turqoise seas, its moats clear of waste but its masonry crumbling from decades of salt and abuse.

  Levantin couldn’t do a Big Year without the Tortugas because of their geographical quirk: though the species here were common for the planet, they were rare on this continent. For example, the sooty tern, dark-plumaged fighter pilot of the warm seas, bred by the millions throughout the tropics, but it was hardly ever found in the colder climes of North America—except on the Tortugas’s Bush Key. Other birds, such as the masked booby, were difficult to find because they usually stayed so far offshore until it came time to return to their Tortugas nesting colony. (Though old salts named the birds boobies because they seemed stupidly tame, Audubon noted how quickly they wised up. The Bird Key boobies, victims of repeated raids by egg-hunters, became so wary of man that the sharpest shooters on Audubon’s boat struggled to sneak close enough to blast one for dinner.)

  Besides all the tropical seabirds, the Tortugas offered one other sideshow—migrating land birds. At times the walls of Fort Jefferson looked like a man-made High Island; the masonry literally crawled with fallout warblers and swallows. Levantin picked up many of these birds—a bank swallow, a bobolink, a veery—but it was with a heavy heart. The songbirds on the Dry Tortugas were hurting. They landed only out of desperation and scrounged madly for insects that weren’t there. How would they ever grow strong enough to complete the seventy-mile, nonstop flight to Key West? Levantin knew most wouldn’t. So did a hungry peregrine falcon that waited, patiently, atop the fort walls. Even though many songbirds here were so spent that Levantin could flick them with his finger, he gave them a wide berth.

  If anyone ever felt sympathy for a creature about to struggle with an ocean crossing, it was Al Levantin.

  When the gangplank was finally lowered onto the dock at Key West, Levantin felt like kissing the ground. He was a survivor.

  For Sandy Komito, however, the misery had just begun. Komito would soon walk onto the same boat for the same trip to the same place. A veteran of dozens of pelagic expeditions, Komito would not get seasick. But he faced his own special hell: triple bunks, deep in the cabin of the Yankee Freedom, stacked so close together that a man couldn’t even sit up in his own bed. The frames were cold metal. Beds sagged so much that the middle bowed six inches deeper than the sides. There wasn’t even room in Komito’s berth for a toilet kit; he had to cram the kit in his duffel with everyone else’s in the cabin walkway.

  Levantin had lived quite well with this arrangement; at night he was so grateful not to be seasick that he rested like a rock on his mushy berth. But Levantin’s relief was a Komito nightmare. So fussy about his sleep that he traveled with his own pillow and night blinders, Komito was now shoehorned into a boat cabin with three dozen strangers who snored and wheezed and did God knew what else in a place with absolutely no privacy. Even worse, Komito was assigned to the bottom bunk. Whenever the guy above him rose in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, he stepped on Komito’s bed. A stranger’s feet—disgusting.

  The first night Komito couldn’t sleep.

  The second night he got two hours.

  The third night he couldn’t sleep again.

  When the boat finally returned to Key West, Komito was in no mood to be messed with. He had gotten the same seabirds as Levantin, just a few days later. He couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  Greg Miller longed for the luxury of a cramped berth. Three months of Big Year travel had turned his wallet into a hurting unit. His savings were nearly shot, and he needed a few thousand dollars for next month’s trip of a lifetime to Attu and Alaska. He still was putting in the time at work—forty hours last week, forty-one the week before—but that was for rent and the monthly minimums on his five credit cards. He wished he could do the Dry Tortugas with a Yankee Freedom-style charter trip that came with guides and cooked meals. His checking account said no. These birds would have to come with no frills.

  He wrote code for six and a half hours in his cubicle at the nuclear power plant and caught the red-eye to Fort Lauderdale. He drove until exhaustion. In Homestead, the last town before the Florida Keys, he checked himself into a roadside motel room that had trash in the wastebasket, an unflushed toilet, and a shower with someone else’s loofah. He turned on the air conditioner and dirt blew out. It was 1 A.M. He was too tired to care. Besides, it was cheap.

  His accommodations on the Dry Tortugas were even more Spartan. His room for the night was a $3 campsite. All the birds during the day had been terrific—he got the requisite terns, boobies, and noddies—but the end-of-the-day blues were sinking in again. There were no phones, so he couldn’t call his father. He was just a man with his pup tent and the stars. Miller hadn’t thought this camping thing through very well. All he had packed for dinner was a tin of SPAM.

  The campers around him had spent the day sunning and snorkeling and were now determined to spend the night drinking. Nesting colonies of sooty terns and brown noddies made a racket to remember, but they had nothing on a campground loaded with navy boys and Bud Light.

  As he peeled back the lid on his SPAM can, Miller must have looked lonely or pathetic or both, because suddenly, out of the blue, two women in swimsuits called to him. Miller pinched himself. Maybe this really was a Bud Light commercial.

  The babes, i
t seemed, had been snorkeling the reefs earlier that day when they’d attracted the attention of a passing boat of men. (Go figure.) The men had caught loads of shrimp. Each party had specific biological needs, and an arrangement was struck: the men’s shrimp for the women’s liquor. The result was two women in the campsite next to Miller with an unexpected bounty of shrimp, plus a backup supply of wine.

  As Miller barbecued the sea’s riches—that SPAM was history—he tried to explain birding and Big Years to the women. They just didn’t get it. In fact, by the end of the barbecue, they were so wasted they couldn’t even stand up. Miller didn’t care. He was the only birder on the island. He was probably the only sober person, too.

  He fell asleep that night alone in his pup tent with no sleeping bag and a pillow made of a shirt rolled around shoes. His belly was full. His mind was calm. He had birds to see in the morning.

  Sometimes, he thought, it pays to bird on the cheap.

  ELEVEN

  The Cradle of Storms

  Three miles over Alaska, Sandy Komito was flying with his head in the clouds. All the breaks were coming his way. He had scored his favorite seat on the aisle of this chartered plane while the others rushed for the windows. He had picked up a new species, a boreal owl, the previous day by hooking up with a birding tour group whose members each paid a ninety-five-dollar fee. He even got himself a spot on this trip without paying the bulk of his bill until the last minute.

  He was headed to Attu.

  This trip, Komito knew, would make or break his Big Year. No place in North America produced more rarities more often than Attu. It was out there—way out there. Farther west than Fiji, closer to Asia than mainland America, Attu was the last island on a volcanic chain that split the North Pacific from the Bering Sea. This flight from Anchorage to Attu would cover the same mileage as a flight from New York to Chicago and back again.