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

by Mark Obmascik

  Even before he showed up at the gate, Komito recognized half the people on this tour. Since 1985, he had been to Attu twelve times. Others had been even more. In a sport of obsessives, Attu was the most potent addiction, and not just because of the birds. It was the people. Cardiologists and boiler mechanics, pilots and postal workers, seniors in college and on social security, the men and women traveling to Attu were united by little else but their singular obsession. For at least two weeks in May, on an island two time zones from anywhere, they never heard anyone accuse them of being peculiar. They ate together, bunked together, and did their one special thing together again and again and again in undisturbed bliss. At Attu, though, the joy always came with snow, sleet, and gale-force winds.

  Just because so many people knew each other didn’t mean they all trusted each other. There were secrets on Attu. Komito, in fact, was being a little cagey himself. He wasn’t making any public proclamations about his Big Year, though many people had figured it out. Some competitors could be flying on this very plane.

  From another part of the cabin—by the wing, realm of the new-bie—a big, bearded, bubbly man came and squatted in the aisle and asked Komito about his record 1987 Big Year.

  Komito had seen this guy before. Just yesterday, on the group’s pre-Attu birding tour of Anchorage, this same man had tumbled like a bad cartoon down a sixty-foot snowbank just to see a ho-hum Alaskan willow ptarmigan. Now he was asking about Big Years. Komito’s danger alarm was clanging.

  A Big Year, Komito told the stranger, was quite an undertaking.

  The other birder agreed. He had been working full-time at a nuclear power plant and cramming his birding in on long weekends and breaks between contracts. He was trying a Big Year.

  Komito cut to the quick: So how many birds have you seen?

  Five hundred and eight.

  Komito snapped upright in his seat. Five hundred and eight? That was ahead of the pace from his record Big Year. What kind of maniac could be beating his record while still holding down a full-time job? Komito had never met someone more driven than he.

  This was surprising. This was strange. This was downright scary.

  The other birder’s name was Greg Miller. That was a name Komito would remember.

  Komito had more to worry about than just another competitor. He was still in trouble with Lawrence of Attu.

  Larry Balch had been the dictator, usually benevolent, of the island since 1980. He chartered all the flights. (There was no commercial service to Attu.) He sold all the tickets and paid all the bills. He did all the hiring. He assigned rooms, roommates, menus, and even the regular chores required of all Attuvians. He held the only federal permit to operate tours on the island; when the government threatened to pull the permit, Balch used his contacts with Texas senator Phil Gramm to keep the annual tours coming.

  On Attu, Balch was The Man. Komito had a thing about The Man. It wasn’t personal. It was his nature. He just had to stick it to the system. He lived to prick the balloon of anyone with an inflated opinion of himself.

  The first time Komito had tangled with Lawrence of Attu, Balch had assembled all the birding troops and announced he was changing the island’s time zone to maximize sunlight in the field. Under Balch Standard Time, the sun would henceforth rise at 6 A.M. and set at 10 P.M. Komito shot up in protest. He worried about jet lag. He demanded a vote of all birders, but Balch made him sit down and be quiet. A rivalry was born.

  They jousted over chores. Balch decreed that all visitors to Attu must do one, a requirement that caused surgeons to scrub outhouses and business CEOs to mop mudroom floors. Komito hated chores. He thought it was outrageous to spend $5,000 for an alleged vacation and still be forced to cut salad for dinner. He started calculating how much money Balch was making off these Attu tours, but Balch, a college calculus professor from suburban Chicago, told Komito his math was all wrong. Lawrence of Attu would not negotiate on chores, so Komito resorted to an old Jersey trick: he bought off his problem. When Komito quietly offered a few hundred dollars to anyone willing to do his chores for him, he found several takers.

  Balch never got angered by any of this. He truly liked Komito, who was one of the island’s best dinnertime storytellers—and one of Balch’s best repeat customers. For Balch, Komito was the class clown in an especially challenging day-care center. The running battle of Balch versus Komito had become as much a part of the lore of Attu as the ever-present runny nose.

  But it all threatened to become unhinged over Komito’s refusal to pay the $5,000 balance for this year’s Attu trip. Ever since losing the 1993 fight over that $48.06-a-night hotel room, Komito seemed determined to make Balch work for every dime of his money. And Komito didn’t want to pay for the trip until he was certain it would, in fact, proceed. So when Balch had sent out a bill for this year’s trip, Komito ignored it. Balch followed up with a phone message and another bill. Still no word from Komito.

  Balch couldn’t understand it. Earlier in the year he had begun hearing reports that Komito was chasing birds all over, all the time, with a zeal that surpassed even his usual type-A drive. The rumor mill held that Komito was attempting another Big Year. Balch knew no one could do a Big Year without Attu. He phoned Komito’s wife and sent one bill by fax, another by Federal Express. Komito didn’t respond. In the weeks before the trip, some Attu staffers lobbied Balch for a simple solution—ban Komito. Nobody else was allowed to get away with nonpayment. Why make exceptions for him?

  As a former American Birding Association president, Balch was awed by Komito’s sheer audacity. Nobody did a Big Year twice. He didn’t want to be the man who killed a Big Year. Five days before the plane was to leave for Attu, Balch was driving a supply van on International Airport Road in Anchorage when his cellular phone rang. It was Komito, who wanted last-minute assurance from Balch that the Attu trip was a go. Balch said yes. Over a van load of whispers from Attu staffers—“Don’t let him come! Don’t let him come!”—Balch heard Komito promise to finally write the check.

  Balch got his $5,000. In return, though, Komito got more than an Attu ticket. He also got the satisfaction of having paid for the trip on his own terms.

  A Big Year wasn’t just about seeing birds. It was about seeing birds and sticking it to The Man.

  The first thing everyone saw on Attu was the snow. In early May, the 2,800-foot peaks were always frosted, but never like this. The island’s runway was flanked with two-foot snow walls; the plane landing felt like an emergency brake on a luge run. El Niño had found Attu.

  While tour staffers unloaded baggage from the plane, birders fretted about the weather. Komito, however, focused on something else.

  He was looking for a killer.

  Every year for the past decade or so, museums and federal agencies had quietly sent gunmen to Attu to shoot rare birds for their collections. Nobody announced the names of these collectors. Indeed, many birders, especially the first-time visitors, didn’t even know they were here. But some found out the hard way.

  In 1986 one particularly obsessed birder became so enthralled with the rarities of Attu that he arranged to camp and live on the island by himself. The University of Alaska museum was so anxious for information on the birds of Attu that it granted the birder a special collector’s permit—a license to kill, but in the name of science. The arrangement attracted little attention until just three weeks before the scheduled spring Attu tour, when the birder found a great spotted woodpecker—one of the first records ever for North America, rarer still for the fact that it was discovered on an island with no trees—and summarily blasted it with his shotgun.

  As organizer of the Attu tour, Larry Balch was livid. A great spotted woodpecker would have been the bird of the decade for dozens of his paying guests, but now it could only be seen in a government freezer. It was outrageous that someone had added the great spotted woodpecker to his life list, but then killed it before anyone else could see it and list it, too.

  The collector becam
e the social leper of Attu, and the solitary life seemed to take its toll. A host of birders claimed the collector began eyeing, then trailing, a young woman during her day trips through the tundra. As she boarded her airplane home, the man supposedly darted out with scissors and collected something else—a lock of the woman’s hair. The collector himself denied that any of this ever happened. No matter the truth, the story circulated for years and mainly served to reinforce the notion that bird collectors were creepy and to be avoided.

  Still, collecting continued. A few years later, a nature photographer was focusing on a Pechora pipit when another government collector entered the picture with a double-barrel shotgun. In the westernmost point of the American West, one of the civilized world’s most precise pieces of photographic equipment was out-dueled by a single round of buckshot.

  Ever since then, Komito had known he had to do more than beat all the other birders at Attu. He had to quick-draw the collectors, too. If someone on the flight was a killer, Komito was determined to outrun him.

  Miller knew little about collecting on Attu, but was too blissful to care. The birds were incredible. On the one-and-a-half mile trek from the runway to sleeping quarters, he saw three lifers—two smews, four common pochards, and a wood sandpiper—that all were supposed to be on the opposite side of the Pacific. As he started to unpack, someone outside cried, “Whooper swan”—the Attu equivalent of “Fire!” in crowded theater. Miller and dozens others blasted through the door (no one had seen the Who concert in Cincinnati) and basked in a magnificent flyby of a five-foot creature as white as the mountains behind it. Even commoners on Attu were worth a second look. The same drab brown birds that barely rated a wintertime yawn in Ohio were transformed into brilliant spring eye-catchers in Attu. Lapland longspurs stuck out with a gaudy yellow bill, black mask, and rufous cape; snow buntings were a dramatic white-and-black. Alaska was the Honeymoon Hotel for birds, and everyone wore the finest breeding plumage.

  Miller had never seen any place like Attu. Alternately buffeted by the warm Kuroshio Current from Japan and the cold Alaska Current from the Bering Sea, Attu suffers from some of the world’s worst weather. Native Aleuts called it the Cradle of Storms, Birthplace of Winds. It rains or snows 250 days a year. Dry days are usually dominated by fog. Home of the fifty-foot wave, the hundred-knot gale, and some of the planet’s shortest-lived wind socks, the island is seventeen miles long and forty-two miles wide, but spackled with mountains that make it difficult to travel anywhere but along the coast. There are no hotels, phones, or restaurants. Nobody lives there permanently anymore; the only residents were twenty Coast Guard on one-year rotations to run the region’s loran navigation system. Because the seafaring world was converting to satellite-based GPS navigation, the Attu Guard station—and thus the runway relied upon by birders—was threatened with permanent shutdown. After an Attu winter, few Coast Guard enlistees mourned the prospect of base closure. They had a hard time believing anyone would spend money to vacation there.

  Even the names on the island reflect horrible hardship. Murder Point, Terrible Mountain—these were products of the 1740s takeover of Attu by Russian fur trappers, who slaughtered the native Aleut men, raped the women, and turned loose the island’s first land mammal, the Norwegian rat. Modern visitors never quite knew how to celebrate the discovery of a life bird at a place called Massacre Bay.

  Sight-seeing was strange, too. Miller scrambled for snapshots of the mountains and frothy bays on the plane ride in, but Attu was more complicated closer up. Junk was everywhere. Rusty oil tanks on a shortgrass beach, an abandoned bulldozer in a tidal pond, and a P-38 fighter plane rotting on a hillside over a bay were leftovers of one of the most awful battles of World War II. Seven months after their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces conquered Attu, marking the first time since the War of 1812 that an enemy had captured American soil. At the time only forty-two natives and a schoolteacher couple lived on the island, but the Japanese wanted to gain a psychological foothold on U.S. soil and divert American military attention from the central Pacific. Neither goal proved successful. Because of wartime clampdowns on the press, few Americans ever learned of the Japanese war victory. And U.S. generals were so underwhelmed by the loss of Attu that they let the Japanese keep it for the rest of the year. Instead of battling the U.S. marines, the Japanese were instead confronted with a more relentless foe—an Attu winter. Dozens were stricken with frostbite and respiratory sicknesses. When 12,500 U.S. soldiers finally landed on Attu in May 1943, they found 2,500 Japanese holed up in the fog of the mountains. After eighteen days of U.S. air and ground bombardments, the Japanese were abandoned by their air force, desperately short on ammunition, and living on a ration of just one popcorn-size rice ball a day. On the night of May 29, they decided to end it all. Armed only with knives and bayonets, the surviving Japanese hurtled down the mountains and screamed, “Banzai!” They slashed wounded Americans in their medical tents and bludgeoned the healthy in face-to-face combat. But the attack did not go far without bullets. When capture was imminent, they pressed hand grenades to their chests—and blew up themselves. Of the one thousand Japanese soldiers who mounted the banzai attack, only twenty-eight were captured alive. Five hundred forty-nine Americans were killed, eleven hundred were wounded, and twelve hundred suffered exposure injuries; many required the amputation of their frostbitten feet. It was the first U.S. experience with Japanese suicide attacks, and the only ground battle of World War II fought on U.S. soil. The War in the Pacific was changed forever.

  Birders borrowed some elements of military precision on Attu. Every half hour each group reported all field sightings by CB radio. “Brambling at Navy Town,” went the call, and Miller scrambled two miles to reach the rotting Quonset huts at the base of Artillery Hill. By the time he arrived, the birds were gone. He returned to base and the call was repeated. Miller raced back to Navy Town. Finally he saw the bramblings—black-and-orange finches ducking the wind in the lee of a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  Ah, the wind. No matter where Miller went on Attu, the wind always seemed to be in his face. This was a serious problem. The only transportation on Attu was by mountain bike, and he was woefully unprepared. Warned that the trip would be physically demanding, Miller had bought a Wal-Mart bike back home and vowed to train on it. Of course, he didn’t. After two days of pedaling through puddles, volcanic muck, and 20 mph head winds on Attu, Miller was one hurting unit. His body was not made to perch on a bicycle seat. His butt hurt so much that he tried riding by standing on the pedals. He quickly faced a choice: inflamed butt or instant heart attack. His rear end would not forgive him.

  Luckily, other birders did. Miller was always the last one to arrive at a staked-out bird, but the rule of Attu held that no one advanced on a rarity until everyone was ready. When a rustic bunting was radioed in a mile and a half away at Kingfisher Creek, Miller feared his thighs, bottom, and aorta would simultaneously explode. But he pedaled up to find a waiting scope line—two dozen birders, queued up behind a long lens on a tripod pointed at a bush. With Miller’s arrival, the scope line began its backcountry ballet. The person in front stooped over the lens and peered at the bird for no more than two seconds, then hastily retreated to the end of the line. The next birder took an identically quick look, and so on, and so on. When everyone in line could say they had had the bird—it was a lifer for most—the whole process repeated, but this time birders were allowed longer looks to study the creature. This time they got lucky. The bunting stuck around. Many times, however, the rarity didn’t. No place could be more excruciating, Miller decided, than the end of a scope line on Attu.

  On the fourth day on Attu, the storm hit. By 6 A.M. the base was socked in with three inches of snow. By 7 A.M., the snow had turned into driving rain. Miller tried to pass the time at base by taking a shower—a Dolly Varden trout had clogged the water intake valves the morning before—but the pipes were frozen. Indoors at Attu, strange things happened.

  For example,
women. Or, more specifically, a woman. She was in her late thirties with dark hair, clear blue eyes, and a laugh that carried across the room. She was fun. She had presence. And, most important, she had a life list of 626 birds. You just don’t meet a single woman like that every day. Miller was smitten with Carol Ralph, and she seemed to enjoy being around him, too. They spent the storm day cooped up at base swapping bird stories and moaning about bicycling in the birthplace of winds. Miller made a point of sitting by her at dinner. He might be freshly divorced, but he still had feelings. That surprised him. He liked her. Suddenly there was something else to chase at Attu besides rare birds.

  While the rain blew sideways outside, Komito lay flat on his back. He was miserable. Sometime between his chases for a brambling and a pigeon guillemot, Komito’s back had begun convulsing with spasms. He made it back to the base, somehow, without passing out, but felt as if someone had taken a hatchet from the oven and buried it in the small of his back. If he could have made it to the Coast Guard station, he might have called an air ambulance. Komito throbbed with pain.

  For Larry Balch, the only thing touchier than a healthy Komito was a suffering Komito. From his magic bag of tricks Lawrence of Attu produced a bottle of muscle-relaxant pills, which seemed to reduce the size of the ax in Komito’s back. If only Balch’s bag had pills that eased other nagging pains.

  Komito didn’t like the community sandwich bread, which he felt was often stale because people left the bag open. So he brought his own personal stash, four loaves of Wonder bread, and sealed them with duct tape in a corrugated box that carried one word: KOMITO. He hated any kind of spice in his dinner, so shrimp creole and cayenne seafood pasta were out. The dining room was too cold. His door banged. His room was too noisy.