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

by Mark Obmascik

  For six days at Gambell, Komito was rained on and blown on and sleeted on. He was tired. He picked up only one new bird, a gray-tailed tattler, but felt good about that one. It was found by a tour group whose members paid $3,000 each to be led around Gambell. Komito walked up to the tour leader’s scope, peered inside, and tallied his tattler—at a mere fraction of the tour group price. Komito may have been grossed out by boneyards, sewage dumps, and rotting coffins, but he could still not resist the lure of a cutrate rarity.

  Other trips were more productive. In three weeks that taught him the first names of half the gate attendants at Continental Airlines, Komito scored a south polar skua off Cape Hatteras, a razor-bill outside Nova Scotia, more seabirds on a Monterey pelagic, and a whiskered auklet in the Aleutians.

  The best, however, was a land bird.

  Tough and aggressive, it had few natural enemies. It was gaudy enough to be recognized by anyone who cared. It was bold enough to mooch the work of others. It was resourceful enough to stash a private reserve of food for days. It was loud enough to force neighbors to shut their windows at night.

  A yellow-billed magpie, found by Komito on a tree branch in central California, near Solvang, was the bird that broke his 1987 record.

  SIXTEEN

  Cape Hatteras Clincher

  If a Big Year were a contest that most people understood—a football game, say, or even something more important, like the baseball play-offs—then Greg Miller would know how to describe his situation. The two-minute warning had sounded. His back was to the wall. It was the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series, and his Cleveland Indians were down to their one last hope.

  He had to catch Komito.

  He had to see birds no one had seen.

  He had to go to sea.

  The sad truth was that Miller could spend weeks wandering the bush for some lost migrant and still come back empty-handed. It was October. There just weren’t that many land birds left to find. Besides, he had little money to search for them. He had already returned to the Bank of Dad for a second loan of $3,000. A third loan was out of the question.

  But even this pelagic trip, from Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, was a long shot. Fall migration had run its course. Most birders were nesting at home. Though Miller had signed up for two offshore trips, on Saturday and Sunday, the tour operator had canceled the Sunday trip for lack of interest.

  Miller was determined to make this one count—so determined, in fact, that he got to the dock at 5:40 A.M. For the first time all year, he was twenty minutes early for something. Desperation had a way of waking up a man before the alarm clock sounded.

  He boarded the seventy-two-foot Miss Hatteras and bolted straight for the bow. For once, he had secured the prime viewing spot. It may have been the first time he ever moved quickly for the best spot instead of the last. Binoculars around his neck, he was ready. He waited. He fidgeted. Nothing was happening here. What did early people do with all their extra time, anyway?

  He walked back to the cabin to find something to do. Other birders were arriving. Miller overheard one, a distinguished-looking man with graying hair, talking about the fork-tailed flycatcher in Massachusetts. Miller had chased that same bird. He eavesdropped a little closer. Something seemed strangely familiar about this man. Could this be the guy, the mysterious third man on a Big Year? Miller couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Excuse me,” Miller interrupted. “I’m Greg Miller and I’m doing a Big Year. You sound like the person who got the fork-tailed flycatcher for your 675th bird. Are you on a Big Year, too?”

  The other guy looked at Miller and beamed.

  “Well, yes, I am,” said Al Levantin.

  It had taken ten months, but finally they had met. (The earlier sit-down on the other Outer Banks dock didn’t count; Levantin had never fessed up to Miller that he was a foe.) Both men felt an overwhelming urge to start comparing notes—how often do you meet a complete stranger who has surrendered to the same obsession?—but first they boiled down ten months of their lives to a simple question.

  “What have you got?” Miller asked.

  “Six hundred ninety-one,” Levantin said.

  “I’m at seven hundred and five,” Miller replied.

  The roses in Levantin’s cheeks turned white. He started to talk, but words wouldn’t come. He had spent so much time worrying about second place. Now he faced the possibility of third.

  What he thought was: Third place? Third place? All this for third place?

  What he said was: “I’ve still got some easy ones left.” This claim was true—he needed a storm petrel on this trip, and some sparrows and that damn spotted owl still out in Arizona.

  Boy, was Miller smiling.

  Third place. Third place. Levantin couldn’t stop thinking about it. He had to change the subject.

  “What’s Komito got?”

  “Last I heard, seven hundred thirty-one or thirty-two. That was about a month ago,” Miller said. Now the smile fell off Miller’s face, too. With two and a half months to go, Komito was at least two and a half dozen birds ahead. Miller felt cold. Was there a draft in this cabin, or had someone just opened a door?

  Suddenly the boat cabin rocked with a voice—that deep foghorn voice. Miller and Levantin snapped around.

  It was Sandy Komito.

  The Three Musketeers, together at last.

  “Al,” Komito said. “Where you at?”

  Levantin eyed his tormentor and cracked a sly grin.

  “Hatteras,” he said.

  Miller laughed. Levantin didn’t flinch. Komito turned to Miller.

  “How about you, Greg? Where are you at for the year?”

  “Doing very well, Sandy. I’m at seven hundred and five,” Miller said.

  “Congratulations on breaking seven hundred, Greg,” Komito said in the kind of tone that uncles reserve for nephews. “Only a handful of people have ever achieved that goal.”

  Komito smiled, then turned back to Levantin.

  “So, Al, really. How many birds do you have for the year?”

  Levantin looked Komito in the eye. “I’m at seven hundred thirty-seven.”

  “Wow!” Komito blurted.

  Komito fell back a step. The shout had burst from his mouth before his brain could control it. He was always loud, but this time people were looking at him. Seven hundred thirty-seven? My God, how did Al Levantin get 737? Komito’s eyebrows hit the top of his ears and tried to blast off even higher. Komito struggled to compose himself.

  “Well, Al,” Komito stammered, “I’m at seven hundred thirty-six.”

  Komito eyed Levantin, hurt.

  Levantin eyed Komito, strong.

  Miller eyed both men, amazed. Levantin had just told a bald-faced lie, and his heart hadn’t even skipped a beat.

  Komito, however, was wobbly. His eyes were so wide they had more white than blue. He looked ready to faint.

  Levantin stared back with a face of stone.

  With Komito swooning and Levantin locked in his imitation of Mount Rushmore, Miller couldn’t hold it any longer. His belly exploded with a laugh so loud, so ribald, that the rest of the boat took notice.

  “He got you good, Sandy,” Miller wheezed to Komito.

  First Levantin, then Komito, keeled with laughter.

  The gamer had been gamed.

  The two-hour motor to the Gulf Stream passed quickly. The waves were tall but the tales even taller, and the three birders bantered like schoolboys on the playground. Levantin and Miller wanted to know how Komito had pulled so far ahead. But when they asked, they inevitably became stuck in yet another twisting and turning Sandy story. Could they learn anything from the leader without putting up with all the blarney? Fat chance.

  Besides, some of Komito’s tales were pretty wild. He had even chartered a helicopter this summer in Nevada to see a Himalayan snowcock. Levantin and Miller had already written off that species as an unattainable freak.

&nbs
p; Komito was wise enough to play to his audience. Misery loved company, and at this point no one understood the agony of a missed bird better Levantin and Miller.

  So Komito told about his fruitless trips for the great gray owl.

  Miller told about his fruitless trips for Swainson’s warbler.

  Levantin told about his fruitless trips for the spotted owl.

  And so on. And so on.

  The bull session was so much fun that Levantin suggested they all meet for dinner that night. Miller jumped right in, but Komito begged off, mumbling something about some previous (but unspecified) plans.

  Komito and Miller moved to a bench on the starboard side of the bow.

  Levantin slipped back to the stern, where he vomited overboard.

  Over dinner that night, Levantin and Miller swapped the obligatory snide remarks about Komito—He’s thirty birds ahead and doesn’t have time for a restaurant with us!—and compared notes.

  Levantin was the only one to add any birds during that day’s eight-hour boat trip (black-capped petrel, over the warm Gulf Stream, No. 692 for the year). Though there still were some gettable pelagic birds, he was sick of being seasick. Fortunately, most of his remaining easy birds were in the Arizona desert.

  Miller’s targets were mostly in Florida. Levantin had already scored those tropical birds back in February and was happy to offer Miller some advice. When searching for flamingos in the Everglades, he told Miller, beware the mosquitoes.

  They laughed and joked and teased. Inevitably, though, the conversation came back to Komito.

  At this point, there was little doubt that Komito’s list was solid. Too many people had spotted him chasing too many birds. No fraud there. It was his attitude that grated. He wasn’t just beating them—he was rubbing their noses in it. There was nothing like traipsing far into the backcountry only to have some well-meaning innocent inform them, “Sandy Komito says hi.” But this morning on the boat, when Komito had finally got a chance to say hi in person, he didn’t bother. He asked only about their numbers. In a sport sugared with niceties and politeness, Sandy Komito had been a birding machine—an unstoppable tank plowing a loud path through the avifauna of North America. It would be up to Levantin and Miller, and only Levantin and Miller, to chink Komito’s armor. The lead was big, but it might not be insurmountable.

  Before they chose their main courses at the restaurant that night, Al Levantin and Greg Miller agreed that they faced a common foe.

  They decided to go out and catch him—together.

  SEVENTEEN

  Two in the Bush

  Maybe this was Sandy Komito’s revenge. Komito, after all, had told everybody at Cape Hatteras that this trip was a cinch. Following the leader’s advice, Levantin and Miller had joined in the no-man’s-land of the Nevada desert to charter a helicopter for, of all things, a Himalayan snowcock. Everyone knew Komito loved to make things sound more miserable than they actually were. If he said the snowcock was easy, then it must be easy, right?

  But all last night, snow had pounded the Ruby Mountains. When Levantin and Miller had woken, the peaks weren’t even visible; the top fifteen hundred feet of the entire range—the place where the birds lived—was engulfed in clouds.

  The two birders stood side by side on the tarmac while their pilot scanned what was left of the Rubies. Levantin and Miller could only guess where the clouds ended and the mountains began. Frustration sank in: the snowcocks were up there, but the birders were down here. They’d have been just as close to their goal if they’d stayed home in bed and ripped up $100 bills. Another wasted trip.

  Just as the birders braced for the inevitable trip cancellation, a wavy dollop of blue sky, a little doughnut hole, cracked the gloom.

  “I think we should go,” the pilot announced.

  Both birders did a double take. Go where? The tops of the mountains were missing.

  “I’m an experienced pilot,” he told them. “I’ve flown plenty of trips up there.”

  The pilot began wheeling his Bell 206 Jet Ranger out of the hangar with a hand-pull dolly. He really meant it. Weather or not, he was going to fly.

  Was this safe?

  Was this insane?

  Was this Komito’s idea of a cruel joke?

  Levantin didn’t say anything, so Miller stayed mum.

  Miller didn’t say anything, so Levantin stayed mum.

  The pilot fired up the rotors.

  Both men knew this trip was borderline crazy. Before agreeing to this joint expedition, Levantin and Miller had spent a grand total of five hours together. (It would have been longer, but Levantin had excused himself on the boat to get seasick.) Now the two men, strangers but fierce competitors, were stuck with each other in the lonely sagebrush of Elko, Nevada. Neither Levantin nor Miller had ever attempted anything like that before.

  Levantin had qualms about relying on another birder for help.

  Miller had qualms about all the money involved.

  As helicopter blades twirled faster overhead, discomfort turned to fear. Flying a helicopter in the mountains during a snowstorm to see a Himalayan snowcock—that was not what either man had ever envisioned for his newspaper obituary.

  The pilot motioned both birders to climb in the helicopter.

  Each spied the other for an awkward pause, a hesitation, a sideways glance that betrayed a second thought. Would one let the other win?

  Levantin and Miller both boarded the chopper.

  It was too late for doubt: they were airborne.

  If the prospect of chasing a bird in a helicopter seemed strange, then the story of how the bird got there in the first place was even stranger.

  In the late 1950s, Nevada state fish and game commissioners worried about a nagging problem: they had thousands of square miles of open space, but nothing to kill in it. Nevada was simply too dry for most game animals. Most of the state received less than nine inches of precipitation a year—it takes thirty-six inches to grow a basic bluegrass lawn—and the only shootable bird tough enough for those conditions was the sage grouse. Sage grouse tasted like sagebrush. Nobody wanted to hunt something that tasted like a gnarled bush.

  Enter the great white hunter. In 1961, after filling his trophy room with the heads of the Grand Slam of North American sheep—the bighorn, desert, Dall, and Stone—a Lincoln-Mercury dealer from Reno, Ham McCaughey, turned his rifle sights beyond his home continent. His target: the world’s largest wild sheep, the Marco Polo of mountainous Central Asia. The Marco Polo, it turned out, shared its home at the top of the world with another outsize creature, the Himalayan snowcock. While playing Marco Polo high in the Himalayas for his next stuffed head, McCaughey hired local trappers to net him six live Himalayan snowcocks. He meant it as a goodwill gesture for the game wardens back home. But when he tried to fly the birds to Reno, U.S. agricultural officials feared the exotic wildlife would spread exotic diseases throughout North America. McCaughey had to quarantine his six snowcocks for thirty days in Honolulu. Living in a tropical paradise for the first time in their lives, five Himalayan snowcocks died. But the one survivor was so magnificent—bigger and stronger than a grouse, but with the rich white meat of a pheasant—that Nevada wildlife officials were smitten. They ordered Glen Christensen, a state biologist, to open negotiations immediately with the governing mir in the Hunza region of the Himalayas to bring more birds to Nevada.

  In 1964, during a spring intermission in warfare among Pakistan, India, and China, Christensen flew to Hunza, in present-day Kashmir. The most spectacular place he had ever visited, Hunza is a long box canyon rimmed by snowcapped, 23,000-foot mountains. Everywhere he walked, Christensen was trailed by Indian and Pakistani agents, who suspected that the pale interloper was a spy. When Christensen told his tailers that he was only interested in a local bird, they grew convinced he was a spy—and redoubled their stakeouts.

  Despite all the security, Christensen was able to capture ninety-five snowcocks. The big challenge was getting them back home. The on
ly regular flight out of Hunza was an old Fokker warplane that accepted both people and livestock. So he loaded the ninety-five snowcocks in cages and crammed them in the aisles around the goats and chickens and other Hunzans also flying to Rawalpindi, Pakistan. (This was one use of a Fokker that Der Führer had never considered.) This time the snowcocks were quarantined in New York, and forty-eight survived. With the help of a biologist from the University of California and a wildlife nutritionist from Purina, Christensen built an air-conditioned pen for the foreign birds in Yerington, Nevada. He started breeding them. By 1970, when India and Pakistan finished one awful war over Kashmir and girded for the next. Christensen realized it was too dangerous for him to catch any more wild birds in the Himalayas. He started releasing his progeny into the American wild. By 1979, a total of 1,569 Himalayan snowcocks were freed into the Ruby Mountains of northeastern Nevada.

  The transplant program, which cost taxpayers $750,000, barely succeeded. Today no more than eight hundred snowcock survive in North America, and in some bad-weather years the population plummets to just two hundred. Though game-and-fish officials had dreamed the bird would become a major attraction for sportsmen, only about a hundred hunters a year bother trying to shoot a snowcock; the birds are just too high, and on peaks too treacherous, for most people. Only about ten snowcocks are killed each hunting season, a dismal return on a $750,000 investment.

  While the Himalayan snowcock flopped with hunters, it soared with birders. Because the Ruby Mountains had none of the recurring wars of the bird’s native home in Kashmir and Pakistan, eastern Nevada quickly became the number one place in the world to see a snowcock. By 1998, hundreds of birders, including dozens of Europeans, were converging on Elko. There was only one helicopter charter in town, El Aero, and it was caught unaware by snowcock fever. The first time pilot Ted McBride hovered up to a snowcock, he worried that his customer, a retired physician, was suffering a seizure. No worries; it was just pure ecstasy. “I’ve never had a woman who got me half that excited,” McBride said. He also never had a woman who would pay $550 for a one-hour ride. Thanks to the snowcock, birders were giving McBride, and his partner Dale Coleman, a fat wallet.