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

by Mark Obmascik

  Ooomph!

  Miller’s ribs slammed against his chest straps. Levantin braced in his seat with all his might. Out the helicopter windshield, their horizon had turned crooked.

  Both men silently mouthed the same wish: I hope this helicopter pilot knows what he’s doing.

  The Rubies were twenty miles to the southeast, and Dale Coleman, the pilot, knew the route well. Just because he was flying another bird run didn’t mean that he couldn’t have some fun. So he banked his turns hard and let the rotors rip. When birders paid by the hour to find a snowcock in the mountains, the pilot wouldn’t waste time dillydallying over the low sage.

  All three men were connected in the cockpit with headsets. Over the whir of the blades, the pilot laid out the tricks of this treasure hunt: After last night’s storm, the snow line in the Rubies was at forty-five hundred feet. The clouds began at ten thousand feet. With any luck, the snowcocks would be either at the bottoms of the cliffs or the tops of the peaks.

  Neither Levantin nor Miller said anything about it, but they both knew full well that the highest peaks still were in the clouds. If the snowcocks rode out the storm up there, this trip would be a $550 bust.

  Miller tried to take his mind off any chance of failure by videotaping the cattle a half mile below. His hands fumbled with the camera. Something wasn’t right. Nothing would focus. Was the camera broken? The pilot saw his predicament and grinned. Miller was so nervous that he had steamed up his entire side of the helicopter bubble. A flip of the aircraft defroster cleared up his fog, but the camera still wouldn’t see straight. Miller checked his LEDs. There would be no tape today. He had forgotten to recharge the camera batteries last night.

  In the back, Levantin wore his stiffest poker face. He said nothing. On the outside he looked calm, but inside was another story. Levantin wanted, desperately, to keep from getting sick. He had lost his breakfast on eight boat trips this year and didn’t want to suffer the same mess in the confines of a helicopter cockpit. He had successfully survived one earlier helicopter trip, though that was on a cushy business-trip glide over the streets of Paris. Maybe, just maybe, his stomach did better on air than water. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. The chopper blasted over miles of sage and range cattle. The speedometer read ninety knots. Levantin hoped the pilot was done with those banked turns.

  The closer the helicopter came to the Rubies, the bigger they looked. Sheer, jagged, and brawny—these weren’t the Appalachians. Clouds lifted, and the morning sun spotlighted the mouth of a tight canyon. The chopper sliced inside.

  Miller wanted to say something about the raw beauty of it all—snow below, cliffs to the side, clouds streaming above—but the reverberating thwomps of the rotor off both rock walls made conversation impossible. The chopper slowed to gain altitude.

  They whirred closer to a ridgeline and picked up speed and suddenly—whoosh!—the earth fell away. What a chasm. Forget about butterflies: Miller felt a live bat skittering in his stomach. In the backseat, Levantin wasn’t talking.

  Beyond the ridge the pilot dropped down and banked right, trailing the cliff face and scanning for snowcocks. Down low, a white mountain goat struggled through a neck-high drift of last night’s snow. Would the goat survive? This trip was single-mindedly focused on another quarry. Their chopper cut hard again into another canyon.

  “There goes one!”

  Levantin, alive after all, was shouting into his headset.

  “Over there! Over there!”

  Below and just behind the helicopter a rusty brown bird furiously thumped its wings.

  “Snowcock! It’s a snowcock!”

  The canyon was tight. Could the chopper spin backward for a better look? It didn’t matter. Though the speedometer read sixty knots, or roughly seventy miles per hour, the Himalayan snowcock was overtaking them. This race was never in doubt: bird was faster than whirlybird—faster and stronger even than its primary predator, the golden eagle. When the five-pound creature rocketed over the next ridge, the helicopter had to lag behind momentarily to gain altitude. The bird was out of sight. The helicopter was finally high enough to make the ridge. It zoomed forward.

  “If we don’t keep up, we’ll lose that bird!” shouted the pilot.

  Whoosh! The helicopter cleared another sheer drop and continued the chase. The bird was a quarter mile ahead. The chopper raced forward along the edge of the cliff. Levantin and Miller were terrified. A 70 mph helicopter race along a rock wall for a bird? This was insane. The rotor echoes were deafening, but Miller, in the front seat, was too afraid to check how much space was between the wall and the spinning blades.

  One hundred feet below them, the snowcock dropped into a cliffside scree field. The chopper hovered. No luck. Half a world from its Himalayan home, the bird wore the exact same colors as the rust-and-gray talus of the Ruby Mountains.

  The bird had vanished.

  Miller whooped out loud, partly from joy and partly from relief. A forty-five-second look at a lifer! He made the helicopter bubble fog over again.

  In the backseat, a grin finally cracked Levantin’s poker face. He wasn’t celebrating aloud, but he clearly was the happiest man aboard. His breakfast remained intact.

  Back on the ground in Elko, Levantin and Miller settled up their charter bill and thanked the pilot profusely. “I’m glad you were as good a pilot as you said you were,” Miller told him.

  The Himalayan snowcock was Miller’s 708th bird. For Levantin, though, it was No. 700—cause for celebration. Only a handful in history ever had reached that milestone. Levantin wanted to call his wife, but he knew she wasn’t home.

  Levantin and Miller eyed each other. Two men, together in the desert, eight birds apart, eight weeks left in their competition. What next?

  Levantin broke the silence. “You know, I don’t have a gray partridge yet.”

  Miller did. But his flight home wasn’t until tomorrow—he had set aside two days in Elko for the snowcock, just in case dicey weather canceled the helicopter trip—and he had to rely on Levantin for the two-and-a-half-hour ride back to the Salt Lake City airport. Miller knew where the gray partridge lived. He had been there three months ago.

  “Want to go to Boise?” Miller asked.

  Four hours, 220 miles, and six golden eagles later, Levantin and Miller were in Boise and turning into a subdivision of McMansions on HolliLynn Drive. The big boxes cast long shadows; the sun offered only another half hour of light.

  Miller hoped they had arrived early enough. Levantin started glassing the neighborhood for a grayish brown chicken with a rusty face.

  Between the third and fourth house down the street, Levantin’s Leicas found something moving.

  They were the yard birds of HolliLynn Drive, eleven gray partridges, No. 701 for Levantin’s year.

  The next day, as they road-tripped back to the Salt Lake City airport, both men started thinking.

  Miller was driving Levantin’s car, a Lexus SUV with heated leather seats. The car alone was worth more than anything Miller owned. Miller realized he had no idea what Levantin did for a living. It would feel rude to ask. With a car this plush, though, Levantin must have some money. He never talked about it. Al Levantin was humble, but he was a sly dog, too. After the gray partridge in Boise, Miller was only seven birds ahead. Miller knew he should focus on the leader, Sandy Komito, but somehow he couldn’t. He was only a handful of birds ahead of a chaser whose reserves exceeded the Bank of Dad.

  Third place, Miller fretted. Third place.

  In the passenger seat, Levantin realized he didn’t know much about the man at the steering wheel. Good birder, terrific ear, all enthusiasm, but could Miller really work that many hours in the office and expect to find more birds? Levantin was only seven birds behind. He still had easy ones left, and he had the time to get them.

  Second place, Levantin thought. Second place.

  Miller was home in Maryland sometime after midnight, and back at his desk in the nuclear power plant by 9 A.M.
He logged nine and a half hours that day. Y2K was coming. There were still birds for him to chase in Florida. He was already down $8,000 at the B.O.D. He really wanted to go to Florida. He put in seventy-six hours the rest of the week. He was saving his money for Florida.

  Levantin drove back to Colorado to an empty house. While he’d been chasing the Himalayan snowcock in Nevada, his wife was adventuring in Bhutan and Nepal, riding elephants, trailing white rhinoceroses, and luxuriating on safari at the famed Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge. She might not be spending as much as Al on his Big Year, but she was making a run at it. She would be out of the country for four weeks with two girlfriends. Levantin really missed her. All that talk about keeping a marriage fresh by going off to do your own thing sounded good, but it could be lonely, too. Levantin wanted to celebrate his 700th bird. He wished his wife was home to help him do it.

  He called eight friends and invited them over for steaks, which Levantin cooked himself. They laughed. They drank. They toasted the Himalayan snowcock. Levantin missed his wife even more.

  When Ethel finally returned home, Levantin told her all about his 700th bird. She was thrilled that he had reached the Big Year milestone, but she was impressed he had staged his own dinner party.

  EIGHTEEN

  Nemesis

  When Al Levantin had started his Big Year, he vowed he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to do it. He worked mightily to avoid it. This was all supposed to be a grand personal adventure, and adventure meant that you didn’t lean on anyone else for help.

  So much for idealism. Levantin needed one bird, bad, and he didn’t have much time for it. He stared at the phone. It was now or never. He didn’t feel good, but he had to do it. He had to hire a guide to find him a bird.

  By now Levantin had memorized every branch on every tree up Scheelite Canyon. The geologic wrinkle in Arizona’s Fort Hua-chuca Army Base was supposed to be the world’s easiest place to spot a spotted owl. He had spent five hours searching there in February and five more in July. The hikers’ journal at the trailhead kept insisting the owls were up there. All the birding books said the same thing, too. Experts estimated that 80 percent of all people who had ever seen a spotted owl in the wild had seen it in Scheelite. These experts had never talked to Al Levantin.

  He knew all their advice. Spotted owls roost within twenty feet of the ground. In live oaks, they stay on branches far from the trunk. On pines they favor closer boughs. Either way, the owls can be tough to see—three or four shades of brown flecked with white spots that turn the eighteen-inch bird into a vanishing piece of sun-dappled background.

  Levantin even carried maps with dots on the specific roosts favored by the owls. This whole backpack of information ultimately was useless and made Levantin feel as if he were the high school freshman being sold an elaborately printed elevator pass. Were spotted owls really in Scheelite? Maybe they were just a prank.

  By the time Levantin finally caught on, it was too late. The one man who could have guaranteed him his spotted owl was dead.

  Robert T. Smith—Smitty, to legions of birders—was an army draftsman in the 1960s who, on a whim, bushwhacked his way up a little-used corner of the 73,000-acre military base. Scheelite Canyon’s mix of massive boulders, cool rock walls, and towering pines took his breath away. So did the 20 percent grade.

  A half mile up the canyon, at an elevation of six thousand feet, Smitty spotted the owls for his first time. He stood transfixed. Until this hike, he had never thought much about birds, but something about these birds—their beauty, serenity, rarity—inspired him. When he retired from the army in 1973, the thin, flinty man started hiking up Scheelite five times a week to check on the owls, keeping detailed records of each visit. He knew where they perched and when they perched. He even named most of their roosting trees. These owls, joked the lifelong bachelor, had become his grandchildren.

  Smitty almost single-handedly scratched out a trail up Scheel-ite and, like the precise army man he was, posted it in one-eighth-mile increments. Over the years he personally led more than six thousand birders on hikes to see the spotted owls.

  Oh, how Levantin now wished he had been one of the six thousand. But two months ago, Smitty had died at the age of seventy-nine.

  Luckily, Smitty did not take his owling maps to his grave. Before he died, Smitty met a diminutive man at a Huachuca Audubon meeting whom he deemed worthy to receive his owl knowledge. The two made an unlikely duo—Smitty the army veteran who had served in the jungles of Southeast Asia, his new friend a native of Manchester, England, who owned one of America’s foremost music and video collections of the martyred Tejano singer Selena. Thanks to Smitty, the repository of spotted-owl wisdom now rested with Stuart Healy, the very birding guide who had spent so much time earlier in the year with Greg Miller.

  In the Big Year battle, Healy wasn’t choosing sides. He was, however, accepting paying customers.

  Levantin arranged to meet Healy at 7 A.M. at the eastern security gate of Fort Huachuca. By now, Levantin knew the directions by heart. Like so many places along the Mexican border, the base had a two-hundred-foot blimp tethered two miles above the desert, an eye in the sky that was supposedly searching for airborne drug runners. If only Big Brother could find him his owl.

  He couldn’t complain too much, though. The military was the whole reason why the owls were here. Founded in 1877 as an outpost to hunt down Geronimo and the Apaches, Fort Huachuca today was home to more than eleven thousand army intelligence workers. The base was one of the few Southwestern mountain forests off-limits to most logging.

  The spotted owl was famous for its dislike of chain saws. The northern race of the same species was responsible for one of the nastiest environmental fights of twentieth century: the logger vs. conservationist blowup in the Pacific Northwest. Though humans never quite resolved whether old trees were best viewed as habitat or jobs, the spotted owl clearly preferred its timber uncut. Scheelite had that and more—no roads, few humans, and a steady smorgasbord of voles, mice, and bats.

  Levantin had to admit, it felt strange to be at the Scheelite trailhead with another person. But if Healy could finally put Levantin onto a spotted owl, his company would be worth it. Levantin wondered how much his $10-an-hour guide was going to cost him.

  As it turned out, Levantin didn’t even need Healy. A spotted owl was perched on a live oak branch directly above the trail. If Levantin had kept walking, he would have slammed it with his forehead. Levantin and guide were in and out of the canyon in less than an hour.

  Technically speaking, Levantin got Bird No. 704 for the price of a single Alexander Hamilton. There was no estimate on the psychic cost.

  Two hours from the Everglades Marina, paddling a canoe for the first time since high school 4-H, Greg Miller choked back his panic. He was lost in a sea of saw grass. His strokes were wobbly and his neck seared without sunscreen. While the wind blew from the north, a vast thunderhead barreled in from the south. He was stranded in an alligator-infested swamp. A lightning storm was coming and his only cover was an aluminum boat.

  This was all the flamingos’ fault. Miller should have nailed those birds months ago. But his springtime trip to Florida had come up empty, so he’d ditched his family on Thanksgiving Day for a jet trip to Miami and a so-called holiday feast alone in a Bennigan’s where English was a second language.

  He should have stuck with the Snake Bight Trail. That was how everybody got their flamingos. Just park the rental car past the Everglades National Park gates and look for the brown trailhead sign and start walking. Off the end of the point set up a 60× spotting scope and start looking for pink. No big deal.

  Actually, there was one complication. Miller hated the Snake Bight Trail. Not because of snakes—had he never seen one there, though he did worry about them a lot. No, the problem with Snake Bight was insect bites.

  After a year of chasing birds through the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, the spring marshes of Alaska, and the Ten Thousand Lakes country of Minne
sota, Miller fancied himself an expert on mosquitoes. The mosquitoes fancied him, too. He slathered on Off!, Cutter, and Muskol; the mosquitoes thought it was marinade. Pure Deet? Bug treat. Those Avon wetnaps may have worked for some, but on Miller they created a new aroma that turned mosquitoes into winged wolves.

  Snake Bight was the worst. The last time he’d hiked it, he’d wrapped himself like a sheikh. He came back with more welts—but no flamingo. Never again, he said at the time, and he really meant it.

  For this trip he did some planning. Just beyond the Snake Bight trailhead was a bayside shop that rented boats. He didn’t feel comfortable with a motorized skiff, but how much trouble could he get in with a canoe? Best of all was the promise from the guy behind the counter: once you get off the shoreline, he told Miller, the mosquitoes are gone. The half-day rental was $22. He was supposed to be back by 2:30 P.M. There was no way Miller needed all four hours. Snake Bight only took an hour and a half. So he bought a 1.5-liter bottle of water and a bag of pretzels and hit the dock. He was smug.

  But a canoe as an idea is different from a canoe as a mode of transportation. When Miller lowered himself into the boat, the boat lurched left. To balance himself he jerked right—and the boat jerked, too. Ouch! He skinned his shin on the aluminum gunwale.