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

by Mark Obmascik

  Steady, steady, he told himself. A mosquito landed on his knee and reflexively he crushed it. The boat moved, but didn’t rock. He laughed with relief. He paddled his first few strokes. So far, so good. He cleared the marina and paddled a little harder and moved a little faster. The water was the color of tea, but transparent enough to reveal crabs on the bottom. A broad-winged hawk soared overhead.

  His hands finally relaxed on the paddle. He was amazed at how quickly this canoe traveled. It even kept tracking when he swapped his paddle for binoculars. He was a natural-born canoer.

  When he saw the Snake Bight Trail, he got really excited. He wondered how many poor saps were being eaten alive as he floated on with ease, with joy, and, yes, with burgeoning amounts of grace. Confidently, he set down his paddle and lifted his trusty Zeiss 10×42s. In the distance, he saw the color of his dreams.

  Pink was in Florida Bay.

  The birds still were too far off for Miller to make a positive identification. No problem. Paddling was fun. Let the others sacrifice blood for flamingos on the Snake Bight Trail. Miller had outsmarted them. He was Huck Finn.

  Around a saw-grass point opened a passageway toward the pink. He paddled through and the surface erupted with silvery fish. Mullet were stacked in this water. Hundreds of snowy egrets flecked the shoals. An osprey soared. Pelicans dive-bombed. And a reddish egret canopy fed just fifty feet off Miller’s bow. Unbelievable.

  Gradually, though, Miller noticed something different. What had started out as four-foot water had become eighteen-inch water and was now turning closer to a foot. Good thing canoes drew so little water. Good thing, too, that the breeze was blowing toward the pink. He pulled out the bag of pretzels and let the wind do his work for a while.

  Finally he had drawn close enough to see pink flecks instead of a pink blob. He raised his binoculars again.

  Whitish head … gray bill … body more pink than orange …

  He wasn’t chasing flamingos. He was chasing roseate spoonbills. Oh, no! He had scored the spoonbill months ago.

  It was 1 P.M., and his trip was a bust. He had to hustle back.

  He turned around but the head wind was unforgiving. One bad paddle stroke and the boat spun like the second hand on his watch. Grace gave way to zigzag. He pulled hard to return to the saw-grass passageway.

  Was this the right passageway? It seemed a lot shallower than he remembered; every stroke pulled up as much muck as water. Maybe the marina really was around the tip of that other shoal.

  He turned. He hit bottom. He turned again and bottomed out again. Now he knew why it had been so easy to paddle to the pink—he was running with an outgoing tide. No more. He was fighting the flow, and down to just four inches of water. He dug hard and the canoe moved up two feet. When he pulled the paddle out, though, the boat slipped back a foot. He dug again. Up two feet, back one.

  His eyebrows dripped with sweat. He tried to rub it off with his T-shirt, but that was soaked, too. He swallowed a long slug from his water bottle and felt grateful to be in the shade.

  Shade?

  In the Everglades?

  Miller looked up and saw the thunderhead looming.

  Deep in his stomach, Bennigan’s turkey fluttered.

  Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, he told himself. This was a national park. Surely someone would come to help.

  Nobody did.

  What used to be the bay was now an expansive mudflat. On the far shore, two hundred yards away, a pair of teenage fishermen grinned. “You might as well head back in this way,” one called.

  Was this a joke? The bay in front of the teenagers still looked more like mud than water.

  But Miller was too desperate to be cynical. So what if the teens were mocking him? If he could just get his canoe back to shore, he could walk it back to the marina. Was that thunderhead growing?

  For the first time, he stood up in the canoe. It wasn’t so tippy in four inches of water. He bent over and grabbed the gunwales. Then, slowly, he hoisted his feet over the side, to the Everglades, which swallowed him. He was thigh-deep in trouble—skanky, oozing, slimy trouble.

  The fishermen laughed so hard that Miller could hear their wheezes above the pounding of his heart. His T-shirt and his jeans were caked with the brown badge of stupidity.

  He trudged on, relying on the canoe as both a balance beam and a rest stop. In the swamp mud, every footstep sounded like a busy bathroom plunger. His leg wormed deeper. He tripped. He threw his arm over the boat and grabbed the far gunwale for support. The canoe jerked ahead. He stopped it with his other arm. He was down to his crotch in muck and scared to death that he might sink farther.

  With a burst of adrenaline, he hauled his filthy body back into the canoe. This time, he was not getting out. He speared his paddle back into the muck and turned the boat into an aluminum inchworm. “You’re making progress,” a fisherman called. Miller laughed, surprised that he still could.

  Arms trembling, he paddled back to the marina and arrived at 2:40 P.M., or ten minutes after the rental return time. The marina attendant took one look at Miller and waived the $8 late fee.

  With every step on the dock, Miller left behind a foul trail of sulfurous grime. He felt bad about the mess, so he hosed away his footprints. Then he turned the hose on himself.

  Blasting the tap water down his jeans, up his armpits, around his back—anywhere and everywhere the Everglades had penetrated—Miller attracted a crowd of tourists. The creature from the black lagoon was showering in public.

  The next day, Miller returned. He parked his rental car beyond the national park gates and hiked the Snake Bight Trail. He was eaten alive.

  Off the end of the point he searched for pink. This time, the bird had a black-tipped bill.

  Miller got his flamingo.

  He would not come back to Florida anytime soon.

  ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through Duluth, not a creature was stirring—except Sandy Komito. He was wrapped in frustration. From an hour before dawn to an hour after sunset, he had driven every road and glassed every tree in the Sax-Zim Bog, but he still couldn’t find his great gray owl. It was the only breeding bird of North America that still eluded him. Wile E. Coyote and the roadrunner had nothing on Komito and his great gray owl. He had chased it on nine different trips this year—Minnesota in March, June, November, and two tries in December, Wisconsin in November and December, California in June, and Oregon in December. Today he had called three different guides to help him find the bird, but all were staying home with family for the holiday. Komito was not a religious man, but a full day of finding nothing when the thermometer topped out at five degrees left him wondering about the plight of Job.

  His immediate problem was finding someplace open for dinner on Christmas Eve. On his first drive through Duluth, he couldn’t find an open restaurant—no Bennigan’s, no Ponderosa, no TGIF. On his second drive he noticed that even McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s were all closed. After such a lousy day afield he didn’t want to go to bed hungry. He had to find something. On his third drive he found a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. The only thing he disliked more than ethnic food was ethnic food in a place without a major ethnic population. Duluth was full of broad-shouldered Lutherans who should have been happy to serve him his prime rib, medium well. But all those Lutherans were in church tonight. Komito wasn’t about to stoop to a hot dog at 7-Eleven for dinner, so he took a chance on the Chinese restaurant.

  Just one other table was occupied. They looked like outsiders, too. Komito ordered his food as bland as he could—egg drop soup with pork-fried rice. A thousand miles away in New Jersey, his daughter was preparing to celebrate Christmas with her husband. Komito wanted to be back home for that. His son-in-law’s mother had died two Christmas seasons ago, and the Komito family tried to do what it could to bring some happiness to the holidays. Komito would be a lot happier on his flight home tomorrow if he had got his bird.

  Usually when he dined alo
ne, Komito spent his time filling a notebook with the day’s events. Today there wasn’t much to report. He couldn’t help thinking about the past. At one point, on his November trip to Aitkin County, Minnesota, Komito thought he might have had his bird. From a road he saw a large owl—was it a barred, great horned, or great gray?—take wing in the distance over the spruces and fly not far from him. But as the bird landed, Komito heard four gunshots. It was hunting season. Komito would have chased the owl into the woods but he didn’t want to be mistaken for a deer.

  Though the egg drop soup was palatable, the fried rice was awash in oil. He drained a few forkfuls and dumped the rest. For the first time in a long, long year, Komito wondered what the hell he was doing chasing a bird so far from home. The other customers left. He was alone in the restaurant. Ever since his yellow-billed magpie in California, every bird for Komito had been a record-breaker. But he wanted to break it even worse. He wanted a record no one else could break. He tried to think of anyone who would want a bird so much that he would eat alone in a Chinese restaurant in Duluth on Christmas Eve. The whole thought was too depressing. He wouldn’t let himself dwell on failure. He was still birding tomorrow.

  Komito was back out at dawn on Christmas Day. He saw two bald eagles but had no interest. In his entire Big Year, Sandy Komito had not been defeated by a human. He was beaten by an owl.

  NINETEEN

  Honorbound

  From his perch on a ridge high up the Colorado Rockies, Al Levantin soaked in a view that reached forever. On his right and left jutted four of the continent’s ninety-two peaks over fourteen thousand feet. At his feet stretched the neatly restored mining town, Georgetown, that once was the world’s greatest producer of silver. Behind his back, though, was a view more difficult to understand.

  Greg Miller lagged hundreds of feet below on the ridge. He clearly wasn’t used to mountains, snow, or exercise two miles above sea level. His face was a shade of red not often seen in nature. He looked about halfway to a heart attack. Levantin hoped Miller was okay. He still couldn’t see how he was losing to this guy.

  There were only fourteen days left in the year, and Levantin trailed Miller by three birds. If this were an ordinary competition, Levantin would be going all-out right now to crush his opponent. But there was a code of honor among top birders: if one asked for help, the other provided it. Greg Miller had asked Al Levantin for help. He still needed a white-tailed ptarmigan, a bird that Levantin had seen in his own home state ten months ago. To show Miller a ptarmigan, Levantin would have to drive two and a half hours from his house at Snowmass, spend even more time climbing mountains just beyond the Continental Divide, then drive two and a half hours back. Of course, Miller had already guided Levantin to a gray partridge in that neighborhood in Boise. But a partridge was a drive-by bird. Ptarmigans were work.

  Levantin checked again down the slope. Miller really was struggling. When they’d started trekking from the saddle of 11,600-foot Guanella Pass, the snow had been packed tight. That had changed higher up. Here, the top layer was strong enough to support Levantin but not all 225 pounds of Miller, whose feet kept crashing through the crust into the soft powder below. Postholing, they called it—walking gingerly on a wind-packed snow crust until you suddenly blasted through, like a stake being rammed in for a rancher’s fence. It made for a brutal contrast: there was Levantin, scampering like a goat high up the ridgeline, and Miller, gasping and heaving through snow up to his thighs. Postholing meant Miller expended twice the energy to go half the distance. He was still sick from Attu. Wheezing, grunting, stumbling—the noise was tremendous. Levantin could do nothing to help. He pressed on ahead.

  Besides, he had company. At the trailhead they’d met another birder who had just seen the ptarmigan. After picking up his camera in the car, the stranger had agreed to show the birds to Levantin and Miller. Levantin did not want to offend the helper with a slow pace up the mountain. As a general rule, Levantin tried not to offend large men with few teeth.

  So Levantin and the gap-grinned stranger played the engine to Miller’s caboose. If a Big Year were won on physical fitness, this would be no contest. Levantin could outrun, outhike, and out-jump both Miller and Komito. But in the car ride up the mountain this morning, Levantin had learned there was one thing Miller outdid him at—boat trips. Miller had scored five extra seabirds this year, more than enough to erase Levantin’s land-species advantage. Levantin couldn’t believe it. He was supposed to win at sea. He had kept getting sick again and again because it was his ticket to the biggest list. Now it turned out that Miller had out-sailed him. The mere realization turned Levantin queasy again.

  Halfway up the ridge, Miller felt iffy, too. The air here was thinner than his hair; he sucked so hard that he swore he could taste his lungs. Was this bird really worth it? Twice in the 1970s he had tried for ptarmigan on Guanella Pass and failed, but those attempts were in summer and involved no hiking. This felt as if he were back on his bike at Attu.

  “Greg! Up here!”

  A hundred yards up the ridge, Levantin was yelling. Miller’s first reaction: How did he have enough oxygen to be so loud? Second reaction: Run!

  Miller blasted through the snow. He was no Prancer, but he wasn’t going to come this far for one bird and miss it. He made it ten feet up the slope before running out of air. Slow down, Levantin urged him. The birds weren’t going anywhere. Miller calmed down. It was fatherly advice, which Levantin certainly was old and wise enough to be dispensing.

  Levantin doubled back down the slope to help Miller with the final ascent. Miller was grateful for the hand, but even more grateful for the news. At least ten ptarmigan huddled at the top of the rise.

  Miller’s adrenaline took over. Eighty more yards and he would be there. He postholed two steps, rested, then postholed two more. His head swirled with altitude. Two steps, rest. Two steps, rest. This, he had heard, was how climbers conquered Mount Everest. Except Everest didn’t have life birds on top.

  This Colorado mountain did. With Levantin at his side, Miller finally reached the crest and was rewarded with a forty-foot view of his first white-tailed ptarmigan—a pigeon-size bird that lived its whole life in the rarefied atmosphere above timberline. Seeing a ptarmigan in winter plumage is one of the most lusted-after prizes in birding. Ivory white, with just the tiniest black dot of an eye and beak, the ptarmigan has such perfect winter camouflage that the best way to find a bird is to look for the shadow beneath it in the snow. Miller found one gray shadow, then another, and another. All ten ptarmigan were here, just as Levantin had promised. Miller wished he could enjoy an even closer look. But every time he raised his binoculars, body heat fogged over the glass. Steam swirled off his scalp.

  On the hike back down the mountain, Miller learned a new lesson about postholing: it’s a lot easier when you’re euphoric.

  As for Levantin, he wasn’t saying much. He had just given away the bird that would almost certainly cement him in third place. Levantin was now four birds behind Miller, 710 to 714. He had no chance of victory. But his honor was intact.

  TWENTY

  December 31, 1998

  On the last day of the Big Year, Greg Miller was so spent he couldn’t roust himself from bed. His head and nose were exploding. Both ears were infected. He had a weeks-old hundred-degree fever. For all this, he blamed Attu. He wanted to chase a snowy owl, the one bird he could have had and should have had, but he was lucky to reach the bathroom. Just after he’d split up with Al Levantin in Colorado, Miller had found a brown-capped rosy-finch, his 715th bird for the year. It was the third-highest total in the history of Big Years. He had flown eighty-seven thousand miles and driven another thirty-six thousand. He had spent $31,000. All six credit cards were maxed out. He remained in hock to his parents, but his father was too proud to care. Miller sat up in bed and celebrated with two Tylenol and antibiotics.

  Al Levantin skied that day, but without binoculars. Snowmass had a thirty-eight-inch base of snow, with a half inch of
fresh powder. The sun was brilliant. Like Miller, Levantin had taken off for one more bird—in his case, a black-tailed gull on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, No. 711 for the year—but he returned on December 23 tired of it all. The year had been fun. He had had his adventures. He’d survived 135,000 United Airlines miles, plus thousands on smaller carriers. But more than $60,000 later, he didn’t want to travel any more. He was home with his wife. He felt free.

  Sandy Komito, however, did not. On December 29, he left for Delray Beach, Florida. He wanted this trip so badly that he agreed to sit in the main cabin—he had flown first-class for almost every other trip of his Big Year—and in a middle seat. Sitting in the center wasn’t so bad, Komito thought, until he saw his seatmate board the plane. It was a woman, large, very large, so large that when she sat, Komito swore he was being smothered by an avalanche of polyester. He was horrified, but too scared to say anything, for fear that she might talk back. Her body touched his the entire twoand half hour flight. When she rose, she left behind a sweat stain on the shoulder of Komito’s golf shirt. There were two days left in the Big Year. The lady had not sung yet.

  He had 744 birds. He hadn’t just broken the record. He had destroyed it. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had crushed a record, too, that summer, but each guy always had the other to goad him on. Komito competed mainly with himself. Sure, he made little comments about Levantin and Miller from time to time, but they had never come close to catching him, much less passing him. Komito had been in uncharted birding territory for his entire year. No one had ever seen so many birds so quickly. No one had ever built a record so dominant. So why did he care so much about one more bird in Florida?