Birding Without Borders Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Map

  Foreword

  End of the World

  The DSP

  Cerro Negro

  Over the Years

  The Harpy

  Gunning It

  An Angel of Peace

  Flying Free

  Home

  Missed Connections

  Photos

  Kalu

  The Karamoja Apalis

  A New World Record

  Hit and Miss

  Birds in Paradise

  From End to End

  Acknowledgments

  Gear for a Big Year

  Big Year Snapshot

  Big Year Species List

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Noah Strycker

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-55814-4

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Image (map) © Sorendls/Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-55815-1

  v1.0917

  Foreword

  Birds are real. If I had to justify extreme birding, that would be my first defense. Even as we dash around in a mad quest for the biggest list of bird sightings, we’re keenly attuned to reality—not just the birds but also geography, weather patterns, forest types, tide schedules, and myriad other factors, because everything in nature is connected. Other people may take up hobbies to escape reality, but birding has the opposite draw. It’s a deep dive into the real world.

  A year is also a real thing—one orbit around the sun—and yearlong birding efforts are the epitome of extreme birding. The first “Big Years” were done in the 1890s by Lynds Jones and W. L. Dawson in Lorain County, Ohio, cooperating and competing to run up their county tallies. By the 1930s, a few birders were competing for the biggest annual list for all of North America north of Mexico. The popularity of the pursuit has been creeping up ever since, and so have the totals produced. Recent North American Big Year champs have pushed the theoretical maximum and cratered their bank accounts by flying back and forth across the continent, chasing every rarity that strayed within our boundaries.

  I myself did a Big Year as a teenager in the 1970s, on a very modest budget, but the restriction of boundaries rankled. I took time out for three trips into Mexico that year, even though birds south of the border wouldn’t “count.” The allure of tropical diversity was irresistible. Even then, the wide world of variety beckoned more than the idea of birding within borders.

  Peter Alden, a pioneer leader of international birding tours, had ticked more than 2,000 species globally during 1968. We all thought that was cool, but in that era, no one seriously thought about topping that score. World birding was hard. Thousands of tropical bird species had never been illustrated at all, and good field guides existed only for North America, Europe, and South Africa. Bird-finding publications were almost unheard-of outside the United States. Birding tours still took in relatively few destinations. For my friends and me, an overseas birding trip involved weeks of preparation, and often more research afterward to figure out what we’d seen. As rewarding as these trips were, no one wanted to cram too many into a single year.

  In the few decades since that time, world birding has gone through two major revolutions, utterly changing the game.

  The first big change, gradual but massive, has been the information explosion. Today, every known bird species has been superbly illustrated. Practically anywhere on Earth, we can choose among multiple bird ID guides. Thousands of “mystery birds” are now less mysterious, their secrets revealed. Excellent sound recordings make all the difference in finding elusive targets, especially in dense tropical haunts. At one time, if you wanted to see a Zigzag Heron, for example, you wandered in the Amazon Basin for a year and prayed for a miracle. Now that its voice and precise habitats are known, this weird little wader isn’t hard to find.

  An even bigger change is the emergence of a worldwide community. Not long ago birding was a lopsided pursuit, popular in a few English-speaking countries, plus northern Europe and Japan. Between these silos of activity, communication was limited. The rise of the Internet changed that. Listservs brought about instant communication among the continents. Social media like Facebook even broke the language barrier with the sharing of bird photos and automated translation. At the same time, local birding communities have sprung up in most nations. In the past, if you wanted advice on birding Colombia, you sought out North Americans or Europeans who had been there. Today that country has a thriving birding scene, and Colombian experts know their own avifauna better than any outsider. Knowledge is now decentralized. And since birders everywhere tend to be open and sharing, travelers now have vastly more potential sources of help.

  For birding the world, the biggest driver of change is eBird, the massive online database of bird sightings. Launched in 2002, eBird was limited to North America at first, going global in 2010. Its acceptance and growth worldwide have been phenomenal, and it utterly changes how we perceive the potential in distant lands. Once, when reading about Blyth’s Hawk-Eagle in the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, it would have seemed impossibly remote. Now a few clicks into eBird will display half a dozen sites where the species has been seen within the last month, and we can check how consistent it is at those sites and who the local observers are. It’s no exaggeration to say that eBird has become the global hub for active birders.

  As world birding has evolved, the global year list record has pushed upward. The American ornithologist James Clements ran up a total over 3,600 in 1989—just before the Internet became a factor. An intrepid British couple, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, surpassed 4,300 species in 2008—just before eBird went global. The time was ripe for someone to push past 5,000, recording more than half the world’s birds in a single year. The previous champs—Alden, Clements, Davies, and Miller—have all been friends of mine, and I watched with keen interest to see who would be next.

  We could not have hoped for a better contender than Noah Strycker. This brilliant young man was already a veteran of detailed field research, already renowned for writing about birds with depth and grace; no one could dismiss him as “just a lister.” In one carefully planned, continuous sprint around the globe, he shattered previous records. He also made a point of going native and connecting with local experts everywhere. The result is a thoughtful, vivid portrait of the world’s birds and birders.

  At this moment in history, it’s easier than ever to see birds worldwide . . . and all over the planet, birds face unprecedented perils. A pessimist might say we’re in the sweet spot between accessibility and extinction. I don’t see it that way. Noah Strycker turned up plenty of birds on his grand tour, but more important, he met people in every land who care passionately about those birds and who will fight for their survival. Everything in nature is connected, and as the birders of the world become more connected also, the reality of the future looks brighter already.

  —Kenn Kaufman

  March 2017

  1

  End of the World

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, superstitious birdwatchers like to say, the very first bird you see is an omen for the future. This is a twist on the traditional Chinese zodiac—which assigns each year to an animal, like the Year of the Dragon,
or Rat—and it’s amazingly reliable. One year, I woke up on January 1, glanced outside, and saw a Black-capped Chickadee, a nice, friendly creature that everybody likes. That was a fantastic year. The next New Year, my first bird was a European Starling, a despised North American invader that poops on parked cars and habitually kills baby bluebirds just because it can. Compared to the Year of the Chickadee, the Year of the Starling was pretty much a write-off.

  So it was with some anxiety that on January 1, 2015, I looked around to see which bird would set the tone for the next 365 days. I already knew this would be no ordinary year: I’d just quit my only regular job, broken up with my girlfriend, spent most of my savings, and then, cramming all my possessions into a small backpack, made my way literally to the end of the Earth. Now, at the stroke of midnight, on top of a Russian ship in the frozen reaches of Antarctica, with a bottle of champagne in both hands and binoculars dangling around my neck, I was in a hot tub with a Scottish historian, a penguin researcher, and a geologist. What bird could possibly tell where all of this was heading?

  With any luck, it would be a penguin. I’d gone to great lengths to engineer this New Year celebration just so that, right after the obligatory countdown and toast, 2015 could be declared the Year of the Penguin—which, karmically speaking, couldn’t possibly go wrong. In the previous week, I’d spent a lonely Christmas night on the floor of the Los Angeles airport, traveled from the United States to the southern tip of Argentina, caught this ship, sailed across the tumultuous Drake Passage, and positioned myself for this moment, this pivotal moment when fate would set in motion the biggest year of my life, and possibly of international birdwatching history.

  The goal was simple: in the next twelve months, I hoped to see 5,000 species of birds—about half the birds on Earth—in the ultimate round-the-world journey. After leaving Antarctica, I’d spend the next four months in South America, then migrate north through Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, reaching the United States in May. If things went well, I’d fly over to Europe, do a big U-turn through Africa, bounce around the Middle East, zigzag across most of Asia, and island-hop Down Under to ring in the following New Year. While the Earth completed one full orbit of the sun, I would visit forty countries with no days off. Nobody had ever attempted such a trip, and bird-brained experts argued about whether it was even possible to spot 5,000 species in one calendar year. By the end, the journey would surpass even my own wildest dreams. But for now, all I knew was that the clock started ticking at midnight.

  ✧-✧-✧

  The world’s most frequent fliers don’t have platinum status, free upgrades, or even passports. Every hour, millions of these undocumented immigrants pour across major political borders, and nobody thinks of building walls to keep them out. It would be impossible to anyway. Birds are true global citizens, free to come and go as they please.

  A few years ago, two British scientists tackled the question of how many individual birds are living on Earth—a sort of global avian census—and calculated that, at any given moment, between 200 and 400 billion feathered friends share this planet with us. That works out to something like forty birds for every human, spread from here to Timbuktu. Birds occupy almost every conceivable niche of our world, from the wild Amazon in South America to the heart of the Bronx in New York City. Even places that seem lifeless lie within their reach: intrepid birds have been recorded at the South Pole, winging over the summit of Mount Everest, and soaring across the open ocean hundreds of miles from land. As of 2015, 10,365 bird species had been identified on planet Earth, a number that only begins to hint at their sheer diversity. The smallest, the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba, could perch comfortably on the toenail of the largest, the Ostrich.

  Birding is a state of mind more than anything else, which makes it hard to define. Roger Tory Peterson, generally considered the father of modern birdwatching, once observed that birds are many things to many people: a science, an art, a sport. They can even, as Peterson’s friend James Fisher added with a wink, “be a bore, if you are a bore.” It’s a tough activity to pigeonhole, though many have tried; birding is hunting, collecting, and gambling rolled into one. Nobody can decide whether birdwatching constitutes an addiction, a release, or just a game played by khaki-clad eco-nerds.

  My own interest in birds was sparked innocently enough at the age of ten, when my fifth-grade teacher suction-cupped a clear plastic bird feeder to our classroom window. When I was twelve, my dad helped me build bluebird houses and took me to a birdwatching festival in eastern Oregon. Pretty soon I was dragging home rotting deer carcasses to attract and photograph Turkey Vultures, then deferring college to go study bird nests in Panama, then eschewing a nine-to-five job entirely, introducing myself as a “bird man” whenever anyone asked.

  From the beginning, the pursuit gave me a sense of purpose. By watching the skies, I began to see the world in different and unfamiliar ways, letting curiosity lead me to new places. By my mid-twenties, I’d spent more than a year and a half occupying tents in various remote corners of the world, in between avian research projects and expeditions, and accepted that there was no going back. I also had a growing, slightly uneasy sense that even if I kept it up for the rest of my life, there were just too many birds and too little time.

  The feeling of urgency seems to be everywhere. Psychologists call it FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), conservationists call it habitat loss, and Hollywood directors call it The Apocalypse. In terms of connecting with the outdoors, we live at an interesting moment. A hundred years ago, people watched birds in hopes of finding new species, but the golden age of ornithological discovery has mostly passed; virtually all birds are now thoroughly, scientifically described, and tucked away as musty specimens in museum collections. Today, people are drawn to birding for the exact opposite reason: to rediscover and celebrate nature at a time when significant chunks of society rarely venture outdoors. It’s poignant that, just as record numbers of people are paying attention, the birds themselves have never faced a more uncertain future. This planet is being cleared, flattened, tilled, drilled, paved, and developed at an unprecedented rate. What that means for birds, humans, and the rest of the world is unclear.

  As easy as it is to get discouraged, birders are a particularly optimistic, action-oriented group. They know that you won’t see much if you stare at the wall all day. They also know that some experiences can’t be duplicated digitally. There is a special joy in watching an actual Scarlet Tanager instead of looking at a virtual red bird, however spectacular, on a phone screen. And by setting their sights on the freest creatures in the world, birders have a unique perspective about how their subjects stitch together even the farthest parts of our globe. Birds teach us that borders are just lines drawn on a map—a lesson we can all take to heart.

  As my thirtieth birthday loomed, a grand plan emerged: to travel the planet, meet its most passionate birders, perhaps set a fun record, and take a unique snapshot of Earth, all in one swoop. I set out to see the world, one bird at a time.

  ✧-✧-✧

  About a hundred passengers and forty crew had converged for this Antarctic expedition, advertised as “New Year’s Eve among Emperors and Kings”—a reference to the world’s two largest penguin species. If you’re going to see the world, you might as well start at the end of it, and Antarctica seemed like the perfect beginning for my yearlong journey.

  As the official onboard ornithologist on this cruise for Canada-based One Ocean Expeditions, it was my job to point out the penguins and other wildlife until the ship returned to Argentina a week after the New Year. We traveled on the Akademik Ioffe, a Soviet-era vessel ostensibly built for oceanographic research but rumored to have once scouted American submarines during the Cold War. The trip’s passenger manifest included doctors, lawyers, business people, technogeeks, and a variety of well-traveled and well-heeled types from South Africa, Australia, the United States, Europe, and other scattered countries, about a third of whom were bucket-listing their sevent
h continent. The interpretive staff, by contrast, were younger, free-spirited souls like me, many of them experts in their field, who could happily spend extended periods in remote parts of the world. This was my nineteenth polar expedition in the past three seasons, and it would be my last for a while.

  As midnight arrived, strains of “Auld Lang Syne” wafted up from the ship’s bar two decks below while four of us soaked in the hot tub outside. The geologist, a master’s student named Casey from New York’s Stony Brook University, shook up a champagne bottle and popped its cork like a starting gun. Its contents sprayed freezing foam on everything in sight.

  “Happy New Year!” we shouted.

  A few passengers emerged from the bar to take cell phone videos of us. Most people, which is to say normal people, don’t celebrate New Year’s by spraying champagne at each other in a hot tub in Antarctica. I gingerly shielded my binoculars. It was hard to focus because the whole world seemed to be rocking. Maybe it was the ship moving, or the champagne, or the general mayhem, or the hundred thousand miles of unknown lying ahead. But . . . no birds! Not one! Oh, I desperately wanted to find a penguin.

  The Scottish historian, a red-haired doctoral candidate named Katie, caught my eye. “Well? Do you see anything?”

  In the midnight sun, the view from the hot tub, strategically perched on the ship’s upper deck, was unbeatable. Thousands of sculpted icebergs, glistening in shades of cobalt, sapphire, and steel, dotted the ocean as far as the eye could see, with a narrow line of dazzling glacier faces tracing the Antarctic mainland on one horizon. An artistic friend, inspired by a similar sight, once confided to me his idea to carve a few bergs to psych out passengers of passing ships: just imagine sailing past a mansion-sized block of ice in the Southern Ocean shaped like Mickey Mouse. But my friend was forced to admit that human creativity has nothing on the brute forces of nature, especially down here. An iceberg the length of a football field weighs a million tons, about the same as, oh, the annual wheat import in Ethiopia; and in the icy waters of the southern sea, I’ve seen bergs several miles wide. A few years ago, a chunk broke off the Ross Ice Shelf south of New Zealand that was bigger than the entire land surface of Jamaica; it drifted for several years, interfering with penguin and ship traffic alike. In this part of the world, the ice is likely tens of thousands of years old—perfect for an aged whiskey on the rocks—and the tip of an iceberg above water truly is only about a tenth of its full size. Watching icebergs is like watching birds: the more you think about them, the more insignificant you feel, and only gradually do you begin to sense how much lies beneath the surface.