Birding Without Borders Read online

  On the plus side, I figured I didn’t have yellow fever, because I had been immunized against it. And I probably didn’t have tetanus, diphtheria, or pertussis—potentially life-threatening bacterial diseases—because I had gotten a Tdap vaccine, along with a polio booster, a flu shot, and a hepatitis A vaccine, in one ghastly pre–Big Year medical visit that ended with me, and my lifelong blood-injection-injury phobia, in a dead faint. I had to be revived by three nurses with smelling salts.

  It’s easy, when you’re far from home, to panic when you get sick, and I tried my best to keep calm. After all, the likelihood of contracting a scary disease is small compared to many other things that could go wrong. I had come down with a flu, that was all, and I tried not to think of all the diseases described as having “flu-like symptoms.”

  When we reached the town of Jaén, Carlos’s phone rang. It was Gunnar, calling from Lima to check on our progress. He had been planning to fly up and join us that afternoon but said he’d missed his flight because of heavy traffic, so he would try to catch us the next day.

  Carlos handed me the phone.

  “Hey Gunnar, I’m not feeling well,” I said.

  “How bad is it?” he asked. “Did you see a Henna-hooded Foliage-Gleaner?”

  “No,” I said. “I really need to lie down now.”

  “Always got to be one of those days,” he said, philosophically. “Listen, you still have time to try for a few birds near Jaén this afternoon. I know a great spot. Just head out by the Utcubamba River—”

  “Gunnar, I can’t talk now,” I said, suddenly violently dizzy and nauseated.

  I hung up and handed the phone back to Carlos.

  “You should rest,” he said, looking concerned. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital? You’re very pale.”

  “I just need to lie down for a while,” I said. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  We checked into a hotel, where I splurged on an air-conditioned room all to myself.

  “I don’t want to keep you up with coughing and all that,” I explained to Glenn. Mostly I just wanted to be alone. Despite my efforts to keep calm, I was already wallowing in self-pity.

  Once sealed in my room, I jacked up the AC, curled into the fetal position on the center of the bed, shut my eyes, and tried to dismiss the feeling of having been run over by a garbage truck. Chills came in waves, shaking my body, which ached from head to toe. The emotions came pouring out, too; I suddenly felt wretchedly homesick, lonely, and scared. Several times I crawled into the bathroom on all fours but couldn’t throw up. Sweat soaked the sheets, leaving me shivering uncontrollably under a mountain of soggy covers. Making matters worse, I felt vaguely guilty for being so miserable, because when you are living the dream, as I clearly was, you are supposed to be happy. The hours ticked slowly by.

  My fever lasted well into the night. Carlos and Glenn checked in a few times, but otherwise I lay immobile for hour upon hour, thinking dark thoughts. I had been pushing hard without a break since the beginning of the year, with early starts and late nights almost every day. My system had maxed out. Glenn and I had talked about it a couple of days ago, and his words came back to me now.

  “A lot of people assume it’s a sprint,” he said, “but nobody can sprint hard for an entire year. That’s crazy. Your year of birding is more like an endurance event, and it’s not even a marathon. It’s more of an ultramarathon, so long and complicated that it’s impossible to reach the finish line without approaching it in sections. You can’t peak too early; you have to pace yourself.”

  Now, sacked out and staring at the ceiling, Glenn’s point struck me hard. I’d finished several marathons in past years, enough to understand the importance of pacing. Professional athletes know that world distance records are usually set with negative splits—in other words, the second half of a race is run faster than the first half—and I supposed that this Big Year might be just the same. Expending too much energy during the first couple of months could set an unsustainable pace. It was still only February and I had a long way to go, the equivalent of being just four miles into a 26.2-mile marathon. Yet I could already feel the exhaustion setting in after so many long days without rest. Perhaps getting the flu was my body’s way of telling me to cut it some slack.

  With my energy at its lowest ebb, one bright thought came shining through: I knew for certain that I would not quit. My main worry from the start had been the possibility of getting burned out on my favorite activity. Now my sagging spirits were soothed somewhat by the sharp realization that burning out was not going to be a problem. If I could remain enthusiastic during the worst moments, then I could be sure that birding wouldn’t get stale. My sense of purpose was still strong. I just had to believe that my body would bounce back. Really, the most frustrating part of getting sick was that it kept me from looking for birds.

  The following morning, I wobbled downstairs with binoculars ready. Carlos stood by the front desk and looked up with surprise.

  “What are you doing up?” he asked. “You look terrible.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll feel a lot better if we can find some birds today,” I said, with a half smile.

  I’d been in bed for eighteen painful hours and hadn’t eaten anything in more than a day, but the fever had broken and I could stand up without vomiting. Might as well go birding.

  Carlos tried to dissuade me, but then, surprisingly, Gunnar walked into the room—apparently he had managed to catch a late flight from Lima and had arrived during the night.

  “Ready to rock?” he asked, grinning broadly.

  “Let’s go find a spatuletail!” I answered.

  Our posse trundled out of Jaén, a little worse for wear but glad to be on the road again. If anything, I was now more committed: a case of the flu only made me want to see more birds.

  The Marvelous Spatuletail spot was another two days’ drive eastward, and by the time we arrived there I was feeling well enough to walk in the forest. I had a hacking cough that threatened to break my ribs, but a course of Azithromycin was helping with that, and as long as I could function enough to continue birding, the quest was on.

  We parked at the Huembo Reserve, near the town of Pomacochas in the Utcubamba Valley—the only valley where you can reliably find a Marvelous Spatuletail—late in the afternoon. Huembo is a conservation success story, a ninety-six-acre sanctuary set up by the American Bird Conservancy and the Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (a Peruvian conservation organization) as an easement with the local community; a small shade-grown coffee plantation supplements entrance fees to protect the land from deforestation. Several feeders are always kept full of nectar for hummingbirds, and some benches have been arranged for birders to sit on while waiting for the star of the show to appear.

  This particular star is worth biding time for. Even without its bizarre tail feathers, a male Marvelous Spatuletail is unmistakable: tiny, fierce-looking, with a spiky purple crest, green throat, and a flashy black line down the center of its body. But it’s the bird’s tail that sets it dramatically apart, earning it the distinction of “world’s most spectacular hummingbird.” (Practically all of the world’s 342 species of hummers are gorgeous, so tread lightly with such superlatives—but this one has my vote.)

  Uniquely in the bird universe, spatuletails are born with only four individual tail feathers: A pair of stiff, pointy feathers in the center, flanked by two wildly elongated, curved shafts that cross over each other to end in round, shiny blue paddles. The effect is like two butterflies fluttering behind the bird’s body, each one moving independently of the bird itself. When it gets excited, a male spatuletail can whip these paddles back and forth over its head in a frenzied display, waving them like semaphores to attract the attention of a nearby female. (You can’t make this stuff up; check out the videos on YouTube.) Otherwise, he seems content to carry his strange tail around like a miniature turbocharged peacock.

  As with the Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager, this bird is both stunni
ng and rare—a knockout combination. Marvelous Spatuletails are restricted to the eastern slope of one remote valley in northern Peru, occur in low numbers, and are thought to be declining; the species’ total population is estimated at fewer than 1,000 individuals. At the Huembo Reserve, Gunnar, Carlos, Glenn, and I sat down on a bench to watch dozens of hummingbirds, of ten species, swarm like bees around several sugar-water feeders. The sight was mesmerizing.

  “Bronzy Inca,” Gunnar said, when an unusually drab hummer darted in for a sip.

  “Long-tailed Sylph!” exclaimed Carlos, gesturing toward a hummingbird with shimmering tail feathers longer than its own body.

  “Ooh, and a woodstar,” I said, pointing out one that flew like a bumblebee. “Maybe a White-bellied?”

  “Sí,” Carlos confirmed. “Good call!”

  So many hummingbirds surrounded us that they demanded full attention, and after nearly an hour I realized that I was completely captivated—for the first time in three days, I had forgotten all about the flu. These hummingbirds were as good as a swarm of antibodies.

  It’s amazing, I reflected, what we will do for our passions, and what our passions will do for us. At home I might still have been flat in bed, but here I was in remote Peru, barely even aware that my body was out of whack. The crisp mountain air, good company, and onslaught of birds offered a healing combination, and the real star hadn’t even materialized yet.

  I was beginning to wonder if he’d keep his appointment when the male Marvelous Spatuletail, species number 1,235, zipped out of nowhere, briefly lit on a twig to scan the scene, and moved in aggressively for his turn at the feeder. The effect was like a rock star stepping onstage. His little tail paddles bobbed along behind, floating like a twin escort of pea-sized helicopters while he slurped down sugar water. Light scattered from his iridescent head and throat patches, sending neon beams of green and violet into space. When you’re so small and quick, predators aren’t a big worry, and this bird flaunted himself like he owned the forest.

  “Dang,” Glenn said. “That is some crazy, crazy bird.”

  It is impossible to put into words what washed over me just then: euphoria, transcendence, a sense of things coming together. I was ecstatic and pensive, filled with adrenaline. The hummingbird was magnificent, but its allure owed as much to desire as beauty. Because I had spent so many years scrutinizing this bird in books and magazines, it almost didn’t seem real in three dimensions.

  There is something metaphysical about the human connection with nature, and we each find our own points of contact. For me, that afternoon, the Marvelous Spatuletail represented something far beyond a single bird. It distilled the whole experience of Peru, incarnated in avian form—all of the rough, raw material of an entire country compressed into one bright and shining diamond.

  ✧-✧-✧

  I spent two more weeks with Gunnar and crew, continuing to have adventures and misadventures. On a single day in Manú National Park, we survived two major landslides, a broken transmission, a flat tire, and a lost driver’s license, and twice had to be towed out of the mud before an agricultural workers’ strike completely shut down the road. We suffered torrential rain in the Amazon, endured the aftermath of a bus accident in the highlands, and briefly got lost in the forest one evening as darkness fell. I developed a bacterial lung infection that persisted for weeks afterward, despite two courses of antibiotics, and I couldn’t ever catch enough sleep.

  And just when we thought that was it, Peru had one last surprise. Immediately after Gunnar dropped me at the airport, he was mugged at a stoplight in Lima while sitting inside a taxi on the way home, and lost all of his birding gear.

  “All of a sudden there was a violent sound and the crash of glass splattered all over the back seat of the cab,” he recalled. “Before I realized what was happening, a dark-clad man reached in the window and grabbed my backpack containing practically all my working material. I was stunned.”

  In that instant, Gunnar lost both his cameras and telephoto lens, laptop, iPad, and GPS, among other things—particularly devastating because of the three years’ worth of photos on the computer’s hard drive. I felt terrible about the robbery. It was an awful way to end three wild weeks of birding.

  “In Peru it is best to count on things not going as you hope and be happy when they do,” once quipped John O’Neill, an acclaimed ornithologist and artist who has discovered more than a dozen species of birds within Peru since the early 1960s. That’s the nature of traveling in such a rough and beautiful country: you take the ups with the downs.

  Gunnar likes to reference O’Neill’s quote when things take unexpected turns.

  “The gods know I have learnt that lesson after years of living in Peru,” he said. “I never get worked up or get despair in these situations. Eventually things work out with some patience. Stay flexible and reassess the situation.”

  Whatever Peru cost us in wear and tear it more than paid back in birds. By the end of our twenty-one days, I had recorded 784 species in the country, more than I would see in any other nation during the year. Of those, 488 were new additions, and 242 turned out to be unique—not seen anywhere else. I left Peru with 1,468 birds on the year list, amped up by a huge boost in sightings. It could not have been done without the help of generous Peruvians and the unflappable genius of Gunnar Engblom.

  7

  An Angel of Peace

  LATE AT NIGHT, while waiting at Lima’s spacious Jorge Chávez International Airport for the plane to Ecuador, I remembered something Gunnar had mentioned a few days earlier. A young Dutch birder had announced his intention to spend 2016 birding around the world, and Gunnar was curious about my reaction. This was the first I’d heard of it. I had been so focused on strategizing my Big Year, and then so busy traveling off-grid during the Big Year itself, that I didn’t know anything about it. Now, sitting quietly at the gate, I pulled out my laptop and snooped around.

  From what I could tell, Gunnar was right: a man named Arjan Dwarshuis was indeed plotting a round-the-world birdwatching trip the following year. He seemed to live in Amsterdam and to spend most of his time out birding—he was almost the same age as me, just four months younger—and he had posted a map on his personal website, with an itinerary spanning about twenty countries. In Africa and the United States he’d arranged long road trips, and in various places he apparently had convinced friends and family to join him. It sounded like fun, though I didn’t think he could reach his goal of 5,000 species of birds with the route he had chosen. He appeared to be in it for the experience, and I hoped we might run into each other. It would be like meeting my Dutch twin.

  I’d always assumed that someone would come along and challenge any mark I set, even if this guy didn’t do it. For me, finding 5,000 birds was the game, but the real adventure was in the people I would meet, the places I would visit, and the stories and memories I would accumulate along the way. The third month into my Big Year, I wasn’t thinking too hard about the world record anyway, which was still thousands of birds away and months in the future, even if I got that far. Still, it was unsettling to imagine that the very instant I finished my own year, someone else would embark on a global tour and conceivably challenge my record. What if he was inspired by my quest to up his game? After all, he’d have the benefit of my successes and failures, like following a blueprint, and he could alter his strategy to squeeze out more birds.

  Slightly annoyed, I shut my laptop. Then, annoyed at feeling annoyed—what was this, a competition?—I boarded the plane, flew to Ecuador, and forgot, for the moment, all about it.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Ah, Ecuador: home of the Incas, fried guinea pigs, the world’s highest capital city, the farthest point from the center of the Earth, and, acre for acre, the highest biodiversity of any country—all within an area smaller than the state of Colorado.

  For birds, Ecuador offers nothing short of a tropical paradise. Virtually every habitat is represented, from coastal deserts to snow-capped p
eaks to the Amazon basin, and more than 1,700 species have been recorded—16 percent of the world’s birds on less than 0.0006 percent of its land surface. For birders, conditions are just as alluring: unlike neighboring Peru or Colombia, Ecuador has a long history of conservation, is relatively stable and safe, has a well-developed infrastructure, and is small enough to cover efficiently. If you want to see the most species of birds in the shortest amount of time, Ecuador is without doubt the best place to do it.

  The importance of natural diversity in this tiny nation cannot be overstated. It’s even written in the constitution: Ecuador is the only country in the world to recognize “Rights of Nature”—the idea that ecosystems have inalienable rights, just like people do—at the highest legal level. “Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence,” states Article 71 of the country’s constitution, in accordance with the Ecuadorian concept of Buen Vivir, which emphasizes harmony with other people and nature above material development.

  This constitution was passed in 2008 following the election of Rafael Correa, a former economics professor who campaigned for president on a popular socialist platform. It didn’t stop Correa from auctioning 12,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest to Chinese oil companies in 2013, or from overturning a ban on the sale of shark fins, but at least he pays attention to the environment. I once bumped into him, almost literally, when he visited the Galápagos Islands before being sworn into office during the fall of 2006. I was there on a study abroad program with the university where he used to work. He looked at me and said, “I used to teach here, but now I’m the elected president!” Correa remains the only national president I’ve ever met in person, for better or worse.

  After the nonstop intensity of Peru, Quito felt immediately friendly and familiar. In past years I had spent about eight months in Ecuador, on three separate trips—more than any other country outside the United States—and now I looked forward to revisiting some old haunts and familiar birds.