Birding Without Borders Page 2

  The sun hung at a low angle, casting everything in its eerie glow. In the distance, I could see Trinity Island, a fifteen-mile-wide projection of ice and rock. It was too far away to make out the Gentoo and Chinstrap Penguins I knew were nesting in its sheltered harbor. Still, with a breeding colony so close, I figured I could spot one or two strays passing by. Penguins are perfectly capable of swimming hundreds of miles, and they like to rest on icebergs.

  But . . . no penguins. On top of that, the hot tub was getting cold. Outdoor hot tubs are not really made for Antarctica, and this one couldn’t keep up with the frigid temperature. If we didn’t hit the sauna soon, the four of us would turn into icicles.

  “Do goosebumps count as a bird?” asked Nicole, the young penguin researcher, and no one answered.

  In the austral summer, when phytoplankton flourishes in twenty-four-hour sunlight, the Southern Ocean is perhaps the single most productive place for life on Earth—and yet there were no signs of life at all, not a single whale spout or seal. In the so-called land of penguins, where was a penguin when you really—really—wanted one?

  Someone said: “You’re the worst birder in the world! How are you ever going to reach five thousand if you can’t even find number one?”

  Casey got out, then Katie. Water sloshed over the side of the hot tub and froze on the metal deck. Nicole took off. Which left just me, the self-described bird man, sitting alone in a half-filled, half-frozen hot tub in Antarctica near one o’clock in the morning, with zero penguins in sight.

  What could I do? Birds are fickle souls. I picked up a towel, followed the others inside to warm up, and abandoned my carefully scripted plan to spot my first bird of the year from a hot tub at the end of the world. All around me in the narrow corridors, people straggled toward their cabins. With the ship’s lights dimmed for dusk, a uniformed Russian officer soberly patrolled the bridge, and a Canadian bartender mopped up in the bar. Throughout the ship, people tucked into their bunks, and things settled down after a long and lively evening. Adventures awaited after breakfast—namely, a visit to a large penguin colony, where I was guaranteed to see thousands of the tuxedoed birds on the first day of the New Year.

  But I was just too keyed up to sleep. After most everyone had ambled off to bed, I pulled on two layers of long underwear, wool socks, a pair of ski pants, a fleece sweater, a waterproof down jacket, a fleece neck warmer, a pair of insulated waterproof gloves, a wool toque, a pair of fleece-lined waterproof boots, and binoculars, and headed out. This time, instead of staking out the upper deck, with its expansive view, I made my way to the very back of the ship, where I could look down its roiling wake. Wedged on the stern deck between a winch, a large crane, coils of rope, and several inflatable Zodiac boats lashed in place, I stood sheltered from the wind by a metal dumpster storing all of the expedition’s garbage, and leaned on the rail.

  This was my favorite spot on the ship. Personal space is scarce on a 383-foot-long vessel occupied by 140 people, so I retreated here whenever I wanted a moment alone. Nobody ever went behind the dumpster. Plus, some species of seabirds like to follow vessels, and I often saw birds coursing the wake, occasionally hanging in the breeze almost close enough to touch. None was visible now, but at least this was a nice vantage point.

  Could I really spend a whole year birding the world without burning out? I wasn’t sure. From now until the end of December, I planned to do nothing else. I would be so focused that I’d skip some of the great wonders of the world—Machu Picchu in Peru and the Taj Mahal in India—just for a couple more hours of stalking birds in the nearby forests. Was that gauche? My friends love to poke fun at me for constantly chasing birds, and I admit that “taking time off” is kind of a foreign concept. But 365 days of predawn awakenings, total strangers, and nonstop, grueling travel would test the limits, sort of like a drug addict doing nothing but cocaine for a year. If it didn’t completely break me down, it would leave me high as a kite.

  There was only one way to find out if I could hack it, and now I was committed.

  My watch read 3 A.M. Suddenly, a hundred yards out, something flickered among the icebergs. In the low light, it almost escaped detection—appearing as a dark speck skimming the surface, zigzagging on broad tacks, gradually approaching the ship.

  I knew what it was before even raising my binoculars. This bird flew on stiff wings, riding intricate wind currents deflected from waves; every now and then it flapped a series of snappy beats to change direction, but mostly it just glided on air. It was the length of a football and equally plump. Its head was matte black, contrasting with immaculately white underwings and belly, and its tail was dark. But the bird’s most striking feature resolved when it banked toward me and swooped low, below eye level. The upper sides of its wings were spattered with frosty black and white blobs, a crisp vision of abstract expressionism.

  Many people call this bird a “pintado,” literally meaning painted, because of its splotchy appearance, but in proper English I had spotted a Cape Petrel, a relatively common Southern Ocean bird that nests on remote cliffs. Although Cape Petrels occasionally spew stomach oil from their beaks in fits of foul humor, they are admired and well liked by most people lucky enough to encounter them. This tough little seabird, trying to keep pace next to the ship at three in the morning, might not be a penguin, but it was perfect.

  Petrels, in their infinite grace, are thought to be named for Saint Peter and his habit of walking on water. With a blessing like that, the Year of the Petrel was off to an auspicious start.

  2

  The DSP

  ACCORDING TO THE American Birding Association’s Recording Rules and Interpretations, a bird must be “alive, wild, and unrestrained” for official consideration on a birder’s list of sightings, be it a world list, year list, world year list, life list, national list, state list, county list, month list, yard list, feeder list, birds-seen-while-driving list, or any other list. In other words, dead birds don’t count, and you can’t rack up exotic sightings in zoos and aviaries. Any bird “under the influence of captivity” is as illegal as can be.

  The rulebook has a few more interesting tidbits. Webcams are a no-no for listing. Eggs don’t count until they hatch, and chickens, as domestic animals, don’t count at all (except the Red Junglefowl of Asia, the wild ancestor of barnyard stock). You can put an injured bird on your list, but not a perfectly healthy hybrid; to be countable, a bird must have the traits of one recognized species. Heard-only encounters are fine so long as recorders “assure themselves” that they aren’t listening to someone else playing a tape from the bushes, a circumstance that happens surprisingly often.

  Otherwise, keeping your list is up to you. Many people assume that birders must document every sighting as if collecting evidence for a court case, but that misses the spirit of the game. As a practical matter, it would be impossible to photograph them all—birds are often too far away or flitting too quickly to get a shot—and anyway, birding works on the honor system.

  Not that a few con artists haven’t tried to fudge the facts. Birders even have a name for them: fakers are called “stringers,” and fabricating a sighting is “stringing.” In one particularly egregious case several years ago in Australia, a birder announced his intention to see as many bird species as he could in one year in his home state. He spent the first few months notching up an impressive list of sightings, started a blog, and built a following. About halfway through the year, some local experts began to get suspicious; then, in a dramatic stroke, the guy was caught red-handed: he reported a frigatebird—a tropical species rarely seen in that part of Australia—and posted a photo of it flying against a blue sky. When it was pointed out that the weather on that day was cloudy, the man broke down and, in a long and cringing confession on the regional email list, admitted that he’d actually photographed the bird on a trip to Fiji. For such blatant stringing, the man was blacklisted by the birding community. As they say, you can lose your reputation only once.

 
But birding scandals are rarer than a Diademed Sandpiper-Plover. It’s pretty easy to tell if someone’s faking it, and there isn’t much reason to make it up. Adding bogus birds to your list is like lying to your diary. What’s the point?

  Most birdwatching transgressions involve far more minor infractions. For everyday situations, the American Birding Association (ABA) maintains a “Code of Birding Ethics,” which outlines respectable field behavior and follows common sense: don’t stress birds; give nests enough space; respect private property; keep your bird feeders clean. The ethical code advises birders to “be especially helpful to beginning birders” and “support the protection of important bird habitat.”

  The rules leave a few gray areas. For instance, if you snap a photo and later discover a bird in the image that you hadn’t noticed before, can you count it? If you are standing near an international border and spot a bird on the other side, can you record it for a country in which you have never set foot? Situations like these come up constantly, and not all birders give the same answers.

  Also, just because the rules allow certain birds, it doesn’t mean you have to count them. Some birders count only self-found sightings, omitting any bird first identified by someone else. Others, who designate themselves NIB—“no introduced birds”—try to keep their lists pure by excluding non-native species. The thorny subject of introduced birds involves various official committees and whole swaths of gray areas. In short, established feral species are legitimate, but the word “established” has inspired heated debates. Even the term “native” is problematic.

  The most contentious part of the ABA’s recording rules is Rule 4, Section B, which allows birds that are heard but not seen. Despite this rule, many birdwatchers note only visual sightings and pay little attention to sounds beyond the most familiar ones. Jotting down heard-only birds can seem almost like cheating; some species that are phenomenally difficult to spot, like cryptic owls and skulking rails, are relatively easy to hear. Few people would dispute that the distant call note of a Stygian Owl is somehow less satisfying than having the bird itself stare back at you. And yet some bird species have such distinctive calls, why wouldn’t you count them, even if you didn’t see them?

  For my Big Year, I decided to tally both seen and heard birds. The previous single-year world record had counted heard-onlys, so I’d be applying the same standard. Also, it’s better for the birds: listening has less impact than playing recordings, trampling through a bird’s territory, or flushing it in a desperate attempt to get a visual. Many species are best appreciated by their sound, anyway; one might argue that you haven’t really experienced a Screaming Piha until you’ve heard one. Vocalizations are as reliable as visual field marks, and lots of drab-looking species have lovely, distinctive songs. In wide-open environments, such as Antarctica and the Chilean Andes, it’s easy to see almost everything; but in places such as the Amazon, where birds hide in thick jungles, the soundscape becomes more important. By the end of this year, I would identify about 5.5 percent of the birds I encountered—one in eighteen species—by ear alone.

  Although hard to believe in this globalized age, there is no single, agreed-upon checklist of all the bird species on Earth. Instead, we have competing interpretations: the Americans versus the rest of the world. In the United States, most birders use the Clements Checklist, which is periodically updated by experts at Cornell University and which recognized 10,365 living bird species while I traveled in 2015. In Europe and other parts of the world, birders tend to rely instead on the International Ornithological Congress (IOC), a progressive committee that acknowledged 10,612 species in 2015. Some countries, notably the Netherlands and Brazil, have adopted their own, even more liberal checklists. The trouble is, birds don’t always fit into neat boxes, and many so-called species blur into each other. On top of that, scientists lately have been re-evaluating birds around the world with DNA evidence, and in the past couple of decades they’ve proposed thousands of “splits”—dividing one species into two or more—narrowing our definition of what a species should be.

  You need rules to play the game, and for my year I adopted the Clements Checklist—the American standard. It helped that eBird, the app I use to keep track of sightings, is based on the same checklist. Along the way, I would keep notes on subspecies, too, so that it would be possible to dynamically adjust the tally. These days, a list of birds is more software than hardware, and keeping it up to date presents an unending task.

  ✧-✧-✧

  A week after the New Year, high in the Andes Mountains of central Chile, I went looking for an oddball animal called the Diademed Sandpiper-Plover. Two local birders from Santiago, Fred Homer and Fernando Díaz Segovia, came along to help with the search, and the three of us were switchbacking up a magnificent Andean valley at dawn.

  Months before, I had asked a friend in Arizona if he knew any good birders in Chile, and he referred me to Fabrice Schmitt, a Frenchman who, after taking a teaching sabbatical in South America, had been inspired to move to Santiago to lead birdwatching tours. Fabrice replied right away with regrets that he would be on a trip to Antarctica when I arrived in Chile—but kindly put me in touch with Fred, who thoroughly embraced the mission.

  “We’ll meet you at the airport and dash off to hunt the birds,” Fred emailed, “and then we’ll rush you back with tires smoking.”

  Fred then called Fernando, a young Chilean biologist, who picked us up at oh-dark-thirty that morning. And that’s how it went: a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend—someone I had neither met nor even corresponded with—was now taking me to see one of the world’s most enigmatic birds in the world’s longest mountain range.

  The Diademed Sandpiper-Plover, or DSP as birders call it, is a peculiar creature, found only at high elevations in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. It is a shorebird that doesn’t live on the shore, apparently related to plovers but with a profile more like a sandpiper (hence the hyphenation). No other bird looks much like it: the DSP, about the size and shape of a dinner roll, has a dumpy body, fat yellow legs, a droopy beak, a deep reddish collar, finely barred underparts, and an upturned white mark behind each eye—the “diademed” part—that gives it a quizzical expression. The bird looks like it doesn’t mind being stared at but wonders why anyone would bother.

  You won’t stumble across one by accident unless you spend a lot of your spare time stumbling around desolate Andean bogs, as Fernando does. For the past few years, Fernando has been tracking sandpiper-plovers, trying to coax out their secrets. As part of a research project, he surveys likely looking habitat; for some reason, the DSP is reliably found in some bogs but not in others that look just the same, and nobody has figured out why the bird is so darned picky. Fernando also captures each bird so that he can mark it with color bands, which help identify individuals from a distance. Keeping track of all these little sandpiper-plovers is like following a soap opera, but maybe the data will unlock some of their mysteries.

  Fernando drove us in his freshly washed SUV up a dusty gravel road that emerged above tree line and continued, hacked into a cliff, up a steep-sided valley. The route was so narrow in places that only one vehicle could pass. When we nosed around a corner to find an oncoming car, Fernando painstakingly reversed along the sheer drop to a slightly wider spot, then folded in his side mirrors to allow the other vehicle to squeeze by.

  While we climbed, I sat in the passenger seat, my thoughts drifting back over the previous week. After kicking off the New Year with champagne and a Cape Petrel off the Antarctic Peninsula, the year’s bird count had progressed slowly. I quickly ran out of Antarctic birds to see, and on January 3—just the third day of the year—recorded no new species at all, notching my first zero day practically out of the starting gate. The pace picked up with albatrosses and other seabirds on the Drake Passage, followed by a fantastic morning at a colony of charismatic Southern Rockhopper Penguins in the Falkland Islands. But by the time our ship returned to port in Ushuaia, the w
orld’s southernmost city at the southern tip of Argentina, I’d recorded only 53 species of birds in the first seven days of the year. With the need to average 13.7 new species each day—about one bird for every daylight hour—to break 5,000 by the end of December, my score was already lagging.

  A full week in Antarctica wasn’t exactly strategic, because there aren’t enough species on the whole continent to keep up this average. If I had scheduled the same time somewhere in the tropics, I would have seen two or three hundred birds by now, well ahead of the target pace—starting my marathon with a sprint rather than a lope. But then I would have missed the world’s coldest and driest and windiest continent, with its massive colonies of Adélie and Chinstrap Penguins, spouting humpback and minke whales, impossibly blue icebergs, and unparalleled ice cap. To me, Antarctica underlined, from the beginning, that this year was not just about numbers. Any global journey that skipped Antarctica wouldn’t be as cool.

  Still, as our ship neared the dock, I was ready to pick up the pace. I felt light and happy. Everything lay before me—uncertainty, opportunity, and a limitless planet of birds and birders. The sun bathed the world in a hopeful light, and I had the exhilarating feeling that I was exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing. There would be challenges, but I was eager to explore. I was a little apprehensive, too. I couldn’t help wondering whether the local birder I planned to meet would actually show up.