Birding Without Borders Page 4
The Torrent Ducks swam by as if paddling on a glassy pond, then hauled out on a rock between two waterfalls and watched while we struggled across, dried our feet, and put our shoes back on.
Dark clouds were gathering in earnest now, obscuring the peaks in a heavy blanket. I remembered that I had landed in Jujuy only a few hours ago, and had been birding with Marcelo and Martin just yesterday afternoon, more than eight hundred miles away. The ranchlands of Buenos Aires already felt like a distant memory. Freddy pointed to a gap in the trees where the trail began to climb, and we walked into the forest just as the first rumble of thunder echoed down the valley.
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Going solo and being alone are two very different things. I went solo in 2011 when I hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, a backcountry route up the American West from Mexico to Canada, but I spent much of the time in company with other people. It would have been hard not to: hundreds of hikers attempt to walk the whole thing each year, and about 95 percent of them take the northerly option, as I did, to follow the progression of summer. During four “solo” months in the backcountry, I saw at least one other person every single day, and often hiked and camped with others.
On my Big Year, I was also going solo, in the sense that I planned the trip myself and that nobody traveled with me from place to place, but I didn’t want to go birding alone. I made a point of seeking out bird-minded companions in each country I visited. Applying the lessons I’d learned from long-distance hiking, I went ultralight for the year, carrying only a forty-liter backpack with trail-tested gear and traveling in a steady progression to the seven continents, with no days off and no jumping around. A one-way trip requires no backtracking, so I always looked forward to new territory ahead, but I couldn’t sync my itinerary with local seasons in scattered parts of the globe, so I’d miss some bird-migration hotspots and hit other places during the not-ideal monsoons.
I set some ground rules. Every bird that I would count, for the whole year, would have to be seen by at least one other person. That would keep me from getting lonely, and, as a side benefit, would provide backup witnesses for each sighting. Also, I decided, my companions should all be locals, living in the same country where we went birding together. It would have been easy to hire professional guides from international tour companies to show me around, but that didn’t exactly fit my style; I didn’t have the budget, for one thing, and I’d always rather go out with friends than as a client. Connecting with locals became a key part of my strategy—this would be the couch-surfing version of birding trips.
A decade ago, such a concept would have been difficult to pull off, but technology has shrunk the world so that it’s now easier to call someone up in another country than to get the attention of your roommate. The Internet has revolutionized birding: what was once a leisure pursuit for the First World has suddenly become a truly international pastime. Now anyone with an interest can find all kinds of helpful information online—and, even more important, get in touch with sympathetic souls through email lists, discussion groups, and forums.
Finding all of these local birders and arranging plans with each of them was a tricky logistical challenge. After settling my basic itinerary, I started looking for the best birders in each place who might be willing to host me for a few days. First I asked friends I already knew; then I asked them for their contacts, and so on. Some people were busy, but almost everyone replied with enthusiasm when I explained the project. To find Freddy, for instance, I first contacted a birder named Ignacio “Kini” Roesler, on the faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, who said he’d be busy with a Hooded Grebe research project in January, but he passed me on to a friend named Nacho Areta. When I emailed Nacho, he replied that he’d be on a Mississippi Kite survey, but he gave me Freddy’s email address—and so the match was made, with the friend of a friend of a friend.
In some places I used a website, BirdingPal, where people list themselves as willing hosts for birders traveling through their area. These aren’t professional guides, but they offer hospitality and good company. It’s fun to show off your local patch to someone who has never seen it, and favors get returned when the roles are reversed.
I also relied heavily for my planning on eBird, an online database of sightings started by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 2002. With nearly half a billion observations logged by hundreds of thousands of birders around the world, the website has become an incredible resource on bird distribution and records, used by scientists to track bird migration and populations. eBird was a godsend for logistical planning: it helped me identify places where I was likely to find certain species, with up-to-the-minute reports, and showed which birders had been most active in areas I wanted to visit. Whenever the word-of-mouth method hit a dead end, I checked out eBird for new leads.
Crashing on couches seems like a casual approach, but setting up all of these visits took five solid months of intense planning. By the time I left home, I knew where I would be, and who I would be with, on nearly every day of 2015. The roster of birders had hundreds of names and kept growing as plans changed and the year progressed.
Nothing can replace local knowledge—of restaurants, shortcuts, customs, languages, secret spots, and the innumerable other things that only residents can tap into. By going with locals, I could instantly become an insider instead of a tourist; and by staying in people’s homes instead of resorts and lodges, I could experience a big slice of real life on Earth without busting my bank account. Local knowledge would certainly pay off with birds that might otherwise be missed. But until the year began, I had no way of answering the question: Would it work?
Many of the people I contacted had no experience with guiding visitors; they came from all walks of life, spoke different languages, and ranged in age from their teens to their seventies. Each seemed to have a slightly different vision of what I was trying to do. Some of them wrote back immediately, while others took months to respond. In some cases, the only correspondence I’d had before landing in an unfamiliar country was through a Facebook message or WhatsApp chat. When I found myself blindly wiring money to personal bank accounts in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, to cover expenses for upcoming trips to national parks with birders I’d never talked to on the phone and who replied to my emails in barely intelligible English, or in other languages entirely, I had a momentary panic attack. Was this a good idea? There was only one thing to do—trust and go forward.
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Might as well have jumped in the river with the Torrent Ducks, I thought, as I slogged up the mule trail. Rain slashed down in sheets. For a while, I held grimly to an umbrella, but it was no use. Drops ricocheted off the ground, a gust of wind whipped the umbrella inside out, and wet vegetation lined the trail like the scrubbers at a car wash. At this point, it was impossible to get any wetter. I could have filled a pint glass with rainwater by wringing out my underwear.
Of more immediate concern, though, was the electricity in the air. Freddy, Claudia, José, Fabri, and I had hiked into a thunderstorm, not under it but inside it, and the atmosphere was charged with popping and crackling sounds as we ascended a ridge. Lightning and thunder became indistinguishable; in a cloud break I saw a bolt strike the valley underneath us, then the view snapped shut and we were left inside a swirling, horizonless world of strobe lights, reverberating concussions, and disorienting motion.
The rain pounded us. I no longer tried to step on bare ground; the rutted trail became a six-inch-deep cascade, and I sloshed upstream, hoping that the garbage bag lining my pack was at least keeping some stuff dry. Every time I looked up, wind stung my eyes, so I walked with my head down, water streaming off the tip of my nose, trying not to think of the estimated 20,000 people who get hit by lightning each year. Around a corner I almost bumped into Freddy, who had stopped to wait. He turned around, spread out his arms, looked up at the sky with a wild gleam in his eye, and said, “Me gusta esta Cerro Negro!”—I
like it this way!
I had to admire his enthusiasm.
We arrived at our campsite, completely bedraggled, just before dark. The thunderstorm finally blew into the next valley, leaving behind a clear sky and curling tendrils of mist at sunset. Our mule driver had dumped piles of gear on a ridgetop, and we located several waterlogged tarps and tents, staked them to a grassy area, and dug into dinner. To feed five people for four days in the mountains, Freddy had packed biscuits, saltines, corned beef, tinned sardines, apples, peanuts, and candy, all of which were damp from the rain. Right now, it looked like a feast. At least water wasn’t an issue—we gulped straight from a nearby stream, on hands and knees, until Freddy figured out how to drink out of a plastic shopping bag. Somehow, none of us had thought to bring a water bottle.
Thank goodness Freddy had brought an extra sleeping bag for me. After a brief buenas noches, I turned in early, looking forward to my first good sleep in several days. Inside my tent, I opened my backpack, untwisted the garbage bag inside, and discovered with delight that its contents were still fluffy and dry. I peeled off wet layers, put on dry ones, and promptly passed out. Weird, unidentifiable birds occupied my dreams all night long.
In the morning, groggy and slightly confused as to my whereabouts, I poked my head out of the tent flap to see an enormous Andean Condor glide by at eye level, swiveling its head as it passed. Ah, yes—Argentina. Fresh snow frosted the peaks around camp. The tent smelled like rain, the grass smelled like rain, the trees smelled like rain, the sopping clothes on our clothesline smelled like rain, and the view was magnificent. Layer upon layer of green ridges, cloaked in cloud forest, folded away in every direction. I checked my watch, but the battery had stopped; my cell phone was also dead, so there was no telling the time except by the sun, which emerged in one of the most brilliant dawn displays I’d ever seen.
The others also were stirring. Claudia strolled around camp, using her botanist’s knowledge to forage for wild peaches, and suddenly exclaimed, “Oh!”
“Que pasó?” called José, from inside his tent.
“Una culebra,” said Claudia, as she leaned over to inspect something in the grass.
I wriggled into soaking wet pants, folded up the dry pair to sleep in, pulled on freezing wet socks and shoes, and padded over to check it out. A foot-long snake, marked by a repeating X pattern along its back, was curled up in a loose pretzel.
“Bothrops,” said Claudia, referring to the genus of pit vipers—highly venomous residents of Latin America—and motioned for me not to touch it. It was an attractive little snake with a boxy, triangular head, less than thirty feet from where I had just been resting, and it could bring down a horse. We left it well alone.
A few minutes later, as I chewed on whole sardines for breakfast, crunching their vertebrae and licking up the oil, an Aplomado Falcon kept an eye on us from its nearby perch. Freddy, munching on a chocolate bar and stroking his pointy beard, explained our plan: the next two days would be spent hiking around the Pastizal grasslands, up to about 11,500 feet elevation, searching for seldom-seen birds with alluring names like Tucumán Mountain-Finch, Maquis Canastero, and Zimmer’s Tapaculo, before we returned to be picked up at the trailhead the following afternoon. With luck, the rain-swollen river would subside and we could wade back across without having to swim the rapids.
Taking in the scene, I reflected on the benefits of going local. Organized tours never visited this place; when I later asked some professional guides about it, they’d never heard of Cerro Negro. It was too hard to reach, too difficult as a tourist destination. But the birds were here, and that’s exactly why I had contacted Freddy—he knew the back corners of the Jujuy province in a way that no visitor ever could.
My system was working! I couldn’t quite believe it. Two weeks into the year, nobody had stood me up yet; in fact, I was beginning to realize that birders were excited enough about this project to make elaborate plans and invite others along. This is what birding is all about—people with a shared passion, sometimes from entirely different continents and maybe not even speaking the same language, meeting as strangers, joining in a common goal, and becoming the best of friends. When I first emailed Freddy, I couldn’t have predicted that we’d be standing on this mountain, the five of us, with three wet mules and a killer view.
He flashed a huge grin. The day was young, and we had birds to find.
“Okay, vámanos!”—let’s go!
4
Over the Years
AS A KID, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with a “history” book, but from the time I could barely read, at about the age of three, when I received a lovely picture book called A Year of Birds, I couldn’t get enough stories about nature and adventure. Birding has a particularly wacky and wonderful lore, in books such as The Big Year; The Big Twitch; The Biggest Twitch; Kingbird Highway; Lost Among the Birds; Birding on Borrowed Time; Call Collect, Ask for Birdman; The Ardent Birder; Extreme Birder; The Feather Quest; Wild America; Return to Wild America; To See Every Bird on Earth—well, you get the idea.
I learned from reading bird books that nothing happens outside of historical context. In birding as in everything, personalities and events unfold over time, one thing leads to another, and pretty soon you wake up to discover that you are part of the stream.
Historically speaking, obsession with birds has often overlapped with a healthy sense of wanderlust. Seat-of-the-pants exploits feature prominently in the resumés of most early ornithologists, including John James Audubon, who was inspired to track down the birds of North America with little more than a shotgun and a set of paints after being jailed for unpaid debts from a failed business venture in the early 1800s. For the next several years, Audubon traveled across the continent, living rough, studying (and shooting) every bird he could find, and created beautiful, meticulous illustrations of each species. The resulting folio of portraits, Birds of America, eventually earned him the respect he craved, but it was Audubon’s swashbuckling tales from the frontier that made him truly famous—a real American hero.
Audubon wasn’t the first by any means. The Scottish-American artist Alexander Wilson, sometimes called the “father of American ornithology,” released nine volumes of bird paintings, literally drawing from his own intrepid travels, before Audubon had even stepped into the wilderness. And a full eighty years before that, the luminary British naturalist Mark Catesby included 220 plates of birds and other species in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, the first published record of North America’s flora and fauna. Just imagine Catesby’s impressions when he landed on Virginia soil at the age of twenty-nine, in the spring of 1712, to spend the next seven years traipsing through the colonies. His illustrations included many species never before encountered by European naturalists.
But it wasn’t until the mid-1900s that watching birds became an obsession unto itself, more like a sport than an art or science, and one man did more to popularize this new activity than anyone else.
His name was Roger Tory Peterson.
This is where modern birding really begins. The son of two immigrants in western New York, Peterson studied at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design in New York City. There, in the mid-1920s, he attended meetings of the Linnaean Society, still active today, where amateur biologists gathered to talk about birds. He soon fell in with a group of teenage bird nerds who started their own group, the Bronx County Bird Club.
At the time, the best bird-identification guides were produced by Chester Reed, who supplied the nascent movement in nature study with illustrated pocket-sized guidebooks. The first, published in 1905, Bird Guide: Land Birds East of the Rockies, described nearly 220 species, with one color drawing on each page. Now bird enthusiasts could carry into the field a portable reference with color pictures of birds. Reed is largely forgotten today, but his importance cannot be overstated—he essentially created the first modern field guide, which Roger Tory Peterson, along with the rest of th
e Linnaean Society and Bronx County Bird Club members, used while scouting for birds around New York.
After graduating from art school in 1931, Peterson pursued his interest in identifying birds in the field—with binoculars instead of the shotgun used by earlier ornithologists such as Audubon. In the meantime, partly inspired by Reed’s guides, he worked steadily on his own project. In 1934, a twenty-six-year-old Peterson published the book that would change birding forever.
A Field Guide to the Birds was something entirely new—so different from any previous book that several publishers rejected the idea, and Houghton Mifflin, the company that took the chance, committed to printing only 2,000 copies. The guide included Peterson’s illustrations of all eastern North American birds, arranged with similar species side by side on plates, in various plumages, with arrows pointing out each distinctive feature. Unlike Audubon’s Birds of America, which comprised four volumes, each weighing sixty pounds, Peterson’s guide could be carried into the field; unlike Reed’s little bird guides, Peterson’s book was complete and showed multiple birds on each page.
When A Field Guide exhausted its first printing in one week, Peterson knew he had a hit, but it would take years for the full impact to sink in. He would live to edit, decades later, the book’s fifth edition, by which time seven million copies had been sold. Peterson-branded nature guides, covering everything from birds to mushrooms, are the world’s most successful series of field guides, all because of that first bird book in 1934.
In many ways, Peterson changed the way we look at the natural world. His field mark system offers encouragement, suggesting that any thorny problem can be solved by observing it closely enough. Not only did A Field Guide instruct its readers, but it also reflected a revolutionary shift in perspective. By simplifying each bird into its distinctive characteristics, Peterson made it possible for anyone, not just experts, to identify complicated targets—and thus brought birdwatching to the masses.