Birding Without Borders Read online

  These books made Peterson famous. But one thing was still missing in his life: the rugged adventure that had become a tradition among earlier ornithologists. Peterson traveled often, but his work kept him so busy that he could never leave it all behind. At last, he hatched a plan with British seabird expert and friend James Fisher to take an extended trip across North America in 1953. The two devised a 30,000-mile route from Newfoundland to the tip of Florida, around the Gulf Coast to southern Texas and into Mexico, through Arizona and up the Pacific Coast to Washington, ending with a flight to the outer Pribilof Islands in Alaska. They set off in April and finished in July, exactly one hundred days later. Afterward, Peterson’s commentary and Fisher’s journal entries became a book, Wild America, a classic of environmental literature full of fascinating observations on everything from birds to alligators, fur seals, and 1950s America.

  Wild America rode the swell of patriotic environmentalism that swept the United States in the 1950s, with birds at the heart of the story. The two naturalists introduced their readers to places that many had never heard of, inspiring more interest in the outdoors.

  And near the end of the book, in small text at the bottom of a page, an intriguing footnote appeared.

  “Incidental information: My year’s list at the end of 1953 was 572 species (not counting an additional 65 Mexican birds),” wrote Peterson.

  “Mine was 536, plus the 65 Mexican species, plus 117 others seen in Europe, a total of 718,” added Fisher.

  In fine print, a gauntlet had been thrown.

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  While Peterson and Fisher were crossing North America, another Mr. Fisher—this one named Dean, from Michigan—was headed for a U.S. Navy cruiser assigned to the Pacific Ocean. Dean Fisher was a bird enthusiast who tracked his sightings while sailing abroad. He’d seen about nine hundred bird species when he left the Navy in 1958, and he wasn’t quite ready to settle down.

  So he set off in 1959 with a friend on quite an adventure: they drove from California through Mexico, skirted Panama by freighter, and continued all the way to the southern tip of South America; then shipped their vehicle to South Africa, drove across the Sahara, sailed to Spain, and drove clear across Europe to reach India; then hitchhiked around the rest of southeast Asia for a while, sailed south, and finished with a long transect across northern Australia. It took three years.

  Along the way, Fisher scouted for birds at every opportunity—local parks, swamps, forests, deserts. Many species he couldn’t identify, because most countries had no published field guides at that time, but he kept detailed notes. It took a while—sometimes years—to identify what he had seen, but in the end he reckoned he’d passed 4,000 birds, more than 3,000 of them on this one round-the-world trip. In the year 1959 alone, he recorded 1,665 species, an unprecedented feat. Without really meaning to, he became the world’s top bird lister.

  Others were beginning to explore more far-flung places around the same time. Travel and tourism surged after World War II, thanks to new technology and an increasingly mobile population, and birders started to realize how many alluring species could be found beyond their own borders. Passenger jets began plying the skies in the late 1950s, cutting an overseas trip from five days to a few hours, and it wasn’t long before intrepid ornithologists booked regular trips abroad.

  One of them was young Peter Alden. During his studies at the University of Arizona in the mid-1960s, Alden spent five weeks each semester leading field trips across the border to Mexico with an emphasis on birds and local culture. After graduating, he went full-time and negotiated with the Massachusetts Audubon Society to lead a series of trips to even more exotic destinations. In 1968, he observed more than 2,000 species—a new single-year world record, surpassing Dean Fisher’s 1959 tally—and helped pioneer international birding tourism, which would eventually become an industry of its own.

  Perhaps the biggest advocate of birding abroad in those early days was an energetic Brit named Stuart Keith, who got hooked on birds while studying the classics at Oxford. Inspired by Wild America, Keith moved from England to California after graduating in 1955, then took careful aim at Roger Tory Peterson’s North American single-year tally referenced in that fateful footnote. In 1956, the year he turned twenty-five, Keith drove across the United States and Canada with his brother, following a route similar to that of Peterson and Fisher but taking more time, and saw 594 species of birds—a new American Big Year record.

  At the time, most ornithologists thought the world held about 8,600 bird species, and Keith began to wonder how many one person could see in a lifetime. As he took birding trips and got to know other keen birders, such as Roger Tory Peterson and Peter Alden, he realized that they were wondering the same thing.

  Recognizing a critical mass when he saw it, Keith cofounded the American Birding Association in 1968 and became its first president, working with a friend, Jim Tucker, to produce a magazine they called Birding. Despite its focus on North America, the club’s members—which numbered 115 after the first year, more than 500 a few months later, and about 13,000 today—did not confine themselves to the United States. In the early days, the association was all about listing, anywhere and everywhere. Initially it was an exclusive club: to join, prospective members had to have identified at least 500 species in North America or 70 percent of the birds in their home state, and people mailed in their list totals to determine a pecking order.

  By the early 1970s, Keith had become the world’s biggest lister, surpassing Dean Fisher’s achievements in the late 1950s, and set his sights on a landmark goal. Several well-traveled birders, including Roger Tory Peterson, had decided to try to see half the birds in the world—about 4,300 species, according to prevailing wisdom—and Keith wanted to be the first to cross the threshold. He officially passed it in 1973, at age forty-one, having spent years slogging through some of the world’s most rugged and remote corners. (Peterson would also reach half, but not until the mid-1980s.) Keith became a minor birding celebrity, hailed as a “superstar” by People magazine.

  In a tantalizing article called “Birding Planet Earth: A World Overview,” published in Birding magazine, Keith reflected on his experiences. “Getting to ‘half’ was the most exciting moment of my birding career,” he wrote. “For the tireless and dedicated world birder who simply cannot rest until he has seen a kiwi and a cassowary, and for those other addicts for whom visions of jabirus dance in their heads, we may establish 4,300 species as a possible lifetime goal. It took me 26 years.”

  He also made some predictions for his own future.

  “I think I can just make it to 6,000, though I may be in a wheelchair when I do it,” Keith calculated.

  As it turned out, he exceeded that goal. He continued to travel for the next thirty years before succumbing to a stroke in early 2003 on the Micronesian island of Chuuk, during a birding trip. The day before, he had seen a Caroline Islands Ground-Dove, life bird number 6,600.

  In his article, Keith had considered the possibility of a one-year global birding adventure.

  “This is a big subject and worth an article in itself,” Keith wrote, “so rather than treat it here I would like to invite readers to send in some theoretical models of global routes detailed month by month. The appropriate person to write on the subject would be the reigning world annual list champion, Peter Alden, who has several times gone over 2,000. How about it, Peter? Could you do 3,000?”

  To me, this paragraph is radical. It is the first printed reference I can find to a world Big Year—not just an incidental one, but a whole calendar year specifically designed to maximize species on a planetary scale. Keith inspired others but never went for a global Big Year himself, explaining that he preferred “to go to one area and work it thoroughly.”

  Birdwatchers began to ask: How many birds in the world could you really see in a year, no holds barred?

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  The birders who survived the early 1970s tend to look back on those years wit
h wistfulness, using words like “innocence” and “golden age.” A lot of things came together: Birders realized they were part of a larger community and began to share information with one another on a broad scale. New regional clubs made it easier to connect, and the pursuit was young enough that anyone could contribute to ornithological knowledge.

  “Birding changed from a mild local pastime to a continent-wide craze,” American birder Kenn Kaufman would write years later, reflecting on that era. “It is only now, looking back from a distance of two decades, that we can see how far-reaching and thorough the changes were . . . Birding for the twenty-first century was born in the brief period from 1970 to 1975.”

  Kaufman was a long-haired nineteen-year-old high school dropout when, in 1973, he spent an action-packed year hitchhiking long distances around the United States to chase birds—partly inspired by Peterson’s Wild America. North American Big Years suddenly became trendy: a young prodigy named Ted Parker surpassed Stuart Keith’s old record by seeing 626 species in 1971; then both Kaufman and American educator Floyd Murdoch set out to beat Parker’s total two years later. It was the first time two people tried to set a birdwatching record in the same year, introducing a new element: competition.

  Kingbird Highway, Kaufman’s memoir published in 1997, is a manifesto of unfiltered passion. Kaufman often slept under bridges and practiced draconian frugality to survive on less than a dollar a day; one memorable passage describes Little Friskies cat food as a cheap and nutrient-filled dinner alternative. Though he set out to look for birds, Kaufman found himself swept up in the growing flock of avian admirers and, by the end of 1973, cemented a place for himself within this larger community. That he set a fresh American record of 666 species, only to be edged out by Murdoch’s 669 that year, was of such diminished importance to him that he included the totals only as an afterthought, in an appendix.

  Kingbird Highway had a profound effect on me when I first read it as a twelve-year-old. I was hungry for exotic stories. Here was a guy who refused to follow the typical path, a rebel, choosing instead to chase birds wherever they might lead. Such is the power of words that Wild America inspired a teen-aged Kaufman to start a birding revolution, and Kaufman’s Kingbird Highway solidified my own dreams.

  By the 1980s, North American Big Years were well established among hardcore birders, and it became clear that the domestic record was up for grabs. A Mississippi businessman, James Vardaman, sensing an opportunity to raise publicity for his forestry firm, hired a team of bird experts to guide him around North America for a year and ended with 699 species—showing what a “lousy birder but a great promoter,” as Vardaman described himself, might do with enough money, time, and expert guidance. During his quest, Vardaman flew 137,145 miles, sometimes catching a plane just to chase one stray bird reported on the opposite side of the continent, and drove another 20,305 miles. His strategy set the tone for later efforts, when a few dedicated souls would push well past 700 species and even, in the new millennium, 750 in a year, but this willy-nilly style—ticking one rare, vagrant bird at a time after listing all the common ones, burning massive amounts of fuel for vastly diminishing returns on one continent—has completely diverged from the pastime of wandering through a forest just to see what’s there.

  Perhaps Vardaman was thinking of this disconnect when, in the final paragraph of his book, Call Collect, Ask for Birdman, he abruptly shifted his gaze to all of planet Earth.

  “I will definitely start planning a World Big Year,” he wrote. “But because of the distances and complexities involved, planning a World Big Year will take some years, and executing the plan will take 365 days and probably cost $700,000 even at present prices. Therefore, I couldn’t make the try before 1985, and I’ll be glad to turn the plan over to someone else if I can’t carry it out. Is 5,000 possible?”

  Heaven only knows what Vardaman had in mind with that budget estimate (his $700,000 in 1980 would inflate to more than $2 million by the time I embarked on my worldwide adventure), but at least he was thinking big. He did travel enough to net 2,800 species and a new official worldwide record in 1984, even if he never got around to a coordinated international assault.

  The only person who achieved a higher one-year total in that generation was James Clements, a maverick ornithologist who literally wrote the book on birds of the world. For his doctoral thesis at California Western University, Clements authored the global checklist still used by most American birders (including me), which standardizes names for every bird species on Earth. He then operated a printing business, which allowed him to travel a lot, and in 1989 set out to see as many birds as he could, using the Big Year concept to raise funds for the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. By the end of the year, Clements had covered more than 265,000 miles and recorded 3,662 bird species, at one point getting himself arrested in West Africa for stalking a hornbill “without permission.” He raised $50,000 for the museum. Afterward, he continued to study birds abroad until he died in 2005, leaving the Cornell Lab of Ornithology the task of maintaining his world checklist.

  Today, James Clements is remembered as one of birding’s most passionate proponents and explorers, with a species of Peruvian gnatcatcher named in his honor, and few people even know about his 1989 Big Year. That record stood quietly for almost twenty years. By the time anyone could take a serious crack at it, birding itself was undergoing a global revolution.

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  When Clements took his round-the-world jaunt, I was a three-year-old. I am part of the digital generation, a so-called millennial—the world’s first cohort to grow up online, coming of age around the year 2000. Culturally speaking, we millennials are significantly different from the baby boomers or even Generation X: we’re more progressive, less religious, more educated, less family-oriented, more urban, less political, more narcissistic, less environmentally minded, and, above all, more technologically dependent. For better or worse, my generation lives on computers and smartphones; we are children of the Internet.

  So how do you explain the surging allure of birdwatching in recent years? If nobody cared about the environment anymore, you’d expect outdoor activities to slack off—but, strangely, they’ve never been more popular. A 2014 Esquire magazine headline said it best: “Uh-Oh. Birdwatching Is About to Become Cool.” When, in short order, Owen Wilson plays a real-life birder in a Hollywood movie about birding, Jonathan Franzen writes an angsty feature about birds for The New Yorker, and rock star Geddy Lee is quoted saying “I’m a birder, believe it or not,” you know something’s up.

  It’s tempting to suggest that birdwatching is a backlash against technology, that getting back to nature responds to a deep, intangible human need, and I’d like to think that people are willingly seeking outdoor therapy to balance their new digital lifestyles. But it’s probably the other way around—all this technology and connectedness has changed the way people enjoy birds and nature, engaging us in new and exciting ways. Ironically, going online is inspiring us to go outside.

  For birders, the Information Age revolutionized the way we communicate with each other—through dedicated email lists, discussion groups, and websites like BirdingPal, eBird, and BirdForum. Instead of a niche activity for wealthy retirees, birdwatching has been transformed into a truly international popular pursuit. Outside the United States and Europe, places like Brazil, India, and the Philippines are adding their own cultural twists to the appreciation of birds. In China, for instance, birding is now seen as an aspirational activity—a sign of elite class, because you must have enough money for binoculars and spotting scopes, as well as leisure time to do it. Ten years ago there were virtually no birders in the entire country, but bird groups have suddenly sprung up on most Chinese university campuses and in most major cities.

  At the same time, technology has made it easier to learn about birds. Digital cameras make identification a breeze, while binoculars have become so good that manufacturers worry customers will never replace them. Field guides
are available nearly everywhere, and they’re increasingly available as smartphone apps. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has an app, Merlin, that identifies the bird species in your photograph with about 80 percent accuracy. Another program does the same for bird songs: hold up your phone and it names the unseen singer, like Shazam for bird calls.

  We are now at the point where it is about as easy to travel the world as it was to explore the United States in the 1970s, during the previous revolution in birdwatching.

  In 2008, two British birders, Ruth Miller and Alan Davies, decided to take on Clements’s record from 1989. A lot had happened in the intervening nineteen years, and they thought it was time for someone to revive the world Big Year idea. Miller and Davies took their adventure seriously, planning discrete trips to rack up as many species as they could, and they sold their house to pay for it. By the end of the year, the two had seen 4,341 species of birds together in more than twenty countries, smashing Clements’s old tally and showing what was possible in this new, networked age.

  I followed their progress closely and scoured their book, The Biggest Twitch, for insights on how to improve their global strategy. Miller and Davies flew home between each destination, skipped around, missed some key areas, and spent a whopping three months in Europe, which has the fewest birds of any of the six major continents. I wondered if someone would put together an even bigger Big Year, and how they might approach it.

  That spring, I graduated from college and had my sights set on remote research stints with various bird projects. As the global economy crashed, I rode it out in a subfreezing tent in Antarctica, strapping GPS tags to penguins and tracking their movements as part of a long-term study. If you had told me then that I would be the one to assault the all-time world Big Year record a few years later, I would have laughed. But now, looking back, I can see that the seeds of a plan were already sprouting in the back of my mind.