Birding Without Borders Read online

  “Scaled Pigeon!” said Giuliano, and aimed his spotting scope at a distant treetop to get a better view. Magnified thirty times, I could see the pigeon’s red bill, brown body, and namesake pattern of intricate marks on the side of its neck like silhouetted snake skin.

  “And an Epaulet Oriole,” interrupted Bianca, pointing out an all-black bird with bright yellow shoulder patches.

  A few minutes later we observed a Red-necked Woodpecker, one of the largest woodpeckers in the world, sidling up a dead tree like a feathered jackhammer, and later heard its echoing double-knock display. Then a Black-throated Saltator—distinguished by its orange bill and black face—made a cameo, and I pondered the benefits of birding in overlap zones. The woodpecker is a true Amazon bird while the saltator is confined mostly to the central Brazilian Cerrado. But here, where the two biomes meet, birds from both habitats could be seen side by side.

  As the sun climbed into a fiercely blue sky, Bianca was telling me about her research in the Amazonas province, where she was about to begin a Ph.D. project studying Black Skimmers—strange, ternlike birds that drag their elongated lower bill through the water to snap up fish midflight—when suddenly she broke off and pointed to a distant line of trees. “Hey, what’s that white speck?” she asked.

  All three of us trained our binoculars on the spot, which appeared to be a large bird perched on a limb. It had the hulking shape of a raptor, with stooped shoulders and a fierce-looking gestalt, just far enough away that we couldn’t quite discern the details. Giuliano lined up his spotting scope, took a look, and stepped back with a slow smile.

  “It’s . . . an . . . eagle . . .” he began.

  My heart skipped. I leaned forward to peer through the eyepiece. Staring back at me was a big, mean-looking bird with a black back, all-white chest, white head, yellow eyes, black mask, and orange bill.

  “. . . but it’s not a Harpy,” Giuliano said. “That’s a Black-and-white Hawk-Eagle, which is a big bonus for us! These are really rare and unpredictable—we don’t have any nest sites or stakeouts for Black-and-white Hawk-Eagles, so it’s lucky to come across one in the forest.”

  Were we lucky? I wasn’t sure whether to be ecstatically happy or disappointed. The Harpy, which would have been almost twice as tall and ten times heavier, remained at large, but in any other circumstance this hawk-eagle would have made my day. It was a neat, crisp-looking bird, dressed in sharp lines and stark contrasts, and I spent a long time studying its features through the scope. The Black-and-white Hawk-Eagle preys on all kinds of animals, but its main diet is other, smaller birds, so it has to be quick and agile. Eventually, this one fanned its tail, flashing a neat barred pattern, and disappeared into the forest. It really was a rare sighting. I wouldn’t see another for the rest of the year.

  After my heart rate had returned to normal, I sat back down on the log to resume the Harpy Eagle vigil. An hour passed. Conversation died. The same smaller birds bounced around us—aracaris, woodpeckers, pigeons—and I watched them, getting to know them while keeping one eye peeled for a freakishly large raptor. I supposed the other birds were keeping an eye out, too, never knowing when an attack might come from above. For me, this was a fun way to spend a morning, but for the other creatures of the forest, eagle-watching was a never-ending fact of life.

  Two hours passed, then three. Giuliano and Bianca looked a bit nervous, and I couldn’t help checking my watch. How much time could we afford on one species, even if it was a Harpy? Strategically, spending more than an hour looking for a single bird was counterproductive. I chided myself for making these calculations; surely anyone could see that a Harpy Eagle is worth more than the usual effort. But as we crept toward the four-hour mark, and my stomach started to worry about lunch, I wondered what else might be sacrificed if the guest of honor didn’t appear soon.

  ✧-✧-✧

  As much as anything, our Harpy Eagle stakeout served to remind me that birding, like so many other pursuits—crossword puzzles, police work, space travel—is a game of patience punctuated by sharp moments of excitement. The thrill comes in unexpected doses. If birds were completely predictable, it would no longer be fun to look for them. Waiting is part of the addiction: the longer you wait and the more you hope, the bigger the payoff—even if that payoff never comes.

  People like me get hooked on the birding habit in part because of the random payoffs, or what American psychologist B. F. Skinner described in the 1950s as a “variable ratio schedule.” Skinner showed, in his now-famous operant-conditioning experiments, that mice can be taught to press a lever for treats, but that they become much more addicted to pressing the lever if they are sometimes rewarded with big treats, sometimes with small ones, and sometimes with nothing at all. Humans share this behavioral quirk; perversely, getting rewarded every time is not as fun as hitting the jackpot every once in a while. Casinos offer a classic example of random reinforcement: they have figured out how to exploit the way our brains are wired. Imagine a slot machine that, without fail, spit out ninety cents every time you put in a dollar. What’s the fun in that? Switch it up, though, so that the machine occasionally pays more and sometimes gives you nothing, and, voilà, the game is irresistible.

  Birding is exactly the same. For each moment of excitement, the brain gets a hit of dopamine—the neurotransmitter that controls pleasure—which reinforces all kinds of habit-forming behaviors. Research has shown that the more unexpected the reward, the more dopamine is released, which makes sense in the context of Skinner’s variable schedules. But that’s not quite the full story, because these chemicals can flood the system long before rewards actually occur; dopamine starts to kick in when we first anticipate a reward. This semi-stressful state keeps us curious and engaged. In other words, chemistry makes the search for birds as fun as the discovery.

  All of which is a roundabout way of validating an otherwise irrational behavior like sitting for four hours in a remote Brazilian forest in a one-sided appointment with a wild bird. As lunchtime drew closer, I kept thinking, “The Harpy Eagle could appear at any moment if we just stay here a little longer!”

  ✧-✧-✧

  When the eagle came, it arrived silently, gliding directly over our heads on rigid wings. Giuliano, Bianca, and I had just decided to wait fifteen more minutes before packing it in, which felt a lot like admitting defeat.

  “We need to move on toward the Pantanal,” Giuliano said, in as soothing a tone as he could muster. “There are lots of other birds to find.”

  I could read the disappointment in his eyes, a reflection of the gutted feeling in my own chest. A Harpy might count the same as a sparrow for the Big Year, but to miss such a spectacular bird at such a promising location, after sitting for hours, didn’t bear thinking about. I couldn’t believe we’d blown half a day for zilch. Then, as if riding this emotional climax for its grand entrance, the mythical creature simply appeared, and any disappointment evaporated in a nanosecond.

  My first thought was, “Whoa, that’s a big bird!” The eagle swooped low toward the nest tree and flared into a stall, landing softly on a thick branch, facing away from us. Then it swiveled its head, fixed us with a hard stare, and turned its body around so that we could see the underside. From the front, I could admire the two powerful talons, which clutched something furry.

  “It’s got a snack,” I said, while Giuliano aimed his spotting scope on the spot.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I can’t quite tell what it is. Here, take a look.”

  The Harpy Eagle was so big that it completely filled the scope view, so magnified that each feather was crisply delineated. I could see its black chest band, a spiky crest on top of its head, the hooked beak, and black and white bars on the wings and tail. The overall coloring was of charcoal, ash, and ink, and the bird’s eyes were deep black without highlights. Size and plumage indicated an adult male, relatively small compared to a female—as if you could call it anything but enormous. There was nothing subtle in the expression of this
Harpy.

  Close inspection showed that the bird was holding some kind of animal with a long, striped tail hanging loosely underneath.

  “What do you think of the prey?” I asked, swapping out with Giuliano and Bianca for extended looks through the scope.

  We ruled out the local monkeys, which have plain-colored tails, before deciding that the only possible match was a coati, a raccoon-like animal widespread in the American tropics. This particular coati was past caring about its fate; it had already been partially consumed and seemed to be missing its head. Evidently the male Harpy Eagle had eaten half its lunch before transporting the leftovers, perhaps intending to share it with his mate. But where was his mate? Off hunting on her own somewhere? Hidden inside the nest? The male seemed uncertain, swiveling his head back and forth as if looking for her. He made no move to eat. He perched quietly, waiting for her to appear. How ironic, I thought. After we waited four hours for this eagle to show up, he was now waiting for someone else.

  For such a large bird, he was oddly inconspicuous. If I hadn’t seen him swoop overhead, it would have been easy to miss the shadowy shape sitting under the canopy, partially concealed by layers of foliage. The Harpy is a sneaky surprise-attack artist, and the half-eaten coati in his talons had probably not known its fate until the last instant.

  After our allotted fifteen minutes stretched into an hour, the male eagle showed no signs of budging from its perch, and the female eagle showed no signs of appearing. I reluctantly let Giuliano fold up his scope.

  “We have a long drive ahead,” he said, “and a few other species to look for before dark.”

  Still, I hesitated. I hated to just walk away from one of the world’s rarest, most spectacular birds, as if I’d won the lottery, shrugged, and returned the ticket. But you can only stare down a monster for so long before it starts to seem tame, and I liked the idea of keeping the memory wild. We had stayed long enough.

  Giuiliano, Bianca, and I retraced our steps, high on the Harpy and dopamine, to begin the journey toward the Pantanal and, for me, the rest of the world. On January 30, the Harpy Eagle became one more species on my list—number 657. With the better part of six continents and eleven months remaining, I had a long, long way to go.

  6

  Gunning It

  AT 16,000 FEET of altitude, the ratio of oxygen in the air is almost exactly the same as it is at sea level—about 21 percent—but atmospheric pressure is reduced by half. The low pressure is what upsets your system. When you take a deep breath at 16,000 feet, you’re inhaling only half the usual amount of oxygen, so your heart and lungs have to work twice as hard to keep up.

  This thought flitted through my hypoxia-addled brain as I gazed down on the country of Peru from Ticlio Pass, high in the Andes Mountains east of Lima, on Valentine’s Day, the forty-fifth day of my Big Year. Colorful ridge lines spidered away in pastel shades of red, yellow, and brown, with hardly a scrap of vegetation clinging to the rocks. Lingering snowfields and glaciers dotted surrounding peaks like dirty specks of frosting, and the sky was impenetrably, obscenely blue. The whole riotous scene seemed to be celebrating my good fortune in passing the 1,000 species mark of my Big Year. I had been inching toward this milestone for the past few days, and finally got it with a fluffy Pied-crested Tit-Tyrant. It took twenty-two days to see the first 500 birds of the year and twenty-three more days to add another 500, and I liked the way things were adding up. I laughed, a little too hard, and got a concerned look from Carlos Altamirano, a young Peruvian birder I’d met just a few hours earlier.

  “You feel okay?” he asked.

  “Never better!” I replied.

  In fact, my head ached and my stomach churned indelicately—typical symptoms of mild altitude sickness. At high elevation, the oxygen-starved human body pumps more blood to the brain in an effort to compensate, and those dilated vessels cause the headache. Meanwhile, blood is diverted away from your digestive system, which means the stomach becomes less efficient. I’d landed in Lima, at sea level, less than twenty-four hours earlier, not nearly enough time to acclimate to a change of more than three vertical miles.

  Never in my life had I been so high. Ticlio Pass is above the level where skydivers typically jump from planes, higher than most helicopters can safely fly. A rock dropped from this height would fall a third of a mile before striking the summit of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the Lower 48 states. At this spot, I was more than twice as high as any particle of the entire continent of Australia, and I sure felt like it.

  Dizziness swept over me as Carlos snapped a picture to mark the occasion.

  “Feliz Día de San Valentín!” he said, grinning.

  In the photo, I am smiling in front of the Andes Mountains, standing alone with feet shoulder width apart and hands stuffed deep in the pockets of my black down jacket. My shoes and pants are visibly dirty, my hair is sticking up, and binoculars dangle loosely around my neck. Behind me, an empty road snakes around several hairpin bends before disappearing down the mountainside. It is a portrait of a man who, for the past 45 days, has done nothing but look at birds and who, in the back of his mind, knows that he will spend the next 320 days doing nothing but the same.

  What I didn’t know, at that moment, was just how crazy things were about to get.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Months earlier, when planning the logistics for South America, I had earmarked a full twenty-one days to cover Peru, a country bigger than the combined areas of Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Romania, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. For birders, it is an exciting part of the world to visit: you’ve got everything from desolate coastal deserts to the snow-capped Andes to the Amazon, with all kinds of elevational gradients and tropical diversity in the mix. About 1,900 bird species have been recorded in Peru, of which nearly 150 are endemic—that is, found nowhere else. Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are staggering; the United States, for instance, has fewer than half as many species in an area eight times as big.

  But traveling here can be hazardous, especially off the beaten path. Virtually all foreigners who visit Peru head straight for Machu Picchu, the fifteenth-century Inca city that is now swamped by more than a million tourists each year. It would be nice to see those ruins, but on this trip I had to focus on the birds. Awaiting me were tanagers to chase through the cloud forest, owls to spotlight in the jungle, and hummingbirds—including one very special hummer called the Marvelous Spatuletail—to stalk among the Andean valleys. Three weeks would scarcely be enough to scratch the surface of Peru’s bird life, and that’s not even considering the difficulties of getting around this country.

  Things have improved since the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) period of guerrilla revolt, severe economic turmoil, and political unrest in the 1980s and 1990s, but Peru is still a raw, developing nation. It produces more cocaine than any other country, except possibly Colombia, and has all the trouble that goes with the drug trade. Outside major cities, you’re lucky to find pavement. Some regions have no roads at all. In the deep Peruvian Amazon, there are still a couple of native tribes relatively untouched by civilization, including the reclusive Mashco Piro of the Madre de Dios region—an area I planned to visit—who figured in a sensational murder in 2011.

  Birds don’t stick to tourist traps, of course, so I needed someone local to help navigate this complicated landscape—someone who lived in Peru and understood its culture and birds. I contacted a couple of guides at ecotour companies, but they were less than helpful. Others didn’t reply at all. In the end, I realized there was only one man to turn to: the bird-crazy Swede of Peru, the man who, when I mentioned his name to several friends, came across as a modern-day warrior, post-punk rocker, and international birding legend.

  His name is Gunnar. It rhymes with “lunar.”

  I’d heard a few rumors about Gunnar Engblom, and had even come close to meeting him several times, but he was like a ghost, popping up in unexpected places, then disap
pearing back into Peru. Two months before the beginning of my year, I was at a birdwatching festival in Texas when someone at a party turned to me and said, apropos of nothing, “Did you know that Gunnar Engblom showed up here today but was immediately detained by the authorities?” It was simply assumed that I knew who Gunnar was and that I would want to know that he had been detained by the authorities. I chalked it up to idle cocktail conversation and forgot all about it until months later, when I met Gunnar for the first time. After I asked him about it, the subject morphed into a fascinating story about something else, and I still have no idea what happened at that bird festival in Texas.

  Some tales are true, some exaggerated, but everyone in South America seems to know Gunnar. Originally from Sweden, he first traveled to Peru as a thirty-year-old biologist in 1990—the year that monetary inflation hit 12,000 percent—and returned for several months each year before moving permanently in 1998 to Lima, where he’s flourished ever since. He quickly fell in love with the country’s birds and began to pursue them with singular zeal, developing a reputation for new discoveries and for bravery in treacherous situations.

  Once, in the early days, following patchy information, he took a public bus across the Andes and found himself escorted off by armed guerrillas at a checkpoint. This was serious: two British birders had just been captured and executed by Sendero Luminoso soldiers, their bodies never recovered, and kidnappings were common at the time. Gunnar, crouched on the side of the road, explained that he was broke and just looking for birds.

  “They pointed at my binoculars and demanded for me to hand them over,” he told me. “But they were nice binoculars, and I didn’t want to lose them! So I said no, but they could have my camera, which was basically a piece of crap. I told them it was a really valuable camera and that I’d donate it to the cause as a supporter.”