Birding Without Borders Read online

  After a lengthy interrogation, the guerrillas became so baffled by this Swedish man’s babbling about birds in accented Spanish that they just let him go.

  “The best part,” Gunnar said, “is that I was wearing a T-shirt that day of Che Guevara”—the Marxist revolutionary instrumental in the Cuban Revolution. “Just imagine!”

  These days, insurgency is less worrisome than plain old logistical chaos, which Gunnar confronts with practiced equanimity as he guides visiting birders around the country. Strikes, strandings, accidents, and natural disasters are part of daily life in Peru, but Gunnar is not a man given to panic. He can put together any trip, on any budget, and now runs a full-time business outfitting custom itineraries for birding expeditions.

  When I sent him a message to explain my mission, Gunnar replied immediately and enthusiastically.

  “I am the right guy to talk to!” he wrote. “I love these kinds of challenges, and am glad to be involved. Time is money for most people. Time is lifers for birders. Count on me for Peru!”

  He was as good as his word, and soon drafted a schedule on a shoestring for my proposed dates, encompassing every corner of Peru. Only later did I realize quite how ambitious the itinerary was: Gunnar intended to wring every possible second from our twenty-one days in his adopted country, targeting endemic birds all over the map. This wasn’t a regular tour—it was a saturation patrol. He would personally accompany me for most of the trip, and we would rendezvous with local experts in each region. Gunnar also found an American birder from California, Glenn Sibbald, an environmental scientist from Sacramento, who would join us for the full three weeks; Glenn’s extra company, cost-sharing, and good humor turned out to be an enormous bonus. All around, it seemed like a great, if potentially exhausting, plan.

  And so, after leaving Brazil—the memorable Harpy Eagle with Giuliano and Bianca in the Pantanal, plus another ten days with other excellent birders in Belém/northeastern Brazil and in Itacaré/east-central Brazil—I touched down in Lima with high expectations. When I landed, I found a brief message from Gunnar: “Just back from a successful and disastrous day trip. Lots of good birds. I will meet you in Santa Eulalia Canyon at 5pm.”

  He had arranged for a local birder to pick me up with a driver, and they waited diligently with a sign at the airport. We did a little birding in urban Lima and then took off out of town. As we ascended toward the 16,000-foot Ticlio Pass that afternoon, one single-lane switchback at a time, my head swam with the altitude and I began to wonder what, exactly, I had gotten myself into.

  ✧-✧-✧

  As promised, Gunnar met us at a roadside gas station where, after some transfers of people and belongings, he jumped into the driver’s seat of our van. Carlos, the birder who had just taken me across Ticlio Pass, sat shotgun while I occupied the back seat with Glenn, who had arrived a few days before. The four of us rolled out.

  I was glad to be heading to lower elevations after spending much of the day around Ticlio, though the idea of “lower” was relative. For the first days in Peru, Gunnar had planned an assault on the central highlands for a few key endemic birds. We wouldn’t quite reach 16,000 feet again, but the Andean valleys in this region were known for their hardy, high-altitude residents, and we’d sleep a couple of nights above 13,000 feet. My head still ached, and I hoped my system would acclimate quickly.

  I had little time to size up my new companion before we hit the road again. Gunnar was in his fifties and had kept the sinewy physique of a long-distance runner—in fact, he was training to run the Boston Marathon in a couple of months, hoping for a competitive time—and he bristled with energy. He sported graying stubble, a gap between his front teeth, and a baseball cap with MORE BIRDS embroidered across the front. I liked him immediately.

  “Here’s the plan,” he said, as the van slalomed around slow-moving trucks, pedestrians, farm animals, and potholes along a cliffside, guardrail-less road. “We’re heading for a place called Andamarca and a bird called the Black-spectacled Brushfinch—a super-endemic species, first described to science in 1999, that is known only from a small part of the Cordillera in central Peru. We have a good chance to see one, but Andamarca is kind of far from here.” He paused to glance at his watch. “I think we can just make it if we drive into the night, sleep in the van, and then get up at sunrise.”

  Carlos, Glenn, and I nodded. It was worth a shot. I wouldn’t see a Black-spectacled Brushfinch anywhere else.

  Gunnar explained that he had spent the past two days scouting with a group of birders and that they’d had some great sightings, but had gotten their vehicle stuck on a remote, muddy road while trying to cross a landslide.

  “The spot was so narrow that we couldn’t open the doors against the cliff on one side, and there was a sheer drop on the other,” he said. “It took us a while to get things sorted out, and we lost a lot of time. But don’t worry, we’re not going to try that road today—it’s been ruled out!”

  Instead, we turned off toward the Upper Andamarca Valley and rattled onto a single-lane dirt track hewn into the side of a mountain. Gunnar knew the route and kept his foot down, driving us onward with unstoppable enthusiasm, but as the sun set it became clear that we had a long way to go before reaching the brushfinch stakeout. When darkness descended, a heavy fog settled on the landscape, shrouding everything in black drizzle. The road snuck around sharp bends without signs, folding us ever deeper into the mountains; I had the surreal impression of dramatic scenery in the dark and a gaping void on the downhill side. No other cars passed us and, after a while, I lost all sense of direction. We pressed on for hours into the night until my eyelids drooped, conversation died, and I slumped against my seatbelt.

  Finally, just after midnight, Gunnar murmured, “Okay, this is it! The brushfinch spot!” We had entered a precipitous valley covered in cloud forest, though all I could see in the headlights was mud and drizzle. A light rain fell as Gunnar gingerly parked on a wide spot and switched off the engine. There were no lights, no stars, just swirling mist and the vertiginous sense that a couple of feet from our wheels the world dropped into a bottomless abyss. The four of us reclined our seats as far as they would go, closed our eyes, and drifted off after a very long day.

  I stirred awake a couple of hours later to the sound of steady rain drumming on the van’s roof. Outside, dawn was dissolving into gunmetal skies, and a chill had seeped under my layers of clothing. Gunnar, Carlos, Glenn, and I were each curled up, awkwardly propped in our respective positions, and we awoke with groans and stretches.

  “Hey, can we run the heater for a bit?” asked Glenn. “It’s freezing in here.”

  Gunnar grunted from the driver’s seat, groped around for the key, and turned it in the ignition. Nothing happened.

  “Hmm,” he said, after a few seconds of silence. “I think we might have a dead battery.” He tried a couple more times, but the van stubbornly would not start.

  “Oh well,” he said, apparently not too bothered. “We might as well go for the brushfinches now and deal with this later. Dawn is our best shot for finding these birds, and it’s already getting light outside. Let’s go!”

  The four of us eased out of the cramped van and stood for a minute in the rain, stretching, taking in the spacious Andean view. In the moody light, I could better appreciate our position. We had parked next to a ravine where a waterfall gushed across the road surface and abruptly disappeared over the edge of a cliff. Lush, wet forest clung to the mountainside, and through a break in the mist I could see farms scattered far below us on the valley floor. Everything dripped from the rain, which was now slashing down.

  BirdLife International lists the Black-spectacled Brushfinch as endangered based on its tiny range and threats of habitat destruction; it is known only from five single localities, and the population seems to be shrinking. It’s a neat-looking bird, about the size of a potato, gray and black with orange on the back of its head. On close inspection, it’s possible to see a bright white mustache
stripe and the namesake black smudge around each eye. These birds prefer damp forest with patchy openings between 8,200 and 11,100 feet elevation. They aren’t particularly secretive but they tend to stay inside cover, either scratching on the ground or sitting in bushes, so they can be hard to spot.

  Gunnar and Carlos led the way, walking slowly along the road while scanning for movement. A pair of White-capped Dippers foraged energetically for aquatic insects below the waterfall, plopping their plump bodies into fast-rushing water to snag their prey. Scarlet-bellied Mountain-Tanagers, dressed in blood and ink with sapphire accents, streaked across openings like bursts of static electricity. Several types of hummingbird, including a Velvetbreast, Starfrontlet, Metaltail, Sunangel, Violetear, and the exquisitely named Shining Sunbeam, buzzed around colorful flowers, tiny droplets of water glistening on their iridescent feathers.

  Locating the brushfinches took more than an hour, by which time I was soaked and shivering. Finally, Carlos pointed out a pair of the birds teed up in a bush, their feathers matted and disheveled but nicely showing the distinctive field marks. After a minute, they disappeared back into the forest, leaving us to exchange damp high-fives for number 1,027. It was a muted celebration, but I was happy that we hadn’t come all this way for nothing.

  Our attention soon returned to the van, which was now stranded with its dead battery between a cliff and the waterfall—no space to try a push start. What to do?

  Just then, a little white car appeared around the bend, navigating slowly toward us through the rain and muck—the first vehicle we had seen since the previous day. Gunnar waved and approached, conferred with the driver for a moment, then gave a thumbs-up and a smile.

  “These people are going to help us with our dead battery,” he said.

  The car stopped behind our van, and its driver, a five-foot-tall man with friendly features, got out. The rest of his family stayed put, preferring to keep out of the pouring rain. I counted at least seven bodies sardined inside, squished against the windows; they sat quietly, patiently, and watched us with round, curious eyes.

  The man didn’t have jumper cables but he did have a screwdriver, which he used to remove the battery from our van. Then he removed the battery from his own car, which he left running, and switched batteries. This had the desired effect: our van started right up, and his little sedan was able to charge the flat battery. He didn’t bother to switch them back—“They’re the same size!” he said—and cheerfully drove off with his family, leaving us to wonder what might have happened if they hadn’t passed by.

  The generosity of this man, whose name I never knew, moved me. Time and again during the year, people like this—utter strangers—would generously bail me out of tight situations. Why did they do it? I could be a criminal, for all they knew, yet they noticed a need and took the time to do what they could, be it switching a dead car battery, pushing a van out of the mud, or offering food, transport, or a place to stay. Acts of kindness from strangers continually surprised, buoyed, and humbled me, and just saying thank you never seemed to capture the fullness of my gratitude.

  Gunnar got back in the driver’s seat.

  “Okay, we nailed the brushfinch,” he said. “Let’s go!”

  The exchange had cost us less than an hour, and we were in good spirits despite being soaked through. We left the Andamarca Valley, navigating across an exposed flank of the Andes, with the rain still falling out of a gray sky and birds flitting here, there, and everywhere.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Two days later, Gunnar, Glenn, and I arrived in Huánuco, a city of nearly 200,000 in east-central Peru. Carlos caught a bus to return to his house farther north, with plans to rejoin us in a few days closer to his home territory. Huánuco is said to be a delightful colonial city—“the soul of the Andes, dressed in jungle,” according to Peru’s tourism board—but I had no time for urban distractions. We rolled into town at 11 P.M. after another long drive on some of the world’s most dangerous roads. Then Gunnar announced that we would be leaving again at 2:30 A.M.

  I was used to getting up before dawn, but 2:30 was pushing it, especially after several days of very little sleep.

  “Gunnar, why not 3:30?” I asked, in a slightly exasperated tone.

  He looked sympathetic but wouldn’t budge.

  “Tomorrow is our Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager quest,” he replied, “and we have to be in the elfin forest at dawn. The road up there is pretty sketchy, so we’ll need at least two hours to make it.”

  This point was inarguable—I simply had to see that rare mountain-tanager—and so we checked into a hole-in-the-wall hotel for a couple hours of rest, setting our alarms for a ridiculous hour.

  When Glenn and I staggered downstairs at the appointed time, Gunnar was sitting in the lobby with his laptop propped open, making last-minute arrangements on the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

  “I just booked us a flight back to Lima for this afternoon,” he said, in a chipper mood. “That should give us plenty of time to reach the mountain-tanager spot, with extra birding along the way.”

  I rubbed sleep out of my eyes and thought, this guy is inhuman. He’s booking same-day flights at two in the morning. How does he do it?

  We set out in quiet anticipation, leaving the dim streets of Huánuco for a rural track that began to switchback steeply up out of town. As the road climbed past potato fields and open pastures, its condition rapidly deteriorated until Gunnar, in pitch darkness, was navigating around fallen boulders, eroded channels, and sudden drops. Glenn and I bounced in our seats in a state of stoic acceptance, resigning our bodies to whatever might befall us. Driving in Peru, especially at night, is best done with a certain dispassionate attitude, somewhere between nonchalance and apathy.

  I tried not to think of the grisly statistics. Broadly speaking, in Peru you are nearly ten times as likely to die in a traffic accident as in the United States. The website TripAdvisor, in an article about how to rent a car in Peru, begins by saying, “It’s not a good idea to drive in Peru. Driving in Peru should be considered an ‘extreme sport.’ The main rule here is that the bigger you are, the less you follow the rules.”

  The U.S. State Department officially advises against driving in Peru, “particularly at night or alone on rural roads at any time of day,” and the British Embassy emphasizes the point: “Driving standards in Peru . . . are poor, with stop signs and traffic lights frequently ignored. Drivers overtake on either side, with little concern for pedestrians or oncoming traffic. Crashes resulting in death or injury take place almost every day.”

  Bad roads are an unavoidable hazard of traveling in developing countries, especially when trying to access remote birding destinations, and I well knew the risks of spending so much time on them. Several prominent birders have perished in traffic accidents, including the late Phoebe Snetsinger—the first person ever to see 8,000 species of the world’s birds—who completed her life list in 1999, when her van rolled off a highway in Madagascar. Vehicle crashes are the number-one killer of travelers worldwide, far ahead of headline-grabbing terrorist attacks, plane crashes, and epidemics; according to the U.S. State Department’s careful records, more than one-third of all Americans who don’t make it home are involved in a car, train, or boating accident (a combined 3,104 deaths just between October 2012 and June 2015). And on a global scale, more than 90 percent of all crashes occur in low- to middle-income countries, where infrastructure and safety standards are lacking. Statistically speaking, driving a car—especially in a country like Peru, at night, while sleep deprived—is the most dangerous thing you can do.

  Already I’d seen some horrific accidents, including a gasoline tanker that had jackknifed, flipped, and exploded on a highway in central Brazil on the same day I saw the Harpy Eagle. We had passed that stretch of road early in the morning without incident, and then, returning a few hours later, found the blackened, burned-out wreckage blocking traffic in both directions. Apparently its driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, probably at
the exact same time that I was enjoying the eagle nearby. “We just have to remove the body,” said a guy in an orange vest. “Then we can push the truck off the pavement.”

  Dwelling on such incidents wouldn’t help anything, so I willed myself into composure on these long drives. Deep down, car accidents remained my biggest worry, a fear that would become only too real a few months later in northern Tanzania. But there wasn’t much I could do about it, other than digging out long-disused seat belts from all kinds of vehicles. (In Argentina a taxi driver once admonished me, “Oh, you don’t need that! I am a very safe driver!”) Life always carries risk, and on the road I tried to sit back and enjoy the ride.

  After a couple of hours of ascending switchbacks, Gunnar announced with excitement that we were nearing the top of the climb—just in time, because streaks of dawn were beginning to smudge the eastern horizon. The road had become a rough, rocky, muddy, two-wheel track cut into the mountainside, and it finally gave out in a flat, muddy area on a saddle, just below a beautiful patch of elfin cloud forest. As Gunnar initiated a three-point turn to park the van facing downhill, the van’s wheels suddenly skidded, spun around, and dug in. We had arrived, and we were stuck.

  Glenn jumped out to assess the situation. As he walked around the back of the van, I heard a shout.

  “Hey, we seem to be missing something!”

  Gunnar reluctantly switched off the engine and we disembarked. In the dim light of dawn, I could see Glenn’s silhouette standing behind the van, and I walked back to join him, stepping carefully around muddy spots. He pointed silently. The entire rear bumper assembly was gone, apparently ripped off by a rock during our rough drive in the dark. The van’s shape looked funny without it, like a horse without a rump.