The BookMarkBy Lani Stack
12:00AM / Wednesday, April 07, 2004
A lark of a book, for birders and anyone
Editor’s note: The BookMark is a new column featuring book reviews, discussions about books and news from the world of books, sponsored by the Northshire Book Store in Manchester, Vt. The column will run on alternate weeks from The Book Report, which is sponsored by The Bookstore in Lenox. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
By Mark Obmascik
Hardcover: 268 pages
Free Press; (Feb. 4, 2004)
I’m not much of a birder, bird-lover or bird-watcher. I admire cardinals for their conspicuous color, crows for their craftiness and chickadees for their overall cuteness. I do delight in seeing the rare swoop of an owl, a bald eagle circling on wind currents or the flitting flight of summer’s first hummingbird, but that’s about the extent of my avian enthusiasm.
However, I’ve recently partaken in an outstanding ornithological experience by reading Mark Obmascik’s new book “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession.” This cleverly titled true tale of the 1998 competition for the claim to “Big Year Birding Champion of North America” is a fascinating account of man’s — or, rather three-men’s — fanatic fixation on winning, under the guise of their birding hobby.
In the United States, some 50 million people lay claim to being bird-watchers or “birders.” They annually spend billions of dollars on birding-related travel and membership fees, and a select and utterly obsessed few compete in one of the world’s most eccentric contests. Every year on Jan. 1, a quirky crowd of adventurers storms out across North America for a spectacularly competitive event called a Big Year — a grand, grueling, expensive and occasionally vicious 365-day marathon of bird watching, all for the questionable glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the “Big Year Birding Champion of North America.”
The participants don’t register — and often don’t even know who their competitors are (or if they have any at all). There are few rules and no referees, and no monetary prize or award is given to the winner. At the end of the year, contestants send their self-reported species totals of birds sighted in North America — sometimes documented with photos, often merely jotted in notebooks — to the American Birding Association, which publishes the results, writes Mark Obmascik, “in a magazine-sized document that generates more gossip than an eighth-grade locker room.”
In 1998, three men took on the Big Year challenge in a whirlwind, winner-takes-nothing battle for a new North American birding record. The competitors were Sandy Komito, a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey with an eye for breaking his previous record; Al Levantin, a recently retired suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and Greg Miller, a recently divorced 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland with an ear for accurately identifying bird calls. The birders raced each other from Del Rio, Texas — in search of the rufous-capped warbler, to Gibsons, British Columbia — on a quest for Xantus' hummingbird, to Cape May, N. J. — seeking the offshore great skua. Bouncing from coast to coast on their potholed road to glory, they braved broiling deserts, roiling oceans, bug-infested swamps, a charge by a disgruntled mountain lion and man’s own competitive nature.
In “The Big Year,” prize-winning Denver Post journalist Obmascik recreates the 275,000-mile odyssey of these three obsessives as they fight to the finish in what wasn’t just a Big Year but the biggest. By year’s end, the three competitors had generated record-smashing Big Year totals, thanks, in part, to El Niño, technological help and 1998’s generally lax airline policies — allowing for last-minute flight bookings.
With engaging, unflappably wry humor, Obmascik — a birder himself, (“When somebody cries, ‘Duck!’ I look up,” he charmingly confesses) — memorializes the nearly-too-good-to-be-true exploits of Komito, Levantin and Miller and interweaves an entertaining smattering of science about birds and their own strange behavior with a brief history of other birdmen and women. A captivating tour of human and avian nature, passion and paranoia, honor and deceit, fear and loathing, “The Big Year” shows the lengths to which people will go to pursue their dreams, to conquer and categorize — no matter how low the stakes.
Prior to reading “The Big Year,” I didn’t know what a Big Year, Big Day, or Life List was — much less an “aviary fallout.” I had no idea that the tiny ruby-throated hummingbird migrated, in a single flight, over the entire Gulf of Mexico — often cannibalizing its own body in the process. I had no clue that chasing a Himalayan snowcock in eastern Nevada, in a helicopter, could be so thrilling that birders regularly shell out $550 for a one-hour ride. Although, since reading “The Big Year,” I probably won’t bother buying a copy of “The Birds of North America” — or even a pair of binoculars — I have already gazed upon the cardinals and chickadees at my backyard birdfeeder with a more appreciative eye.
A fantastic accompaniment to “The Big Year” is “Winged Migration,” the breathtaking film by Jacques Perrin (now available on DVD and VHS) or the complementary picture book of the same name. For a firsthand account of the 1973 Big Year, check out ornithologist Kenn Kaufman’s memoir “Kingbird Highway.” Kaufman, a high-school dropout, describes his Big Year adventure, completed at age 19 without a car (or even a driver’s license) and with a budget of under $1,000. If you love rooting for the underdog, “Winterdance “ is an excellent true story of a staggeringly unprepared Iditarod racer.
To learn more about birding or to tally your own list, visit the American Birding Association’s Web site at www.americanbirding.org .
Lani Stack works in Northshire Bookstore’s marketing office, and can often be found with her nose in book. |
