THE BIG YEAR: The extraordinary story of the greatest bird watching competition of all times, by Mark Obmascik (Doubleday, $37.95).
Pulizter Prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik is famous for his coverage of the Columbine school massacre, politics and environmental reporting. For a change he turned his attention to bird watching or, rather, watching bird watchers. He spent hundreds of hours interviewing three of America’s leading bird watchers, their wives, families, associates and crowds of witnesses to write this book – and found that American birdwatching is the activity of an obsessive, super-competitive, and sometimes alarming subculture.
The members of the American Birding Association compete to see as many bird species as possible within a year. They call themselves “birders”. Obmascik tells the story of three of the most zealous, most obsessive, competitive birders, who took on the gruelling job from dawn of January 1 to dusk on December 31, 1998.
Some 675 bird species live and breed in North America; top birders are expected to see all these birds in the course of a year, plus as many stragglers or rarities as they can find. The birds must be alive, wild and unrestrained and, if possible, birders should try to photograph their prey or find somebody to corroborate their sightings. The top birders are sometimes on fairly congenial and collaborative terms, but deceit and paranoia occasionally show up.
Two of the watchers were wealthy businessmen who chartered planes, helicopters and boats to pursue their birds. The third birder worked overtime at a nuclear power plant to finance his all-consuming passion on weekends and public holidays.
In The Big Year we relive their searches up snowy mountains to see ptarmigan, their boat trips to see noddies and albatrosses, their chartered helicopter rides to see Himalayan snowcocks in the Nevada desert. We are given a wonderful account of visits to Attu, the desolate, westernmost of the Aleutian Islands – and holy grail of birders – to see smews, pochards, and stragglers blowing in from Siberia. Our three top birders hurry to see an off-course Baikal teal behind an ice-cream shop in Denver; in Tucson they sit with 20 people around the base of a telephone pole at dusk, hoping to spot an elf owl.
Obmascik gets up close to these fanatics. One phones his wife in New York.
“Well Ethel, today I was in Brownsville, Texas, and I saw the Taulipas crow.”
“A Tamawla what?”
“A Taulipas crow. A Mexican crow. I saw it today.”
“How nice. What does it look like? Is it a good-looking bird?”
“It’s a crow. It’s black.”
“Where did you see it?”
“At the dump, Ethel. The Brownsville dump.”
“Was it a nice day?”
“I got the bird, Ethel.”
Watching birds is infectious. Obmascik spent so much time on the trail of the birders that he became an avid bird watcher himself. He has given us a rollicking, very funny book.