Pacific Views

Extreme Birding

Living on Earth is one of my favorite radio programs and this week it had a topic that was particularly fascinating for me: birders who become so obsessed with their sport that they spend a year trying to see more species north of the US-Mexico border than anyone else. Steve Curwood interviewed Mark Obmascik, author of “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession” who wrote about one Big Year and the three men that competed for the title.

So what is the Big Year?

Every year on January 1, hundreds of people abandon their day-to-day lives to join one of the world's quirkiest contests. Their goal: spotting the most species of birds in a single year. Most contestants limit themselves to the birds of their home county. Others chase birds only within the borders of their home state. But the grandest birding competition of them all, the most grueling, the most expensive, and occasionally the most vicious, sprawls over an entire continent.

It is called the Big Year.

In a Big Year, there are few rules and no referees. Birders just fly, drive, or boat anytime, anywhere in the continental United States and Canada, to chase a rumor of a rare species. Sometimes birders manage to photograph their prey, but usually they just jot down sightings in notebooks and hope other competitors believe them. At the end of the year, contestants forward their self-reported species totals to the American Birding Association, which publishes the results in a magazine-sized document that generates more gossip than an eighth-grade locker room.

In a good year the contest offers passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental craving to see and conquer mixed with an unstoppable yearning for victory.

In a bad year the contest costs a lot of money and leaves people raw.

(Except courtesy of the Denver Post.)

According the LOE interview, the contest was started by the famed Roger Tory Peterson who one year accompanied a British naturalist, James Fisher, on a journey along the coasts looking for birds in the days before the great interstate highways. When they got back, Peterson wrote about his experience.

So, Peterson, in this terrific book “Wild America,” ended up writing one tiny, little footnote, an asterisk at the bottom of a page which noted: “my year’s list, at the end of 1953, was 572 species.” Well, that was the footnote that launched the whole Big Year phenomenon. There were a lot of people who read that and said, I can match that. Or, even more – I can beat it.

Obmascik also talked about Kenn Kaufman, birder extraordinaire, and his Big Year. Kenn Kaufman dropped out of high school at the age of 17 and went out on the road to do real birding. Kenn was inspired by Peterson from a very young age and in his fascinating coming of age story, Kingbird Highway, tells of his own Big Year in the early 70s. It is a incredible book and one that has put the prairie potholes in North Dakota on my must see list. Here's Kenn on listening to Peterson in Kenmare, ND.

Listening, I realized he might have been any kind of artist. He might have been a composer: the great composer who began as a youth and learned to play all the instruments, who studies the intricacies of music theory, searching for musical perfection...until he could sit down at the piano and improvise so brilliantly that every measure of music rolling forth from the keys would be an inspiration to the listener. So it was with Peterson, only it was birds, not music. Since his boyhood he had been watching birds, painting them, photographing them, writing about them, letting his quest for birds take him to all parts of the globe; now he could hold a room full of birders spellbound simply by reminiscing, by improvising. When it was over we would all be on our feet, rocking the room with applause - but while he spoke, no one made a sound.

Obmascik's story about Kenn was how his obsession had him going to extreme lengths in order to spend his time birding.

OBMASCIK: Sure. Ken Kauffman has kind of become the hero, in many ways, of the birding movement. He dropped out of high school at age 17, from Kansas, and decided to do a Big Year. He had no money. His father was unemployed. What he did is hitchhiked his way across America and Canada for a North American Big Year. He spent less than a thousand dollars total by thumbing his way across the country. He got beaten up in Nome, he was sleeping under viaducts. And, most amazingly, he actually lived, often, on a can of cold Campbell soup, and he would poor little Friskies Brazed Liver cat food into it, and chowed down.

CURWOOD: Cat food? Cat food!

OBMASCIK: Just to see birds. He had no money.

Curwood noted that Obmascik seemed to have gotten pretty intense in his own birding. Obmascik agreed and gave some statistics about how much birds, birdwatching, and birding have captured the public.

OBMASCIK: It’s a slippery slope. Birding really can be addictive. One thing that amazed me when I started looking into this project was just the sheer number of people in this subculture.

There is a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that says that there are roughly 40 million Americans who try to figure out what birds are in their backyard. Now, these are mostly feeder people. They’re the ones that have got all the sunflower husks on their lawn. Forty million people – that’s about one out of five so-called adults in the country.

But that’s not a measure of the obsession. There are 3.6 million people, or a population roughly the size of Connecticut, who can identify 40 or more species solely by sight or call. I mean, think about that. Forty or more species. Most people can look and say, well, there’s a pigeon, there’s a mallard, there’s an American robin. There’s three, keep going, you need 37 more.

That’s a lot of people, a population the size of Connecticut. But the obsession, here’s where the obsession kicks in -- there are actually 2.4 million people who keep a life list of every species they’ve ever seen. A life list. When you start writing stuff down, I think that’s where the addiction kicks in. That’s a birding army the size of Arkansas. That’s how many people keep a life list.

Obmascik's book is one I have to get because, you see, I'm one of those that keeps a life list. And although I never got to see or meet Roger Tory Peterson, I was fortunate enough to go on a birding trip with Kenn Kaufman. And on that trip to a wetlands outside of Forest Grove, Oregon, I added a Ruff to my life list.