A Fowl Obsession

Sandy Komito was ready. It was an hour before sunrise on New Year's Day, and he sat alone at an all-night Denny's in Nogales, Ariz. He was 2,400 miles from home. He ordered ham and eggs. He stared into the black outside the window. � Komito knew men who, at this stage in their lives, lusted for a new wife or a Porsche or even a yacht. He had no interest in any of those. What he wanted was birds. � For the next 365 days he would dedicate himself to a singular goal: spotting more species of birds in North America than any human in history. He knew it wouldn't be easy. He expected to be away from home 270 of those days, chasing winged creatures around the continent. There were ptarmigans to trail on the frozen spine of the Continental Divide in Colorado and hummingbirds to hunt in the heat of the Arizona desert. � Komito would prowl the moonlit North Woods of Minnesota for owls and wade the beaches of South Florida at dawn for boobies. He planned to race after birds by boat in Nova Scotia, by bicycle in the Aleutian Islands and by helicopter in Nevada. Sleep was not a priority, but when it came Komito would be tossing in an Army bunk in Alaska or turning in a boat berth on the rolling waves of the Dry Tortugas. This was, after all, a competition, and he wanted to win. � He ordered his second thermos of coffee and spread his papers across the place mat. One sheet was a regional rare-bird alert from Tucson. Komito smiled. More rarities had been spotted the previous week in southeastern Arizona than anywhere else on the continent.

His gut told him that this chain restaurant was the right place to start. He'd eaten in so many Denny's over the years that he didn't have to waste time on the menu. Besides, other birders had reported that the trees around this Denny's were roosts for the great-tailed grackle and the black vulture. Either of these fine local birds, Komito decided, would make a wonderful first sighting for his year.

From his window Komito watched the horizon brighten with the promise of dawn. Little moved outside. On the tracks across from the restaurant, though, a freight train suddenly rammed through the quiet. The ruckus made something take wing and land just beyond his window.

Komito's heart raced: It was his first bird of the competition! He lurched forward for the identification: Plump...gray...head bobbing.

"It's a damn pigeon," Komito muttered.

Every Jan. 1 hundreds of people begin a yearlong effort to spot as many species of birds as they can. For these obsessives bird-watching is hunting without killing and collecting without clogging their homes. Most competitors limit themselves to the birds of their home counties. Others chase birds only within their home states. But the grandest, quirkiest birding contest 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 anywhere in the continental U.S. and Canada to chase the rumor of a rare species. Sometimes they manage to photograph their quarry, but usually they just jot down the sighting in a notebook and hope that other competitors will believe them. At the end of the year contestants forward their self-reported species totals to the American Birding Association (ABA), 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 features passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental yearning to explore and conquer mixed with an unquenchable craving for victory. In a bad year the contest costs a lot of money and leaves people raw.

This is the story of a single month in the greatest—or maybe the worst—birding competition of all time: the 1998 North American Big Year.

By May 11, when Komito scrambled north to Alaska for the spring migration, he had spent more time watching the birds than Alfred Hitchcock. Since spotting his first pigeon more than four months earlier in Arizona, he had scored an average of four new species a day, and his nights had been dominated by dreams of ways to find more. He had flown, driven, hiked and boated more than 100,000 miles in 25 states and provinces. He had been given the once-over twice by an immigrant-hunting border cop in Texas—"You're doing what out here before dawn? Bird-watching?"—and by a Vietnamese potbellied pig on a Colorado cattle ranch. He had gotten lost on the Rio Grande after dark while chasing a rufous-capped warbler, and he had passed out from exhaustion in a parking lot in Oklahoma while stalking a lesser prairie-chicken. He had even scored a black oystercatcher in the same California bay where Hitchcock had filmed the 1963 horror classic that made the world think twice about backyard finch feeders. Komito was ahead of his pace of 1987, when he had set the Big Year record of 721 bird species—at a cost of $60,000. He was kicking some serious tail feather.