Catch Hold Of The Big Year: A Tale Of Man, Nature, And Fowl Obsession Engineered By Mark Obmascik Compiled As Text

book appeared mildly intriguing when i picked it up at a secondhand book shop and after a reading, that definitely sums it up, With far too much filler, like many books, it would be far better whittled down to a longform feature article in a magazine or newspaper supplement, One of its major problems is that i found all three of the protagonists repugnant for various reasons, This would normally be enough for me to give up on a book but i ploughed on hoping for some sort of twist in the inevitable outcome, There wasnt one. The author is a competent professional and the oddness of the pursuit makes it bearable, but thats about as good as it gets, This was a quick read, and much better than the movie, It is really more like a,stars, but when forced,it is, I love watching birds, and cherish my binoculars, so reading of peoples Big Year experiences are fun for me, Although I don't have the desire, or money who really does, to do one myself, I can live vicariously through others, I LOVED this book and wanted to give itstars!, One of the most wonderful books I have ever read and now want to go right back to the beginning and start again, I am a bird looker, I like searching for them then love looking at them, . . these guys are the storm chasers of the avian world, utterly obsessed to the point of madness, . . and Mark O has taken the tale of three of them and their search to be the record holder of most birds seen in North America in one year and made the funniest,most entertaining and informative account of twitching that probably exists.
It is a masterpiece if you have ever been seasick on a pelagic tour,just missed a rarity seen by dozens of others or simply love birds then this is the book for you.
Entertaining look into the world of competitive birding, Oddly, the book has made me more keen to see the movie, starring Steve Martin, The author does a good job of making repetitive tasks travel, find a bird, repeat interesting and profiles the three main competitors very well,

Through it all, I had a continuous sense of disbelief at how these middle aged, overlycompetitive men manage to utterly transform a beautiful, peaceful pastime into an anxietydriven, miserable competition.
The Big Year by Mark Obmascik was a fun and engaging look at the world of bird watching or birding, More specifically, it was a look at a particular event in the world of birding, a spectacular competitive event called a Big Year, an event in which participants try to see the most species they can in North America north of Mexico during one calendar year.
In, three men battled for a new North American birding record and The Big Year chronicles their struggle,

A Big Year is a very interesting competition with as the author put it "few rules and no referees, " Birders simply fly, drive, or boat all over the country and try to see the most number of species in a year, Though they often try to photograph the birds they see and often have witnesses with them, they usually just jot down in their notebooks when and where they saw a particular species, forward their totals to the American Birding Association, and hope that their competitors and the birding world believe them.
Much of the competition is built upon credibility and honor and once someone is suspected of cheating just one time that person is finished, though cheating or accusations of cheating are quite rare.
Indeed, so strangely honorbound are the participants that Obmascik recounted several times when the three competitors actually helped one another, alerting each other to rare bird sightings in various parts of the continent and even in some cases showing their competitor the bird in person.


Obmascik profiled the three birders who competed that year, interviewing them and visiting the places that they birded in order to win the competition, Each individual had a different starting point to begin their Big Year, had different networks of informants to tell them when rare birds showed up in various parts of the country accidental strays from other parts of the world, be it Asian birds in Alaska, Mexican birds in Texas and the American Southwest, or Caribbean birds in Florida, and had varying types of experience to bring to bear on the competition.


The three Big Year men were Sandy Komito a New Jersey industrial contractor, to many a rather unlikely birder, Greg Miller a nuclear power worker in Maryland who birded deeply in debt and greatly surprised the other two birders who had much greater resources also the only one of the three to do a Big Year and still work a fulltime job, and Al Levantin a semiretired corporate chief executive who lived in Colorado.
The author followed their progress throughout the year and discussed their lives and what had brought them into birding in general and to competing in the Big Year in particular.


Obmascik discussed the history of the Big Year, covering Roger Tory Peterson's revolutionarybook A Field Guide to the Birds and the author's later famous book, Wild America, published in, a book in which the author traveled the continent and noted in a footnote that he sawspecies in his travels in.
This inspired a man by the name of Stuart Keith to repeat the feat in, who reported in Audubon magazine that he had seenbirds in a year and that his lifelist birds he had seen his entire life ofwas second only to Peterson's reported list of.
Within weeks of hisarticle it became clear that Keith was in fact ten among overall lifelisters, the champion having seenbirds, InKenn Kaufman, hitchhiking and spending only, traveled,miles and sawspecies, not winning the contest but writing a wellknown book called Kingbird Highway and inspiring others, including inJames M.
Vardaman, a timber consultant who while not an expert birder hired guides and consultants with his vast financial resources to help him plan a Big Year the complete opposite of Kaufman, ending the year withspecies and having spent,and writing an influential book, Call Collect, Ask for Birdman and setting the stage for more formal networks to be set up to report rare birds.


My favorite part of the book was the description of the places the three went to and the birds they saw, They went to Attu, "the Holy Grail of serious birders", a "treeless Alaskan spit seventeen hundred miles from Anchorage but just two hundred miles from Russia" to see rare Asian migrants pushed eastward by the region's harsh storms.
A vital stop was the Brownsville, Texas Municipal Landfill, the only reliable place in the U, S. to see the Tamaulipas crow the site nearly as hostile as Attu in its own way, To check off the rare Baird's sparrow, a secretive bird of nativegrass prairie that breeds only in the Northern Great Plains, they had to make a special trip "among birders,

the Baird's separates the men from the boys.
" High Island, Texas was another vital stop, a prominent birding spot along the Gulf coast, "a green oasis that can be seen for miles offshore," such a popular spot to see arriving spring migrants like hummingbirds, warblers, and tanagers that the Houston Audubon society had built bleachers.
To add Pacific pelagic birds, the Big Year men had to contend with the highly influential Debi Shearwater formerly Debi Milllichap, who had legally changed her name in honor of a type of seabird, who ran the best pelagic birding charter on the West Coast if one wanted to see Pacific seabirds, one had to be on her good side and one of the Big Year men wasn't.
In order to see the Colima warbler, one had to hike to its only breeding area in the U, S. , the,foot high Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park in Texas, The only place to see otherwise tropical seabirds like the sooty tern and the masked booby was the isolated, desolate Dry Tortugas, arid islands that were once a prison in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mark Obmascik's style here is playful and almost conversational, He really plays up the competition among the three contenders, I discovered, however, that I'd much rather read about birds than about bird chasers,

I'm generally content to observe the more common species of birds sharing the habitat close to my home, I can be thrilled by a robin feasting on fall berries, barn swallows building a nest in spring, hundreds of crows gathering in a huge pine for an evening confab, or a winter wren singing his heart out, putting on a concert just for me.
I do enjoy the challenge and excitement of identifying a bird I've never seen before, but I've never kept a "life list" and never will,

To me, the concept of "competitive birding" is absurd, Birdwatching is not a sport, People who race around the country checking off species as quickly as possible are not watching birds, They are bird chasers, We may as well put them on a reality TV show and forget about the enjoyment of nature for its own sake, as a meditative pursuit,

All that said, I did enjoy the book, I learned a lot about how the national and international birding communities operate, and there's some fascinating information about birds and migration, Chapterwas particularly excellent in that regard, Obmascik also includes some history of famous birdersmuch more interesting than modernday fanatics,

There were three competitors for Big Year, Al Levantin and Greg Miller seemed like pretty decent guys, I found Sandy Komito so odious that I had a hard time reading about him and his exploits, He's one of those guys who goes out of his way to be obnoxious and offensive just to get attention and amuse himself, I might have been impressed by his bird knowledge if he had used it for anything other than to stroke his oversized ego and outdo other hopefuls, He had already won the Big Year competition several years before, He could have stepped aside and let someone else have a chance, The author seemed to genuinely like Komito, though, while still doing a perfect job of showing what a complete jerk he was, Heres a strange but fascinating world I knew nothing about: competitive birding, It can be fun but it can also be almost vicious,

Every year there are state competitions and a national one to see who can spot the greatest number of different birds over a calendar year, Theres also a noncompetitive annual Christmas day bird count,



The author interviewed the top three winners of thecompetitive birding year to come up with his story, Part of the year for one man is written in a daybyday diary, He intersperses the tale with brief bios of other famous people connected with birding such as John James Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson, who came up with the idea of field guides.


Its certainly exciting, Serious birders know in advance where major gathering grounds are for that season or week, So at any given time they might be in of all places the New Jersey Meadowlands! Who would think that location is one of the major sighting areas due to the seasonal bird migration paths along the east coast Or the site of the week may be the Everglades or the Dry Tortugas in Florida.
Then it may be islands off the coast of Texas or Duluth, Minnesota in the dead of winter, Even Attu Island far out in the Aleutians is a special site, And no matter how isolated the site, youll probably find a bunch of birders who got there before you,

In addition to the standard, wellknown bird gathering areas, competitors rush to rare bird sightings posted on the internet, These may be at someones backyear bird feeder or at a landfill, And by the time you get there the birds may be gone,



At various times the birders travel by air, auto, canoe, bicycle or even helicopter, There are birdwatching boat cruises, like whale watching excursions, It costs money to do all this traveling, One wealthy competitor spent,that year, mostly on his,miles of airline travel, But another spent only,a loan from the Bank of Dad and often hitchhiked,

Not just the three main competitors, but just about all the birding characters are men, A lot are divorced. Is it the birds or the competition that attracts these men to this sport Is it a sport Is the divorce thing cause or effect Divorced men have more time to bird and more freedom to do so.
But men absent from home on all the holidays, with or without kids, does not bode well for a marriage, The serious competitors will be on the road birding more thandays a year and maybe close to, Or it could be the personality type that starts it, One competitors wife told the author she had a friend who warned her against marrying the guy saying “if Dale Carnegie had ever met him, he would simply have given up.
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There is a lot of other humor in the book, When one birder is impatient to get flat fixed out in the wilderness, the mechanic “took his time fixing the flat, Even in amph wind, locals could smell desperation, ”

“In the lates, Nevada state fish and game commissioners worried about a nagging problem: they had thousands of square miles of open space, but nothing to kill in it.
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A good read, I enjoyed learning about something I knew nothing about, And thanks to my sister for sending me this book,

Top photo of migrating birds along the Texas Gulf coast from smithsonianmag, com
Air photo of the New Jersey Meadowlands from environmentalgeography, files. wordpress. com
The author from cdn, skyhinews. com
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