The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and a Fowl Obsession FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
For those unfamiliar with the rituals of birding, a "Big Year" is a yearlong quest by individual birdwatchers to log official sightings of as many breeds as possible. Make no mistake -- this is no leisurely walk through the local woods. Birders engaged in a Big Year are highly competitive and go to enormous lengths to sight their birds, including daring acts of physical endurance, large financial outlays, and even psychological combat.
In Obmascik's hilarious recounting, the Big Year is 1998, and the birds are chased by three competitors: Sandy Komito is a ruthless, wisecracking roofing contractor who grew up on the mean streets of New Jersey; Al Levantin is a gracious and successful businessman with a mansion in Aspen; and Greg Miller is a nearly broke junk-food addict who works as a software administrator for a nuclear power plant. They are three men quite unlikely to ever cross paths, except for a consuming passion: birds.
As the three men chase ptarmigans, hummingbirds, owls, and boobies, they travel by every means possible -- from airplane and taxi to helicopter, bicycle, and boat -- canoeing through gator-infested swamps and sleeping in the frozen terrain of the Aleutian Islands. Only one man can win this race, but birders and nonbirders alike will find themselves cheering the competitors along in this quirky contest in which honesty and honor play as important a role as winning.
(Winter/Spring 2004 Selection)
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Every year on January 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, "extreme" 365-day marathon of birdwatching.
For three men in particular, 1998 would be a whirlwind, a winner-takes-nothing battle for a new North American birding record. In frenetic pilgrimages for once-in-a-lifetime rarities that can make or break their lead, the birders race each other from Del Rio, Texas, in search of the rufous-capped warbler, to Gibsons, British Columbia, on a quest for Xantus's hummingbird, to Cape May, New Jersey, seeking the offshore great skua. Bouncing from coast to coast on their potholed road to glory, they brave broiling deserts, roiling oceans, bug-infested swamps, a charge by a disgruntled mountain lion, and some of the lumpiest motel mattresses known to man.
The unprecedented year of beat-the-clock adventures ultimately leads one man to a new record -- one so gigantic that it is unlikely ever to be bested ... finding and identifying an extraordinary 745 different species by official year-end count.
Prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik creates a rollicking, dazzling narrative of the 275,000-mile odyssey of these three obsessives as they fight to the finish to claim the title in the greatest -- or maybe the worst -- birding contest of all time. With an engaging, unflappably wry humor, Obmascik memorializes their wild and crazy exploits and, along the way, interweaves an entertaining smattering of science about birds and their own strange behavior with a brief history of other bird-men and -women; turns out even Audubon pushed himself beyond the brink when he was chasing and painting the birds of America.
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. This is a lark of a read for anyone with birds on the brain -- or not.
SYNOPSIS
The Big Year is an annual contest in which birders travel all across North America competing to identify as many different species as possible over the course of a 365-day period. Journalist Obmascik profiles three of the participants in the 1998 Big Year, one of whom achieved the unprecedented record of identifying 745 different species, and describes their adventures in traveling the continent looking for rare species. Obmascik frequently incorporates the natural history of the discussed birds into his narrative, also discussing some of the wider societal issues surrounding birds and their environments. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In one of the wackiest competitions around, every year hundreds of obsessed bird watchers participate in a contest known as the North American Big Year. Hoping to be the one to spot the most species during the course of the year, each birder spends 365 days racing around the continental U.S. and Canada compiling lists of birds, all for the glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the Big Year birding champion of North America. In this entertaining book, Obmascik, a journalist with the Denver Post, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year: a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey who aims to break his previous record and win for a second time; a suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and a 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland. Obmascik bases his story on post-competition interviews but writes so well that it sounds as if he had been there every step of the way. In a freewheeling style that moves around as fast as his subjects, the author follows each of the three birding fanatics as they travel thousands of miles in search of such hard-to-find species as the crested myna, the pink-footed goose and the fork-tailed flycatcher, spending thousands of dollars and braving rain, sleet, snowstorms, swamps, deserts, mosquitoes and garbage dumps in their attempts to outdo each other. By not revealing the outcome until the end of the book, Obmascik keeps the reader guessing in this fun account of a whirlwind pursuit of birding fame. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Bemused appreciation from Denver Post reporter Obmascik of a year-long quest to eyeball or hear as many bird breeds as possible in the US and Canada. The Big Year was 1998, the protagonists were Sandy Komito, a roofing contractor from New Jersey; Al Levantin, a well-heeled businessman; and Greg Miller, a software jock for a nuclear power plant. As enjoyably chronicled by Obmascik, all three went to punishing lengths to tally the highest number of bird species encountered for the year. It was a bit like The Great Race, except that here there would be no fraud or deceit: witnesses would be good, photos even better, but trust was imperative; there would even be instances of "honor among top birders: if one asked for help, the other provided it." Pocketbooks would be stretched, as would the limits of physical endurance, in mad dashes for vagrants, accidentals, and true freaks made public by rare-bird alerts. Sometimes a good sighting was just a matter of being in the right place, or of reaping the bounty served by El Ni-o, and chasing birds via air travel was certainly easier in those pre-9/11 days. The author, a bit of a birder himself, knows how to wring joy out of this birding bender; he vividly conveys the delight in identifying a white-throated robin, a clay-colored robin, a rufous-backed robin, a chachalacas ("that sounded as if Ethel Merman had swallowed a rusty trombone"), a yellow rail ("the Greta Garbo of the bird world"), or "the green microburst of energy called Xantus's hummingbird." Obmascik will light a tinderbox of bird lust in unsuspecting readers who have never given a thought to "Le Conte's thrasher, a notoriously elusive soil-digger of the saltbush desert." You'll gladlyadd this one to your own list-of surprisingly good books. Film rights to Dreamworks, with Red Hour Films
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