Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World

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Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World

Book: Paperback 25 - 09 - 2018

Product ID: 9913807

Condition: New
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Language : English

Paperback : 352 Pages

ISBN-10 : 1328494632

Original Product Guaranteed - Imported from USA


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 End of the World On New Year’s Day, superstitious birdwatchers like to say, the very first bird you see is an omen for the future. This is a twist on the traditional Chinese zodiac ? —  ?which assigns each year to an animal, like the Year of the Dragon, or Rat ? —  ?and it’s amazingly reliable. One year, I woke up on January 1, glanced outside, and saw a Black-capped Chickadee, a nice, friendly creature that everybody likes. That was a fantastic year. The next New Year, my first bird was a European Starling, a despised North American invader that poops on parked cars and habitually kills baby bluebirds just because it can. Compared to the Year of the Chickadee, the Year of the Starling was pretty much a write-off. So it was with some anxiety that on January 1, 2015, I looked around to see which bird would set the tone for the next 365 days. I already knew this would be no ordinary year: I’d just quit my only regular job, broken up with my girlfriend, spent most of my savings, and then, cramming all my possessions into a small backpack, made my way literally to the end of the Earth. Now, at the stroke of midnight, on top of a Russian ship in the frozen reaches of Antarctica, with a bottle of champagne in both hands and binoculars dangling around my neck, I was in a hot tub with a Scottish historian, a penguin researcher, and a geologist. What bird could possibly tell where all of this was heading? With any luck, it would be a penguin. I’d gone to great lengths to engineer this New Year celebration just so that, right after the obligatory countdown and toast, 2015 could be declared the Year of the Penguin ? —  ?which, karmically speaking, couldn’t possibly go wrong. In the previous week, I’d spent a lonely Christmas night on the floor of the Los Angeles airport, traveled from the United States to the southern tip of Argentina, caught this ship, sailed across the tumultuous Drake Passage, and positioned myself for this moment, this pivotal moment when fate would set in motion the biggest year of my life, and possibly of international birdwatching history. The goal was simple: in the next twelve months, I hoped to see 5,000 species of birds ? —  ?about half the birds on Earth ? —  ?in the ultimate round-the-world journey. After leaving Antarctica, I’d spend the next four months in South America, then migrate north through Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, reaching the United States in May. If things went well, I’d fly over to Europe, do a big U-turn through Africa, bounce around the Middle East, zigzag across most of Asia, and island-hop Down Under to ring in the following New Year. While the Earth completed one full orbit of the sun, I would visit forty countries with no days off. Nobody had ever attempted such a trip, and bird-brained experts argued about whether it was even possible to spot 5,000 species in one calendar year. By the end, the journey would surpass even my own wildest dreams. But for now, all I knew was that the clock started ticking at midnight.* * * The world’s most frequent fliers don’t have platinum status, free upgrades, or even passports. Every hour, millions of these undocumented immigrants pour across major political borders, and nobody thinks of building walls to keep them out. It would be impossible to anyway. Birds are true global citizens, free to come and go as they please. A few years ago, two British scientists tackled the question of how many individual birds are living on Earth ? —  ?a sort of global avian census ? —  ?and calculated that, at any given moment, between 200 and 400 billion feathered friends share this planet with us. That works out to something like forty birds for every human, spread from here to Timbuktu. Birds occupy almost every conceivable niche of our world, from the wild Amazon in South America to the heart of the Bronx in New York City. Even places that seem lifeless lie within their reach: intrepid b

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