To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime Obsession

Book by Koeppel Dan

Prologue

My father and I were drinking champagne on a remote island in the Rio Negro, the dark river that flows into the Brazilian Amazon. IÆd hidden the bottle in my backpack, along with paper cups for the other members of our group. The toast was brief. For Dad, this was the moment he joined an elite cadreùfewer than a dozen others, living or dead, have ever seen more than seven thousand bird species, the milestone heÆd just reached. It was the culmination of fifty years of watching. For the rest of our group, the Amazonian Black Tyrantùa small flycatcher that shares the same coloration as the river we were travelingùwas just another number.

But itÆs all about the numbers.

Dad and I had been travelingùup the river in creaky boats, along mud-packed roads, and through deep, wet forestùfor nearly two weeks. I was on the verge of my fortieth birthday. It was the first extended period IÆd spent with Dad since I was a teenager. Throughout my childhood, as well as now, our time together was focused on birds: Dad watching them, and me watching Dad watch them.

The group my father, Richard Koeppel, joined in Brazil is made up of people just like him: intensely dedicated, highly competitive bird watchers (or birders, as they prefer to be called) known as ôBig Listers.ö Approximately 9,600 bird species are found on earth. About 250 people have seen 5,000 of them; about 100 birders have reached 6,000. Several of the twelve or so birders at the seven-thousand level are racing toward eight thousand, a mark only two birdersùonly one now livingùhave reached.

To see more than seven thousand birds is a massive undertaking. It requires extensive travel (only nine hundred species are found in the United States and Canada) to some of the planetÆs most remote destinations. And it requires a specific mindset: singular, focused, and obsessed, often to the point of blotting out anythingùfamily, career, other pastimesùthat might slow the quest. For most Big Listers, that arduous and all-absorbing mission seems to be borne of being pursued by circumstance, ambition, or personal demons, coupled with a barely submerged understanding that the only way to outrun those pursuers is to chase after something else with equal determination.

If any air at all gets into the Big ListerÆs hunt, itÆs a compulsive need to count everything. My father counts books heÆs read and cheeses heÆs sampled. IÆve met Listers who tally the number of planes theyÆve flown on, the states in which theyÆve had Starbucks coffee, or their sexual conquests. Seeing every bird on earth is an eccentric pursuit. It can also be a tragic one. Phoebe Snetsinger, one of the two people to see more than eight thousand birds, became a Big Lister after receiving a cancer diagnosis. Given six months to live, she decided to forgo treatment and chase birds. She thrived and counted for seventeen years, and then was killed in a car accident on a remote road in Madagascar as she approached her 8,500th species. SheÆd talked about quitting because reaching numbers that high requires travel to distant and dangerous places, but she admitted that she was unable to stop. To my father, the only thing more important than his quest was cigarettes; despite the fact that he was a doctor, he couldnÆt shake the addiction until, just after seeing his seven thousandth bird, he was stricken with both cancer and heart failure. As he recovered, he took comfort in his list, reordering it, putting a half-century of bird sightings into cohesive form.

As I packed away the champagne in BrazilÆs Jßu National Park, the elation of the moment tempered, and I once again found myselfùas I had all my lifeùbecoming curious, trying to understand my fatherÆs consuming passion. Why? Why count? For the past ten years, IÆve been trying to find the answer. The search has led to more questions, about science, personality, and desire. My father is a brilliant man who has lived a life that, in so many respects, didnÆt turn out the way he wanted. He buried the sadness of his disappointments by watching birds, by tending his logbooks and checklists the way a gardener nurtures his blooms. On our trip, Dad and I connected in ways that were both lovely and difficult. I saw his self-destructive side, a part of him that for years has shut out family and love. And I saw his best qualities, a man with a gentle heart, hidden by pain, but not hard to detect upon careful inspection. The triumph of the list is the triumph of that hidden heart because it is proof not just of obsession, but also grace, and glory.

***

Dad and the Big Listers arenÆt just chasing numbers; theyÆre chasing the definition of life itself. Not long ago, there were only thought to be six thousand bird species on earth. Ten years from now, most ornithologists believe, there will be three times that many. It isnÆt that new species are evolving; rather, scientists are arriving at new definitions of what species are. This advanced thinkingùand birds are on the cutting edge of itùhas profound implications for human understanding. Speciation is evolution. Evolution is at the heart of who we are, what life is on this planet. I hope that this book shows how the pursuit of birds relates toùand grows fromùscienceÆs quest to explain our existence. I hope it shows what that science means to those of us who are content to simply watch at our backyard feeders. And I hope it shows why birdsùespecially birdsùcan lead to these understandings; the same reason Darwin chose finches to illustrate his theoriesù birds are active, colorful, and musical, all easy-to-differentiate evolutionary traitsùare the reasons for the more general romantic love of birds. It shouldnÆt be a surprise that humans are fascinated by creatures that soar, sing, nest, and battle.

To see every bird on earth isnÆt easy. It requires strategy, money, and time; it is sometimes dull, and sometimes dangerous, and very often absurd. The underlying ôgameö of birding is a labyrinth of mechanics, rules, and rivalries. There are birders whoÆve been shunned for cheating, internecine fights over what truly constitutes a sighting (seeing is not the only form of believing in modern birdingùcurrently, many birders consider a ôheardö bird countable). BirdersÆ lists themselves are often moving targets, subject to frequent revision and categorization: You donÆt just start at one; instead, you create multiple tallies, delineated by year, region, species, genus, and just about any other category a person could think of.

My father says his listing is ôan addiction, just like any other addiction.ö Though he spent a considerable portion of his medical career attempting to cure those with physical dependencies, I wasnÆt surprised that he didnÆt care to engage in analysis of his motivations: ôI canÆt explain it. I canÆt even say it ever gave me a sense of euphoria. ItÆs just what I do.ö

But I want to explain it. I want to understand. I know Dad wonÆt agree with everything IÆve said in this book. I know he wonÆt share many of my conclusions about what drives him. He wonÆt be completely happy with some of the things IÆve revealed here. But thatÆs the nature of love, especially between father and son. What Dad has given me, through all the trouble and pain, and finally through triumph, is his legacy. I didnÆt want it to be burnished and idealized. DadÆs story is so much more beautiful when it follows the alternately tragic and elating course of a real life.

As I was writing this book, I spent hours on the phone with Dad. I accumulated hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews with him. I was, of course, using birds as a way to find out about him, as a door into his life. Sometimes the interviews were tedious. They were occasionally fun; often they were painful. Dad was in a big hurry to get them done. At first, I thought this was because of his typical impatience for introspection. But then he let it slip. He was nearing his seventieth birthday: ôI was worried,ö he says, ôthat something would happen to me before you got the whole story. I wanted to get this done, so youÆd have it.ö

He wanted me to get through the list, as well, he wanted to pass it on. Once it was safely in my hands, it was up to me to determine what, exactly, IÆd been given. It was only when I began to read between the seemingly dry and formal lines of the tally itself that I realized what such a lifetime of counting contains: the desire to find oneÆs own place in creation, pursued with a single-mindedness that so far has evolved only in humans. Seeing every bird is a way of seeing everything, of attempting to know everything. Such attempts mark human history, in religion and art as well as in science; theyÆre seductive, and sometimes dangerous. The story told here is about finding a way into that seductionùand finding a way back."