Andrew Guttenberg - Falcon Freeway: A Big Year of Birding on a Budget

Over the last 100 years the activity of watching birds has changed dramatically. In recent decades birdwatching, or birding, has evolved speedily and grown both in popularity and practice. Improvements to technology have changed how we find and share birds, allowing us to learn more about their amazing and complex lives.

In the spring of 1953 Roger Tory Peterson, a celebrated naturalist and artist, traversed the continent with British friend James Fisher. Their 100-day cross-country trip targeted many premier birding destinations, which appear in many modern Big Year itineraries. This duo of natural historians wrote a fascinating book that incorporated their observations, interactions, and thoughts from this journey into an educational book titled Wild America. After reading this marvelous story, I was hooked.

There are many published books on Big Year birding adventures, but two classic stories stand above the rest. Kenn Kaufmans travels chronicled in Kingbird Highway epitomized budget-friendly birding. For Kenn, sacrificing the comfort of reliable transportation and knowing where his next meal was coming from was the price of admission for living out a year-long dream of birding across the continent. His story inspired my own journey, and my title is a tribute to not only this wonderful mans remarkable storytelling ability, but the example he has set for others. I owe him a debt of gratitude.

Times have changed, as has the fabric of our continents biodiversity. Humans have impacted nearly every corner of the landscape, with increased carbon emissions, noise pollution, urban and agricultural developments, and careless disposal of waste. I quickly realized that while on my travels, I needed to be making observations and writing them down, to chronicle this point in our history. It is a rare intersection of human impact, changing landscapes, and an ecological consciencetrying to understand the landscape and lessen my own impact on itwhile doing a very intensive carbon-hungry activity: birding.

This book is an imperfect attempt to share my story: what Ive learned as well as what I saw, and the mindset I embraced to undertake such an adventure. Inspired by the journeys of Kenn Kaufman and Roger Tory Peterson, I have called my story Falcon Freeway to reflect what doing a Big Year on a budget means now in the 21st century. Hitchhiking is not as safe or culturally acceptable, highways are now multi-lane freeways, and yet the spontaneous adventure and freedom of Big Year birding remains unchanged. Rather than using my photographs, I asked rising artist Andrew Guttenberg to create pen and ink illustrations, as a nod to the amazing artwork of Roger Tory Peterson and Kenn Kaufman, continuing a traditional approach to a modern work.

With hope, I share this story with the intention to do for others what Kingbird Highway did for me: inspire, illuminate, and pave the way for the grand adventure ahead.

The New Year came and went passing quietly just like any other night. There were no fireworks and no partiesno dressing up and getting down on the dance floor. In what had become the new normal for meat 26, I swapped friends for family, carbonated beverages for water, and opted out of watching the televised ball drop in Times Square to go to bed early. I had a big day aheadI was going birding.

Ever since I was young, I always slept well at my grandparents house, and this time was no exception. Although my 4am alarm came much earlier than I would have liked, I went upstairs to find that Papa and Nana (my moms dad and stepmom) were already awake and more excited than I was for my birding trip into Canada. I took a sleepy sip of pomegranate juice that was set out on the counter, and was quite surprised to realize it had been spiked with ginger ale to wake up my taste buds. My sandwiches and snacks were already made and packed for a day on the road. I realized how lucky I was to have a supportive family.

A delicate layer of ice crystals covered the mossy boulders and prehistoric-looking sword ferns that lined the steep driveway. Thin shafts of moonlight shined down through dense boughs of cedars and firs, illuminating my bursts of warm breath in the frigid night air. Slightly winded from the walk, I examined the fragile crystals glistening in the moonlight, waiting for my body to catch up to my mind.

Perhaps only a minute passed, but the cold made it seem like an eternity. The audible thumping of my heartbeat soon slowed, and my ears could take in the stillness of the surrounding forest. I played the call of a Northern Saw-whet Owl. Silence answered each series of toots, my mind using the blank canvas of silence to paint images of what it wanted to hear. My pulse quickened as I imagined what creatures were out there in the woods.

Years ago, my uncle had walked up this same driveway to his car at night, and startled a mountain lion sitting atop a freshly-killed deer. As my imagination ran wild, the silence was broken by an unidentifiable noise, an eerie, unfamiliar sound. Was this the alternate call of a Northern Saw-whet Owl? Perplexed, I listened to the stillness for another long moment, and walked back down the hill to my car.

The first day of each new year is a special day for bird enthusiasts who identify as listerspeople who keep a list of all the birds they see. On January 1st, the year list resets to zero, and every new bird seen shares equal weight. I wondered what my first bird of the New Year was going to be.

As if conjured by a magicians spell, a Barn Owl appeared in my headlights, floating across the road like a floppy marionette suspended by invisible wires. The heart-shaped face glowed in the flood lights of my carand then was gone. My year list increased from 0 to 1.

The years first lesson in economical-birding presented itself as I surveyed the parking near the ferry terminal in Port Angeles. Daily parking was $20 which was way too muchmaybe I could find a hotel? I found a Red Lion hotel, and decided to ask if I could leave my car in their lot. After explaining my planned foray into Canada, I flashed a wide smile and was rewarded with a free parking slip for hotel guests. With a Happy New Year! I was out the door with free parking for the day.

The muffled chirps of House Sparrows came from somewhere near the edge of the parking lot as I unloaded my dads bike from the back of my car. It was almost $50 cheaper to walk on the ferry than it was to take a vehicle into Canada. I took my dads mountain bike, which would allow me to cover more ground in Canadaand see more birds.

I packed and double-checked my bags to be sure I had all the necessities: my passport, extra batteries, GoPro mounts, and directions to the last report of a Redwinga rare thrush from Asia that had been recently spotted in Victoria, and was the target bird of my trip. After grabbing some extra snacks from my car, I double-checked it was locked and pedaled off towards the ferry terminal.