Local birder seeks to see 650 species in 2010

The first bird of the first day of the Big Year was a song sparrow.

It would have been a Canada goose, but Bob Ake, bless his heart, knew I wanted to be there when he got his first bird, so he ignored that goose honking outside his house before I arrived at
7 a.m. on New Year's Day.

Most of Ake's friends had expected him to start birding at midnight, listening for owls in the treetops, but he planned to take it easy on the first day of the Big Year, birding only dawn to sunset.

This week, he's in Texas looking for birds. In the next few weeks, he'll pick up Southern California and Arizona. He'll go twice this year to Alaska and take several offshore trips into the Pacific.

He's aiming to see 650 species of birds in 2010, more than he's ever seen before in a single year. Birders call such an effort a Big Year, and it doesn't happen by accident. Most people spend months getting organized.

Ake has been preparing for this all his life.

People say, ‘How do you see
all these rare birds?’ I say, well, I go out and look for them instead of sitting in a chair wishing I could see them.” 
-- Bob Ake

^{STORY CONTINUES BELOW THE INTERACTIVE}

^{CLICK THE THUMBNAILS BELOW TO HEAR SONGS FROM THE BIRDS SPOTTED ON JAN. 1.}

I had heard of Robert L. Ake's birding prowess, had even corresponded with him a few times when I had a pressing bird question, but I first met him on Oct. 27 during a trip to Fisherman Island.

The one time I had been there before was during hot weather, when so many deer ticks clung to my legs that one had to wonder what they eat when I'm not around. That put me off the place, and I swore I'd never go back with any skin exposed, but because Ake goes to the refuge three times a month, I figured I could tough it out one more time.

Because it was me and this is just my luck, I got more than my wish: A brisk, cold wind and several days of rain beforehand called for layers of clothing and tall rubber boots.

Ake is seldom deterred by weather. As foghorns sounded from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, he selected a pair of muck boots from the trunk of his Prius, whose license plate reads "Toucan." In really bad conditions, the refuge staff calls his cell to see whether he is actually on the island, and usually he is.

Ake counts shorebirds for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and if he has seen all the species multiple times before, he still enjoys it. "I've never been jaded about anything in my life," he said.

Ake paid no attention to birds until, as a college student, he decided to study for finals in the woods just as a wave of spring migration filled the trees with brightly colored warblers.

"Just these knock-down gorgeous things," he recalled. "I said, 'Why haven't I ever seen these things before?' "

He got a bird identification guide and, as he says, "Once you start looking them up, it's all downhill from there."

That was in 1966. Soon after, he took his first trip solely to look for birds, which fits his definition of a birder (as opposed to a birdwatcher), and for many years he has been a serious amateur ornithologist.

In 2001 he retired early from his job as a chemistry professor at Old Dominion University because work was interfering with his ability to look for birds during certain months of the year. In 2006 he was one of the few chosen by Cornell University, a pre-eminent center of ornithology, to help comb - unsuccessfully, as it turned out - the woods of Arkansas and Florida for ivory-billed woodpeckers, a species that may or may not be extinct.

The birds at Fisherman Island are more common, although some are becoming less so, and Ake's counts have shown a shift in numbers.

On this day, he turned up three species of sparrows, two falcons, thousands of gulls, hundreds of other birds and, several times, he looked at the surging ocean where some black ducks were riding the swells: scoters, a type of sea duck that seldom comes ashore.

"I like the scoters," he said, and shrugged. "There's a wildness in them."

Ake has volunteered with the Fish and Wildlife Service for seven years, but Nov. 30 was his last survey, at least for a while. He will devote 2010 to counting birds for himself, something he has been planning for at least two years.

The American Birding Association lists 957 species endemic to North America. When birders set out to see as many of those as possible within 12 months, it's called a Big Year.

Ake sat down with a spreadsheet of all 957 and started figuring out the most economical way to see two-thirds of them in one year.

"My modest goal at the beginning was just to see as many as I could, and pass my previous record, which was piddling, about 515, which is, you know, pretty good but it's not super," he explained. "When I put out the spreadsheet, it looked to me like 600 would be easy and 700 would be tough, and 650 is where I ended up."

In Texas this week, Ake hopes to see whooping cranes and Sprague's pipits on their wintering grounds, which will save him a trip to North Dakota in the summertime. On the day before I met him at Fisherman Island, he made reservations for Alaska.

About three hours in, after hiking on the beach, then trudging through waist-deep marsh grass and standing water, then through wet sand that sank 2 inches with each step, we paused for refreshments. Ake said he doesn't drink enough, but he meant water.

He has helped band royal terns and brown pelicans in the nest, works with the Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory on hawk watches and does Christmas bird surveys for the Audubon Society in at least seven locations each year.

"There's pretty much nothing I wouldn't do in birds," he said. "Because I have to know. People say, 'How do you see all these rare birds?' I say, well, I go out and look for them instead of sitting in a chair wishing I could see them."

By the end of 6 miles, my legs ached, and it turns out the rubber boots bruised one toenail so severely it would later fall off. Then I learned that Ake plans to take several boat trips into the Pacific, looking for Big Year birds. He gets seasick. That does not stop him.

"It's worth it," he said. "Nobody knows what's really out there, and the knowledge that we've acquired on pelagic trips in the last 30 or 40 years is just enormous. Hopefully, I'll be able to stay upright."

A Big Year is not for wimps.

By last fall, Ake had added a line to his e-mail signature that reads: "I'm doing an ABA Big Year in 2010 - it seemed like a good idea at the time."

In December, he added a link to his blog - www.bobsbirds.

blogspot.com - and began practicing adding Google maps. He plans to post at least one photo and one paragraph each day of the Big Year. Prior to this practice, the last time he posted was in June.

Much earlier in the planning process, Ake phoned a Texas woman who had just completed a Big Year. She had spent $45,000 in pursuit of birds.

"She enjoyed it, but she spent a lot of money," Ake said. "I mean a lot more than I intend to spend. I have to keep my budget intact. I'm going to use this itinerary, try to lasso in as many rare birds that happen to be in that area at the time, and let the chips fall as they will."

The June posting was about returning home from an e-mail-free vacation in Yose-mite to find numerous messages saying a roseate spoonbill, normally limited to Florida, had appeared in Augusta County near Staunton. Ake, fresh from the airport in Raleigh, N.C., jumped in his car and headed west. He fumed over delays at the tunnels, fretted over having to stop for gas, worried about a traffic jam in Charlottesville that put him more than an hour behind schedule. He still arrived in time to see the bird, then drove home, putting 571 miles on his car that day.

"The homeward run after seeing a rarity is always better than the trips after not having seen the bird," he blogged. "But they're not as exhilarating as the run to the bird, filled with expectation."

Ake says he cannot afford to run after rare birds during his Big Year. He says he must stick to his itinerary and his budget of $12,000 to $20,000.

"I did put a couple of caveats in," he admitted. "If the bird was a life bird for me, I might make a run for it."

Ake is a lister. He keeps meticulous lists of the birds he has seen and how many on a given day, and he lists the birds he has seen in his lifetime and the birds he has seen in Virginia and the birds he has seen each year and the birds he has seen worldwide on any given day, year and lifetime.

He will post his lists on Cornell's web site, which was established, Ake said, "so when heavy birders go to their graves they don't leave a shoebox full of these cards that don't make sense and don't mean anything to anybody."

Ake himself once dreamed that he had died and, during the settlement of his estate, a lawyer approached his son and said, "To you he left the most valuable thing: his life list."

Each of Ake's lists is legible only to other serious birders, who use four-letter abbreviations for each species, usually the first two letters of each word in the name. Thus, a mourning dove is a MODO and a song sparrow is a SOSP, but it gets more complicated when you run into something like a northern shrike and a northern shoveler, which

cannot both be NOSH but must be NSHR and NSHO.

By this system, Ake would be ROAK and the birding buddy who will accompany him on most of his Big Year travels would be JOSP, for John Spahr, a retired pathologist from Staunton. As Ake and I crossed Fisherman Island, a white deer ran into the woods, prompting him to remark that his son's name is JORN, which it really is, Jorn being the hero of James Thur-ber's story "The White Deer," an Ake favorite.

Jorn was on a quest in the story, and so is Ake, who hopes to write on his brand-new list ISSJ, the island scrub-jay of Santa Cruz; BTCU, the bristle-thighed curlew; and Himalayan snowcock, an introduced bird that doesn't have an abbreviation and which is found only in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada. They are all birds that he has never seen before and thus, would go on his life list as well as his Big Year list and his daily list.

In previous years, Ake has traveled to China, Antarctica and Cuba looking for birds, as well as to other locations, but he was refused entry to Tibet. Worldwide, Ake has seen 5,450 species out of a possible 10,000. He still plans to go to Tibet, as well as West Africa and to circumnavigate Australia. But he has other plans for 2010.

By mid-December he had made travel plans and reservations for many of his Big Year destinations, knew what birds he planned to see where and when, even had an itinerary for Jan. 1. He invited me to go along.

In the gray dawn, three of us - Ake, Spahr and myself - stepped out the sliding glass door of his Norfolk house onto a small patio facing the Lafayette River.

"There's a song sparrow."

"There's two mourning doves. Two ducks out there."

"There's a goose and then the American crow."

Together they exclaimed: "Towhee!"

It was too dark to see much. Instead, they listened, naming the birds they could hear: Carolina wren, cardinal, robin, a single fish crow.

"You can distinguish them from American crow by their call," Ake said. "It's a very nasal 'anh anh.' "

"Or you just ask them," Spahr said. "Are you an American crow? And they say, 'anh anh.' "

As the light grew, both of them recorded SOSP as their first bird. Ake was wearing a gray hoodie given to him by Jorn for Christmas. On the front it said "Bob's Big Year" and on the back, "957."

His wife, Joyce Neff, had made homemade granola as that infernal goose honked in the darkness outside and Ake had kept his hands in his pockets so he wouldn't write CAGO in his new notebook before the Big Year's official start time.

He and Spahr spent the next hour watching chickadees, buffleheads, kinglets, mergansers, pine warblers, cormorants, white-throated sparrows and more in the backyard - nothing unusual, but every species counts in a Big Year.

The day before, two fellow birders had discovered two rarities seldom seen in Virginia - called accidentals, because they accidentally show up outside their habitat. Ake and Spahr decided not to waste time trying to find them, reasoning that the rare birds might very well have already moved on, as had the summer's spoonbill. They would stick to Ake's well-planned itinerary, going first to Stumpy Lake, then to Knotts Island, and working their way back to Norfolk via Back Bay and the Oceanfront, ending at sunset to get some rest because they would be participating in a Christmas Bird Count the next morning.

The trail at Stumpy Lake was full of water. With some misgivings, I put the rubber boots on and followed the two into the woods. Some distance in, Ake set a red iPod on a tree stump and played the call of a screech owl. Almost instantly, small birds appeared in the trees around us, ready to chase the owl away.

At that point, Ake discovered he had left his binoculars in the Prius. That's a birding sin, he exclaimed. I handed him mine, a brand-new 50-power Nikon Christmas present because, hey, it's not my Big Year, and he needed to see the birds more than I did.

"You've got to look at every single bird because it's the odd bird you're looking for," he explained. They counted myrtle warblers, chickadees, various woodpeckers. On down the trail, they found yellow-bellied sapsuckers that started to call after someone coughed, and Ake tried to rustle up an owl by throwing back his head and whoo-whooing, but had no luck.

His cell phone rang. It was a fellow birder, reporting that the ash-throated flycatchers native to the Southwest were still hanging around a collard field near the Norfolk airport, and that three anhingas native to Florida were at Lake Wright.

"Going down Tim Road, is the collard field on the right?" Ake said into the phone. "All right, we may get out there. It'll probably be the last thing today."

He hung up and turned to Spahr, and after a little discussion, they decided to turn their itinerary upside down and make a dash to the airport.

"Obsessive behavior is obsessive behavior, whether it's birders, golfers or fishermen," Ake said. "All those people are nuts. That's what makes life interesting."

On the way to the airport, they noted a red-tailed hawk soaring across the highway and a flock of about 1,000 common grackles. They arrived at the collard field and parked.

"Chasing rarities is a real two-edged sword," Ake began, just as Spahr said, "There it is."

"Oh, yeah. Wow. Even I have to get that one," Ake said, and fetched his camera from the car. After several photos, he returned to his theme of not chasing rare birds and said, "In most cases, if you succeed, you're just refinding someone else's bird and, if you fail, you really fail."

He turned to Spahr. "Well, maybe we should go get the anhingas."

By the end of the day, they had snagged two anhingas and 81 other species. On Jan. 3, excited by the discovery of a Pacific loon on the river behind Ake's house, they decided to run up to Chincoteague in search of a reported black-headed gull, which they did not find, but they did see a Eurasian widgeon (a European duck) and an Iceland gull.

By Thursday, Ake was at 116 species. Three-hundred and fifty-eight days to go in the Big Year, and already he had diverged from his carefully prepared itinerary twice. Others who know him well predict he will do so again.

Myself, I won't be surprised if he ends his Big Year with way more than 650 species. After birding with Bob Ake, I'm prepared for anything.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com