Takes One to Know One

A rare bird flies in pursuit of a wild record

His quest began at precisely one second past midnight on Jan. 1, 1979, when he spotted a barn owl in Florida City, Fla. His mission, admittedly, was in part a wild goose chase, but it was a snowy plover chase and a glossy ibis chase as well. For James Vardaman, 58, had decided that he would spend 1979--from New Year's Day to New Year's Eve--trying to become the first person to sight 700 different species of birds in North America within one year. "Hot damn!" he remembers saying when he thought of the idea. "That's my kind of challenge."

And a challenge it was. There are only about 650 species that customarily breed in North America, along with another 50 that visit frequently and another 100 or so that fly by occasionally. Only seven bird watchers have spotted 700 different species on the continent--and they did so over their lifetimes.

The owner of a timber management firm in Jackson, Miss., Vardaman consulted ornithologists for the best birding areas around the U.S. He hired local guides to point out species to him. On one memorable January day near Point Reyes, Calif., Vardaman sighted 111 different varieties. Every two weeks he mailed out a newsletter to 1,150 "birders," as the devotees call themselves, asking them to call him collect with news of rare species in their regions ("Ask for Birdman"). He hired planes and boats and bushwacked through the woods of northern Minnesota. He flew to Alaska four times and spent 14 days on Attu, a bleak island in the Aleutians, where he saw the green sandpiper. On July 27 he surpassed the previous one-year record by spotting bird No. 658, an American woodcock, near a ditch in Chicago. In early December he flew to Texas in successful pursuit of the white-collared seedeater. That brought him up to 697.

Christmas came and passed, and Vardaman was still three birds short of 700. Then came word of sightings of three more varieties: a skua in Ocean City, Md., a stripe-headed tanager in Miami and a golden-crowned warbler in Brownsville, Texas. Vardaman dashed to Ocean City on Dec. 28, spotted the skua and was on his way to Florida and Texas when he learned that the birds had flown. He was still tempted to check for himself, but decided otherwise. "To hell with it," he says. "It was New Year's Eve, and I was dead tired."

Vardaman thus closed the year with 698 sightings. He had spent 170 days and logged 161,331 miles: 137,145 by plane, 20,305 by auto, 3,337 by boat, 384 on foot and 160 on bicycle. His odyssey cost $35,000 and put a strain on his marriage. "I would have sold him for a dime," says his wife Virginia, "when he went off to Alaska and left me for weeks with the kids."

Vardaman's pell-mell efforts were also ridiculed by leading bird watchers. Les Line, editor of Audubon magazine, complained that Vardaman's venture "has more to do with sport than with nature or the beauty of birds. It's not an appreciation of nature--it's a game." Line likened Vardaman's pursuit to "counting out-of-state license plates."

Such grousing leaves Vardaman un-ruffed. His next project is to sight more than 5,000 varieties of birds around the world in one year. Meanwhile, he can comfort himself with the thought that he did find two more birds of a different feather in 1979. On the last day of the year, a neighbor gave him a bottle of Wild Turkey whisky with a paper bird wired to its neck. That gave him 700 after all.

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