BIG year: RGV Birding Festival draws celebrities

HARLINGEN — Marci Madsen Fuller believes this could be a big year, of sorts, for the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, which begins Wednesday.

The festival’s chairwoman said that organizers have packed this year’s five-day lineup with birding world celebrities — taking advantage of Hollywood’s box-office movie, “The Big Year.”

“There’s a lot happening,” Fuller said. “That’s why we’re calling it ‘The Big Year.’ We’re just doing all sorts of things over here.”

The film — released in October — stars Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black and favorably portrays birding and birdwatchers, something that excites birding enthusiasts like Fuller.

“The birding world has been waiting for this movie since we heard of its existence for a year or so,” Fuller said. “Jane Hatheway from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ in the ‘50s sort of set the stereotype of birders as sort-of nerdy, odd people. So this is the first time that Hollywood has done anything with birding, and we were on pins and needles about it. And they did a good job.”

But part of the movie could ruffle feathers in the Rio Grande Valley. In an early scene, “Brownsville, Texas” is scrawled across the screen, and Steve Martin walks alongside a mountain of garbage while offering snacks to fellow birders. His character appears to have traveled to the Valley simply to spot a Tamaulipas crow in the city’s landfill.

The scene hits on a comedic point about the lengths birders will go to in order to find a specific bird, but it’s the only scene that features anything from the Rio Grande Valley.

“It doesn’t shine the Valley — that’s maybe one of the things I would have done differently,” Fuller said. “But the main point is that they (Hollywood) know we exist, and the book does a lot better with the Valley than the movie.”

Although the Valley was not more prominent in the movie, other places in the country could also complain, Fuller said.

“The Everglades were probably also upset that they were not in the movie more,” Fuller said. “There are some things that we could say, ‘Gosh, I wish they did that differently.’ But the birding world’s kind of tickled with it (the movie).”

A Personal Challenge

Nearly 500 bird species can be found in the Valley, according to the World Birding Center’s website. Steve Martin’s crow, ironically, is no longer one.

“Actually, that crow is not at the dump anymore,” Fuller said. “The crow moved off the dump. For a while, it was at the Brownsville airport… but the Tamaulipas crow has been out of the Valley now for — I don’t know — six years or something.”

The movie was adapted from the book of the same name written by Mark Obmascik, who chronicled three birders’ record-breaking birding pursuits in 1998. They each undertook a quest known among birders as a “big year,” an individual venture in which a birder seeks to identify as many birds as possible in one calendar year in North America — north of the U.S.-Mexico border through Canada, in this case.

A big year is a personal challenge, much like how birders keep life-long lists of sightings. However, some birders take listing to a competitive level, spending tens of thousands of dollars during a big year, despite the fact that the only certain reward is a mention at the end of the year in the American Birding Association.

“It’s a bam-bam-bam-bam world with wings, sort of,” Obmascik said. “The big year is something that some birders do, but it’s not anything like an organized competition. You just go out and do it.”

A bird watcher can expect to find about 675 native species in North America, Obmascik explains.

“Now they either live here, fly through here on migration or just come here for sex,” the author says. “The winner of this competition saw 745 (in one year). How did you get from 675 up to 745?”

The answer, he said, was the effects of El Niño that year — 1998 — and that the birders took advantage of geographical areas affected by birds pushed into North America by the weather phenomenon — places like Alaska’s Aleutian Islands chain and, even, the Rio Grande Valley.

“Definitely, one of the stations of the cross for birders is the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas,” Obmascik said. “It’s just some place you have got to go if you want to see the species of the continent. There are many species that live there and only there. That’s the cool thing about birds — they’re kind of persnickety about where they live.”

Inspiring Birders

Fuller hopes the movie and the book will provide inroads for more people to discover birding — and by extension, the Rio Grande Valley. One of the first people the book inspired to delve deeper into the birding world was the author himself, of course.

“He’s a birder now, but he wasn’t when he started the book. He was a journalist,” Fuller said. “Anything and everything helps. I’m hoping that because of the movie, the names of the actors, that we’ll get more people in for Mark’s talk (at the festival).”

Obmascik and Greg Miller — the inspiration for Jack Black’s character in the movie — are among featured guests at this year’s birding festival. Obmascik will be Friday’s keynote speaker, and Miller will be a master of ceremonies, of sorts.

“Birders will be the major ones who have read the book, and birders will be the major ones who will be excited to meet Greg Miller,” Fuller said.

You won’t hear Greg Miller’s name in the movie. In the opening, the film warns: “This is a true story. Only the facts were changed.”

Among those facts, Miller’s name was lost — as were the names of Sandy Komito and Al Levantin, the other two big year competitors featured in the book.

But Miller’s spirit is preserved in Jack Black’s bumbling, sympathetic character. Miller’s friends told him that the actor nailed many of his mannerisms.

“Nobody’s ever told me what those mannerisms were, other than the kind of bumbling part,” Miller admits. “I am forever doing stupid things. Birding? I’ve got that down. I’m a good birder. It’s just the rest of life that doesn’t quite stack up.

“Sandy Komito, after his first big year when he broke a record, wrote a book about himself and his experience during that big year. And he called himself birding’s Indiana Jones. Well, I think I’m birding’s Lucille Ball.”

More Celebrities

Obmascik and Miller are not the only celebrities — at least among birders — who will be in attendance.

On Thursday, the festival will also feature Kenn Kaufman, an inspiration to Greg Miller and the man who authored “Kingbird Highway,” a book referenced multiple times in Obmascik’s “The Big Year.”

“Kingbird Highway” chronicles Kaufman’s own big year as a 17-year-old hitchhiking across North America on a quest to spot as many birds as possible.

“Kenn left home — well, his mother keeps saying that he didn’t run away,” Fuller said. “He was 17 years old, and he hitchhiked for his big year. He had trips from Alaska to the East Coast several times, and Kenn broke a pretty good record. His book, ‘Kingbird Highway,’ is an excellent read. He’s just a great writer. So when I arranged for Mark and Greg to come down for the festival, I called Kenn, and I asked, “How would you like to revisit ‘Kingbird Highway’ for our Thursday keynote?’ And he said, ‘I’d be delighted.’”

Kaufman hasn’t conducted many talks on “Kingbird Highway” because he’s known for his field guides, Fuller said.

“He has some of the best beginning birder guides,” Fuller said. “The Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America is just terrifically easy to use.”

On Friday, there’s also a chance for birders to meet Jon Dunn, co-author of the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America. The new sixth edition paperback was just released Nov. 1.

Richard Crossley, author of The Crossley ID Guide, will also be a speaker Friday.

On Saturday, Tim Brush will speak. He’s the author of “Nesting Birds of a Tropical Frontier: The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas,” sponsored by Texas A&M University-Kingsville.

Other authors who will participate in signings at the trade show include Bob Behrstock, Bill Clark, Jeff Gordon, Amy Hooper, Kevin Karlson, Michael O’Brien, Louise Zemaitis, Seth Patterson, Sharon Stiteler, Sophie Webb and Debby Kaspari.

Lasting Effects

But festival organizers have more than celebrities and authors to be excited about. A Texas A&M research project recently announced that eco-tourism, including birdwatching, accounts for more than $300 million annually for the Valley’s economy — more than hunting and fishing combined, Fuller said.

“The second part of that study is going to be done during the birding festival,” Fuller said. “They are going to have survey takers on site.”

Among other findings, the survey has already shown:

• Valley nature tourists stay an average of five days. About 64 percent had visited the Valley previously. The average number of previous visits was 15.
• More than 23 percent of all Cameron County and Hidalgo County leisure visitors travel here to specifically for nature tourism.

“It’s important for the people in the Valley to know — the business owners, the gas stations, the restaurants, the hotels — just how much money is injected into the Valley economy, and that has to do with the birds,” Fuller said. “These birds are going to disappear if we keep bulldozing our habitat for more and more subdivisions or whatever and not replacing it and preserving what’s left.

“To me, that’s the most important thing that comes out of this study — to show the local people that there’s a huge economic value on our local places in the Valley.”

Fuller suspects that the second part of the study will focus on the rippling economic effects created by the birding festival.

“Most people — birders — come to the Valley for the very first time with the festival,” Fuller said. “What happens is they come down for the festival, they go on their trips, they sort of get a feel for the Valley, they get the lay of the land, and then they come back a second, third, fourth and fifth time in other visits — on their own. So the effects of the festival do not end with the five days here, they are ongoing.”