The Great Bird Bash

It is 2 a.m. on the salt marsh at Anahuac, Texas, a black-velvet night, warm, moist, entirely silent. A necklace of dim lights is visible across Galveston Bay. A sweet-rotten scent rises from the wetlands. Then, violently, the peace is shattered.

Out of the darkness, blazing with light, splattering through the mud, an extraordinary vehicle comes on like something out of a James Bond movie. Basically it is a tractor, equipped with enormous balloon tires and festooned with spotlights. It tows a tumbrel with a generator aboard that puts up a continuous howl. It is Rolligon, a mechanical dragon. Its purpose is to expose, then intimidate, the quarry that its crew of men, clinging on precariously, is hunting down.

Suddenly it comes to a jolting stop. More lights—hand-held strobes—flash on. And from the men comes a yell of triumph. "Yay!" they shout, "Hoo hoo!" Pinned in the cross beams is the quarry, cowering in the marsh grass. It is five inches long, with a tiny yellow beak, black and sandy markings. "Hoo! Yellow rail," somebody shouts. "We got us a yellow rail!" The little bird comes to its senses and wings off into the night. For the bird watchers on board Rolligon, the big day has started triumphantly.

Bird watchers! Too passive, too tame a word, as they will tell you themselves. Bird watchers no doubt still exist, crouching stealthily, studying a favorite species for hours on end. The men on the Rolligon are birders. They go and they check 'em out, man. And the more they check, the happier they are.

The record for bird species observed in a single 24-hour period is 288. That figure was achieved in Zambia, East Africa, in 1975. The North American record was set in California last year: 231 species. Last Wednesday, starting on that Texas marsh, five men set out to beat both of those figures. They felt that 300 was a distinct possibility. Given the so phistication of their plan, it seemed that their optimism was justified.

The birders gathered at Houston last Tuesday, at the airport restaurant. There was Steve Oresman, a 46-year-old New Yorker, a Park Avenue management consultant who started his birding at age 10 in Central Park ("A great spot. The birds haven't got anywhere else to go"). There was Benton Basham, an anesthetist from Chattanooga, and Jim Tucker, of Austin, Texas, executive director of the American Birding Association, a psychologist and the acknowledged Texas expert. There was young Jon Dunn, from Encino, Calif., one of the group that had set the national record.

And there was the chairman of the board, Joe Taylor of Rochester, N.Y., president of the ABA. Uncle Joe, 65, a rubicund, white-whiskered Mr. Pickwick of a man, started the final planning session with a large tequila on the rocks. "I'm in training," he pointed out, "but not in strict training."

The plan, in fact, was pretty well cut and dried already. The Big Day—the birders' own term for a record attempt—would begin in the Anahuac salt marsh at 2 a.m. By dawn the assault group would be close to Houston again, working the mixed hardwood and pine forest 15 miles east of the city. Next they would drive to Galveston, and Galveston Island. And then they would play their trump card.

At Galveston Municipal Airport, a Lear jet would be waiting. The birders would be whisked down the coast to Rockport, where they would clamber into a rented station wagon and check out the ducks of Copano Bay and the shorebirds of Mustang Island and Oso Bay. That would bring them close to the Corpus Christi airport, where they would rendezvous with the Lear again and hurtle, on to McAllen, to the Mexican border and the birds of the Rio Grande.

Then the big jump, to the green canyons of the Huachuca Mountains in Arizona. Plenty of hummingbirds there, they figured, and maybe a golden eagle. Traveling westward through the day, they would lose some hours in flying, but they would gain light through two time zones. By 3 p.m. Pacific time they would be in San Diego, where the great talents of Jon Dunn would come into play. All the richness of West Coast birdlife would be added to the list, and the last act, in the darkness, would be to drive out to Mount Palomar. For the owls, naturally, which would respond to the taped hootings the team had prepared.