The Big Year A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession

Now reissued to tie in to the 2011 major motion picture release from 20th Century Fox starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, the critically heralded book by award-winning journalist Mark Obmascik ;a feathered version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World ; ( Outside ). With engaging, unflappably wry humor, The Big Year re-creates the grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, ;extreme ; 365-day contest for a new North American birdwatching record. In this thrilling real-life adventure, three men battle the daunting forces of natureand each otherin their whirlwind 275,000-mile odyssey from Texas to British Columbia, Cape May to Alaska. One of them achieves an astonishing record unlikely ever to be bested. A captivating tour of human and avian nature, passion and paranoia, honor and deceit, fear and loathing, The Big Year shows the lengths to which people will go to pursue their dreams, to conquer and categorizeno matter how low the stakes.

Mark Obmascik is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Big Year, which was made into a movie, and Halfway to Heaven. He won the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for outdoor literature, the 2003 National Press Club Award for environmental journalism, and was the lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Denver with his wife and their three sons.

Contents

Introduction

1. January 1, 1998

2. A Birder Is Hatched

3. The Early Birds

4. Strategy

5. Bodega Bluff

6. Whirlwind

7. El Niño

8. The Wise Owl

9. Yucatán Express

10. The Big Yak

11. The Cradle of Storms

12. The B.O.D.

13. Doubt

14. Forked

15. Conquest

16. Cape Hatteras Clincher

17. Two in the Bush

18. Nemesis

19. Honorbound

20. December 31, 1998

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index