About Books: A Very Big Year and an Intimate Summer

Mark Lynch

February 1, 2026 9 MIN READ Book and Video Reviews

“This white-eye is kicking our ass”, I said.” (p. 283 The Biggest Year in American Birding)

If you are a birder of a certain age and have lived in Eastern Massachusetts, it is very likely that you remember Nicholas Komar. He and his twin brother, Oliver, became the wunderkids of birding for several years. Sheila and I remember them in the backseat of our car, munching on raw peppers as we drove them out to the Berkshires to do some hardcore birding.

After high school, Nicholas and Oliver pursued different academic careers. Nicholas earned degrees from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts and became a disease ecologist. Throughout his adult academic life he never lost his deep passion for birding and continued to bird around his home state of Colorado and around the world.

My motto became work hard, play hard. Between 2004 and my retirement from my federal biologist position, I published over 90 scientific articles and was considered an expert in my field during my career at CDC. I also started a side business (Quetzal Tours) running birdwatching tours throughout the Americas. (p. 5)

He also was active in playing baseball for a local team. Baseball has been another of Nicholas’s passions throughout the decades.

In 2022, at the age of 57, he retired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and decided to do a unique Big Year in 2023 that turned out to be very much an all-American Big Year.

To my knowledge, no one has attempted to see 900 species in a calendar year in the United States and the U.S. territories (American Samoa, The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands). This expanded geographical region, USA and Territories hosts approximately 100 additional species available for observation, thereby earning such a Big Year attempt the unofficial title of the Biggest Year in American Birding. Starting on January 1, 2023, I initiated a year-long attempt to accomplish this feat for the first time. (p. 3)

Note that Canada was off limits in this exclusively “American” Big Year.

A project this complicated, involving many plane and pelagic trips, required lots of advanced planning, which Komar did…up to a point. A number of times he left reservations up to the last minute so as to keep his schedule somewhat flexible. He relied heavily on eBird to help plan where to go, generate lists of hot spots to check out, and inform him when a “mega” rarity showed up.

This project was extraordinary even to attempt, but there was one more complicating factor. Komar was diagnosed with Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease. Obviously, this complicated his wild chase for a big year list. Of course, he could not just pretend he did not have Parkinson’s.

Some aspects I could not ignore. My hands and arms trembled, making binocular use very difficult. I got around this hindrance by using battery-powered image-stabilized binoculars. I used a Canon model but half-way through 2023, I switched to Opticron 14X30 which were considerably lighter.

Other physical issues I dealt with included balance disorder, slowness and weak vocal chords. This meant that when I hiked, I needed a walking stick or hiking poles, especially at night. I would fall more than most people. My balance on boats was atrocious. (p. 5)

For me, the fact that Komar had Parkinson’s put this Big Year narrative in a different light and showed that he is truly indefatigable. Or obsessive. I choose the former. All the while he did this mad dash around the country and islands, he continued to lead trips for Quetzal Tours and to play several baseball games. From his earliest birding years Komar was never a fan of pelagic trips because of his propensity for seasickness. But taking a good number of pelagics is de rigueur for anyone seriously doing a Big Year. So he put on a scopolamine patch and just forged ahead. As it was, he missed a few sea trips by oversleeping and showing up at the wrong dock.

I will not reveal if Komar reached his goal of 900 species in the United States and its territories. You should really read the book. He did manage to photograph more than 800 of the species he ticked, and a number of his photographs are in the book. His hard luck misses, despite making efforts to see those species, included Dovekie and Connecticut Warbler, two species that persistent Massachusetts birders can eventually see or hear. He did visit the Westboro Wildlife Management Area hoping to tick a Connecticut Warbler. Some of his efforts would be daunting to any birder, let alone one with Parkinson’s. His climb in the Ruby Mountains to see the Himalayan Snowcock was physically challenging and ended up a failure. Komar would later tick that species, but not during his Big Year. It was heartening to read that wherever he went, Komar met other birders and local experts who were willing to help him along his journey with information about where to look, driving him around, or even offering accommodations. That said, Komar did have to stay in a variety of places, some positively roach-ridden. Nothing could stop him on his quest.

As I drove from the Valley on January 1, 2024, I pondered my achievement. I felt very fortunate to be able to see this adventure through. I considered it my personal walkabout or sabbatical. I wondered what new adventures lay in store for me in the years ahead (p. 299)

Big Year narratives have become a common genre of birding literature. Locations and species fly past the readers at breakneck pace. Therefore, most Big Year narratives may not appeal to many readers. The Biggest Year in American Birding stands out from others for several reasons. First of all, the parameters of this Big Year were unique. I most enjoyed the sections of the book where Komar visited the various unique islands, including Hawaii with its crazy list of breeding non-native birds and the outer Pacific islands of the Marianas and Western Samoa, of which most readers will know nothing. Whatever challenges he faced, Komar just kept going, uttering his mantra “work hard, play hard.” Nicholas is also a very self-deprecating writer who fully owns up to events that end in total failure, making his quest a very human endeavor. The Biggest Year in American Birding is also a great tale of a person with serious physical challenges accomplishing something extraordinary. Finally, this is a story of an ultimate quest by a person many of us knew back from when he was a teen. Nicholas Komar ends his wild narrative with this admission:

Birding every day all year long was living a dream. Perhaps the one regret I had was that I didn’t have time to bird for the sake of birding. I had to constantly move on to chase the next staked-out target. Although I enjoy the chase, I enjoy even more finding birds myself and sharing my discoveries with others. (p. 301-2)

“In one sense, Return of the Osprey is a simple story of a man watching the ospreys that nest in his Cape Cod neighborhood and following their fates as the year unspools. But this is a simple story in the way an osprey can seem simple if you’ve only ever seen a picture of one in a book.” (p. ix Helen Macdonald in the Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition of Return of the Osprey)

I was a bit apprehensive when I set out to reread Return of the Osprey. I often reread fiction, or sections of books, especially classics, but I do not reread nonfiction. After all, I have to read 2–4 books every week, 52 weeks a year, for my radio interview show Inquiry. Plus, it had been 25 years since I first read Gessner’s now classic book; would I still get anything out of reading it again? Over the decades I have interviewed Gessner about his latest books. I had even interviewed him about his books published before Osprey, and I have had the pleasure to watch David Gessner develop and deepen his literary talents. How would Return of the Osprey compare to his more recent books?

The 25th edition of Return of the Osprey begins with a new Preface in which Gessner recounts what has happened to him since the book was first published.

“Where is home? And how do we get there? These are the questions, and sometimes—with luck—the answers, we encounter in the pages of the best nature writing. (p. xiii David Gessner in the Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition of Return of the Osprey)

Finding a home was one of the key issues Gessner wrestled with throughout Return of the Osprey. By the end of the book, he and his wife had decided to stay on Cape Cod and finally call that place home, which was a fine way to end the story. What happened instead was that shortly after he finished Return of the Osprey, Gessner was offered a good position at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. So he and his wife left the Cape. Gessner explains his current relationship to the Cape:

I still get back to Cape Cod whenever I can, and when I do I spend time down on the marsh watching a new generation of ospreys. Looking back, I believe my osprey year was pivotal. It changed me, as a man and a writer. It really felt that by discovering ospreys I had picked out an invisible thread that connected many disparate parts of my life and ospreys were, in John Muir’s words, “hitched to everything.” (p. xviii)

Rereading Return of the Osprey was revelatory. I found that certain passages had stuck with me after all these years. Before writing Return of the Osprey, Gessner had already moved around quite a bit. He grew up in Worcester, but his family was connected to Cape Cod. His father is buried there. Gessner had previously written books about the people and environment of Cape Cod, including a fine book about John Hay, the Cape Cod writer, naturalist, and co-founder of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Gessner had a run-in with cancer, had married, and had moved with his wife to Colorado, a place she loved. Now in Return of the Osprey he was returning to his literary roots on the Cape.

The first time I’d wintered alone on the Cape, looking to Thoreau as my guide, but this time I brought Nina with me. It was Walden with a wife, and I worried about having dragged my mate away from her beloved western mountains. (p. 5)

Return of the Osprey is focused on the bird, of course, but that’s because the osprey is what Gessner has taken as his talisman that summer. He is watching the osprey as a kind of meditation while he figures out who he is, where he wants to live, and what he wants to do with his writing.

With all due respect to those privileged few who have found “it”, we all know that humans are happiest when in the act of searching. What does one search for? Something larger, more vital, more meaningful; something outside of self. Some find God. This spring I’ve begun, however tentatively, to find ospreys, though I could just as easily, like Hones, have been on a pilgrimage for stripers. (p. 89)

Gessner monitors the four osprey nests in his neighborhood for the summer. The one nest that gets most of his attention is in a marsh behind the cemetery where his father is buried. Several times a week, Gessner sits in a chair at the edge of the marsh with a notebook and for hours just observes this one pair and the young they raise through to fledging. He finds himself living on osprey time.

Gessner spends pages on the crazy composition of an osprey nest.

A slob myself, I feel a kinship with the ospreys. Not for them the artistic subtleties of the African weaverbird, who can tie at least a half dozen different stitches and knots and construct elaborate tunnels. Ospreys aren’t minimalists, preferring sheer mass to dainty perfectionism. (p. 37)

More than anything, he wants to observe an osprey diving, something he has never seen in person. From reading, he knows what is involved, but the idea of this huge bird diving into the water fascinates him. “To even imagine a dive is to get excited. What a bold way to live! To find one thing you do well and then to stake your life on it. It’s as simple and direct as passion. It is passion.” (p. 65)

We also read about Gessner’s transformation into an environmental activist. Previously he rebelled against being pigeonholed as an “environmental writer.” But in Return of the Osprey he researches how ospreys declined because of DDT while also witnessing the rapid development of the Cape around him.

Like most people, I resist the dogmatic aspects of environmentalism. Other than essayist I don’t like anyone pinning any -ist tails on me. But despite bristling at doctrine, I’m beginning to feel I don’t have any choice except to take action. That action, political action, must soon follow the course of my newly political thought. Circumstances have forced my hand. Unless I want to turn into an embittered old man, grumbling about the big house up on the bluff, I need to do something. (p. 247)

If you listen to the world long enough you will hear what it asks for, and it turns out to ask for quite a lot. It calls for nothing less than a new way of looking, a new way of being. I need to find a new way to be in this world, to develop what Jack Turner calls a “sacred rage.” In the spirit of Art Cooley, I need to learn to love the fight. (p. 257)

Return of the Osprey is an even better read the second time around. There’s no denying that it is a classic. If you read it first twenty-five years ago, I recommend you read it again with fresh eyes. Toward the end of the book, he takes a walk with the elderly John Hay. For a while it becomes a dialog between two grumpy old men railing against all that’s wrong about the world. John Hay finally declares something that sums up the pleasures of Return of the Osprey:

‘Strange to have come through the whole century and find that that the most interesting thing is the birds,’ he says. ‘or maybe it’s just the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself.’ (p. 280)

To listen to my WICN interviews with Nick Komar and David Gessner (about the 25th anniversary edition), go to:

Nicholas Komar: <https://wicn.org/podcast/nicholas-komar/>

David Gessner: <https://wicn.org/podcast/david-gessner-2/>