Gooddie, The Jewel Hunter

“[M]oments of random joy…days of unforeseen despair…. No matter how skillful you become, no matter how honed your technique, it’s all so uncertain.”

Words that will resonate with any birder, but they apply with special urgency to Chris Gooddie’s year chasing all the world’s pittas across Asia, Africa, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific. Gooddie succeeded, tallying all 32 then-recognized species, along the way surviving illness, injury, sun bears, and snakes. In the course of eleven months, he traveled well over 100,000 miles—most of it by plane—and spent well over $50,000.

Why?

To start with, pittas are, as I’m assured by those fortunate enough to have seen them, amazingly beautiful; it’s no accident that the romance forming the subplot of Sean Dooley’s Big Twitch is with the “girl with rainbow pitta eyes.” It was an encounter with a feathered pitta that convinced Chris Gooddie of the emptiness of a conventionally successful life, and it was his awareness of the sad state of many pittas’ populations that persuaded him to turn his back on that life in order to see them all while they were still more or less around.

Gooddie’s twenty chapters are for the most part straightforwardly chronological, each devoted to one of the major destinations he visited in his quest. The result is a series of adventure tales, “good reads” all, guaranteed to whet the reader’s appetite for exotic locales and their birds. The color photos illustrating the accounts are unfailingly evocative, even—or perhaps especially—the poor-quality images of some of the most elusive pitta species. Not a few of Gooddie’s photos are the first ever published of the species depicted.

Still, though, the question nags.

Why?

The author’s efforts on behalf of pitta conservation began well before he undertook his pitta year, and the book repeatedly points out that the habitats of some of the rarest species survive only because of the income provided by visiting birders to local guides and local communities: if a pair of scrubfowl is worth $3 dead and ten times that much per day alive, plain old self-interest should keep the birds crowing at the forest edge.

That’s a hopeful view, and one that seems to have been borne out in Gooddie’s experiences during his pitta year. I’m skeptical, though, that the simple “trickle-down” model really works for birding tourism on the whole. Too often, natural history travel is touted as ecotourism, when in fact the profit accrues to western tour operators and large landowners, consolidating rather than correcting unjust social circumstances. Let’s hope that future “jewel hunters” follow Gooddie’s lead in promoting the preservation of imperiled forests and the threatened birds that need them.