The Birdman of Texas

Over the course of six decades, Victor Emanuel has seen the rare Eskimo Curlew and the exotic Horned Guan, traveled the globe with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, and taught George W. Bush the joy of not shooting a bird. But some days he’s happy to just contemplate the lowly grackle.

by Katy Vine

May 2011

Photograph by Wyatt McSpadden

Kathy Hornbein says: I have had the honor of birding with Victor. The descriptions in Katy Vine’s article were apt, delightful. What is so remarkable is exactly what is described so well in the last paragraph. For each new birder and each new bird, his enthusiasm is 5 out of 5 and spills over to everyone near him. His vision is just unbelievable. He finds you new birds in your own backyard. Besides his birding camps for youngsters, VENT contributes internationally to nature and environmental groups, and Victor’s customers become involved as donars. He remains interested in politics (he’s a humanist), and loves classical music. He listens to educational courses as he drives, and of course pretty soon everyone in the car is interested too. He’s an amazing friend, and connects his friends to one another. What a man! (April 28th, 2011 at 5:09pm)

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Looking back, I don’t think my initial reaction to Victor Emanuel was out of line. I first encountered his name years ago, when George Plimpton, who was giving a reading at the Texas Book Festival, spotted a trim, friendly-looking man entering the room. Plimpton beamed as if the president of the United States had just sauntered in. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he bellowed, “Victor Emanuel!” If memory serves, Plimpton tried to get the audience to applaud. Not recognizing the name, I leaned over to a colleague sitting nearby. “Who is that?” I asked. “He’s a birding expert,” she said. My response was something along the lines of “Who cares?”

As it turns out, plenty of people. Over the years, Emanuel has gone birding with a wide variety of high-profile clients, among them Laura Bush, Prince Philip, filmmaker Terrence Malick, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson. He has traveled with the famed naturalist Peter Matthiessen for many years and appears in Matthiessen’s books The Birds of Heaven and End of the of Earth.

Eleven years ago, George W. Bush was on the campaign trail in Cleveland, Ohio, and told the crowd about an epiphany he had had after inviting Emanuel to his ranch in Crawford. “You know what you ought to do?” Emanuel had told him. “You ought to go down and look at the birds.” Bush had replied, “I’m a bird-shooter. That’s all I’ve done as a kid—you know, I shoot ’em.” On that occasion, however, he just looked at the birds. Years later, standing at the lectern, he gave voice to a sentiment that has been expressed by many people, no doubt with a hint of bewilderment: “So I went birding with Victor Emanuel, and it was fabulous.”

None of this is to imply that Emanuel is a birder to the stars; he’ll bird with anybody. And besides, in birding circles it is Emanuel—not the company he keeps—who is the star. Thomas Hornbein, who was part of the first expedition to climb Mount Everest by the West Ridge route, told me, “I have a fair bit of notoriety in mountaineering, and frequently people will recognize me. When I’m with Vic, the roles are reversed.”

Though Emanuel, who lives in Austin, operates one of the oldest ecology tour companies in the world, that alone doesn’t account for his renown. Nor is it the intensity of his obsession with birds that draws people to him; many other die-hard birders are just as obsessed. Emanuel can bombard people with statistics and avian trivia, but that isn’t the source of his appeal either. What he offers is different, and hard to define. There’s something about Victor Emanuel that will cause a random hiker to approach him and say, “Mr. Emanuel, there is a pygmy owl about a hundred yards back up the trail, and it would mean so much to me if I could show it to you.” And then, upon returning home, brag that he went birding with Victor Emanuel. And that it was fabulous.

Despite some hearing loss that occurred in childhood, Victor Emanuel is a remarkable guide. Roger Tory Peterson, who wrote and illustrated a widely read series of birding field guides, once suggested that Emanuel and another Austin tour guide, Rose Ann Rowlett, have “the sharpest eyes in Texas,” capable of identifying a bird at a glance. It’s conceivable, of course, that Emanuel is simply so familiar with the landscape that he just knows where a certain bird is likely to be. “Victor has a superb memory in regards to all the rivers and all the birds and all the people he has met,” said one friend. On a second trip to a far-flung locale, for example, he will remember that there’s a bend in the road just ahead with a fence post that’s ideal for, say, a white-tailed hawk to stop and rest and, upon rounding the corner, will see that a white-tailed hawk agreed.

One day last fall he and I patrolled an Austin park, scanning the perimeter for wildlife. Emanuel is seventy and bald on top, with a half-moon of white hair hugging the back and sides of his head. He walks at a good clip and dresses as if modeling for an REI catalog. A few minutes into our tour he spotted a flash in a tree. Quickly, he brought his binoculars to his eyes. “Ruby-crowned kinglet up there,” he said. “That tiny thing flitting around up there is a bird that may have come from Canada. See it there? Upside down? It’s called a ruby-crowned kinglet, and it’s a tiny little bird. Flits around. Very flitty. One of the things it eats is spider eggs.” I looked through my binoculars and saw a grayish-yellow bird that resembled a sleeker version of a sparrow. “There it is. Very flitty. See how it flits its wings a lot? That’s typical. If you learn the behavior you don’t even have to look at it. Nervous little bird.” I tried to follow the bird as it moved around. Emanuel continued watching it without his binoculars. “You might wonder, Why is it called ruby-crowned? Well, under the feathers on top of its head is a brilliant red pom-pom, like a burst of red, like you stuck a piece of red cotton on its head. When it gets angry or upset or wants to say, ‘Back off, this is my area,’ it puts up its red pom-pom. That’s why it’s called ruby-crowned.” I put my binoculars down too. All I could make out was the tree.

When looking at a bird, Emanuel will often whisper, “Wow!” He can be tranquil one second and animated the next. When I called him one day, he interrupted our formal greetings to shout, “There’s a Cooper’s hawk outside my window—I’ll call you back!” and hung up. He has no filter for his excitement. He will bring a car to a screeching halt and run through the brush to get a better look at a bird he has seen through his windshield—mosquitoes, rocks, gates, cougars, and snakes be damned. According to witnesses, he was once so excited to see penguins swimming five feet off the shore in a little bay in the Galápagos Islands that he ripped off most of his clothing and strode into the water.

“There used to be a term in the early days: ‘bird lovers,’” he told me as we walked, giving a quick overview of the nomenclature. “‘Bird lover’ sounded a little bit drippy, a little bit mushy. Then there were ‘bird watchers’ and then we had ‘birders’ and that—” he halted abruptly. “Look on the water fountain. There’s our state bird.” He paused to get a good look through his binoculars before the mockingbird flew into a nearby bush. “So birders, to some extent, don’t just watch birds,” he continued. “They try to see as many as they can. But a bird lover—actually, in terms of my feeling about birds, I’d be closer to that.”

Though we can assume reciprocation is out of the question, it’s uncanny how the birds seem to reward his dedication. Years ago, Emanuel was standing in the front yard of Austin author Lawrence Wright when a bird called. “Did you hear that?” Emanuel asked. He began to search for the bird, telling Wright it was a yellow-billed cuckoo and that it sounded as if it had a caterpillar in its mouth. It did.

Victor Emanuel was probably the type of kid whom adults call “wise beyond his years.” It’s a description that doesn’t usually bode well for a child’s social life. In the late forties, most boys in Houston were interested in sports or comics; they weren’t impressed, as Emanuel was, with the color of red cardinals on green moss or the murmur of a hummingbird feeding on mimosas. But Emanuel wasn’t alone in his pursuit for long. When a fellow Cub Scout told him about the Outdoor Nature Club, which met at the downtown library, the nine-year-old showed up for a meeting and realized he had, finally, found his people. He soon dropped out of his Cub Scout troop, even though most of his new friends were decades older than him.

During Emanuel’s first few years with the club he spent enough time in the field that he learned to differentiate between the loud ta-wit, ta-wit, ta-wit, tee-yo of the hooded warbler and the trilling twe-twe-twe-twe of the pine warbler. He began to notice which birds soared and which flapped their wings continuously. He taught himself to swiftly pop his binoculars in front of his eyes so that he could get the best view of the quick chimney swift and the vermilion flycatcher, whose red coloring is so brilliant that it appears to be glowing. Emanuel couldn’t get enough. He’d keep an eye out for the chickadees and ruby-crowned kinglets hopping on branches in the water oaks as he walked to school each day. On weekends, he’d page through Peterson’s Birds of Eastern North America and examine the book’s glossy plates. Some of the birds were exotic, with bright colors and stripes and patterns and weird, long tails. Some had mohawks or plumage shaped like soft-serve ice cream on their heads. Others were totally bald and wrinkly, with whitish warts near their eyes.

To any child interested in nature, the peculiar details of the world’s birds have undeniable appeal. The hoatzin in South America smells like manure. The helmeted hornbill in Borneo laughs maniacally. Cassowarys have been known to kick (and even disembowel) people. Peregrine falcons can dive at speeds of up to 200 miles an hour. The more attention Emanuel paid, the more he noticed that even ordinary birds—a rock pigeon, say—began to seem exotic.

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