I feel like I'm constantly trying to re-explain the appeal of birding. I don't know why. No one is asking me for an explanation. But I guess whenever something takes over my life to this extent, it's natural to start wondering what it is about this thing and not another thing. So here's some thoughts I've been having about it.
-
The idea that you can just go look at all the animals that live around you, no zoo, just in the wild, is so cool. I'll never get over it. Like I always knew this I guess, but until I started doing it I didn't realize how endlessly fun it would be. Before I would go in the woods and not really see much other than maybe a deer so I thought it would be too hard. But learning to notice is so huge. Part of what helps that is:
-
Identification. Learning how to identify is a HUGE part of how birding works, about what's exciting about it. You're honing a skill that brings you closer to nature by virtue of not seeing "bird" but seeing "sparrow" or even "fox sparrow." That opens you up to specific knowledge rather than general knowledge, and there will always definitionally be more specific knowledge on any subject with depth than there is general knowledge. This skill connects the game of birding with the joy of birding with the knowledge of birding.
The game of birding is about lists, counting birds in a trip, in a day, in a week, in a month, in a county, in a lifetime. It's about seeing how many you can find. It's an ARG, it's Pokémon. But secretly it's an excuse that brings two other things into your life:
The joy of birding is gaining a perspective on yourself, on the world, on ecology and how all living things relate to each other, humans to birds to plants to trees to mushrooms to water to rocks to air. Starting somewhere small and getting specific means it will inherently lead you to the other specifics. And there's magic in the details and in seeing how it all connects. It feels spiritual. More on that later.
The knowledge of birding is about facts it's about scientific names and phyla and species and evolution and extinction and history and present and behaviors: breeding, migration, foraging, etc, etc, etc. Nerd shit. Ornithology. Ecology as science. Biology. Identification is the first bit of knowledge you get, and it's what allows you to play the game, it's what shows you the road to deepening the joy, and it's a starting point for deeper knowledge. If you learn that the difference between a Western Gull and a Glaucous-Winged Gull is that a Western Gull has black primaries, then you are learning what Primaries are (they're specific wing feathers).
- Spirituality. I'm reading Thomas C. Gannon's memoir Birding While Indian and he talks about his view on Lakota spirituality as being one that was misinterpreted by colonizers, but was perhaps originally something closer to viewing animals like the eagle and the meadowlark as profoundly spiritual beings on their own, without supernatural powers, because their natural ones are already incredible. [note: I will do everything I can to keep this from going into a white-lady-fetishizing-native-spirituality-and-nature path, because that's not what I'm trying to do, but I realize it might look like that.] I think that sort of materialist naturalist take on spirituality is something I've found deeply affecting and meaningful to me at this point in my life. Not to say this necessarily has anything to do with Lakota spirituality, I'd be the first to admit I don't know a thing about it. It has more to do with the book I read. But I am saying that when I see a Meadowlark it automatically feels like a spiritual experience to me. To put it in a Jewish lens, the Zohar tells us there is a seed of God in all of creation and when I see a bird I feel like I am looking at God. God is in trees too. And grass. Moss. Mud. Shit. But harder to see maybe in those last two. I've always been a spiritual person but the last few years have been harder in that regard. I began to drop off of a lot of my Jewish practice, which had been so important to me, as one by one the group I studied Torah with stopped showing up, or moved. The last remaining members were me and my landlord at the time. You can probably guess how that relationship got strained.
Discovering birding has meant so many things to me, but one of those things is a discovery of the divine around me in a way that feels immediate and obvious. It's easy to say God is in nature, which I think I've always believed, even since my childhood days being raised inside a pretty intense evangelical monoculture, God being able to be something you could observe "in His creation" was always a given. But it's one thing to go out on a nice day and see a pretty sunset and go "Wow!" and another to be watching a Bald Eagle pick up a fish, fly up high and drop it back in the water, then repeat the process on another fish, for no discernable reason and say, "Yeah, that's God too and sometimes the fish is me, or someone I love and I'm like what the fuck, God" and he just does that squeaky wheel Bald Eagle noise (not the one you hear in movies, but the real one) and stares at you and grabs another fish while staring with that uncomprehending, near-alien sentience we see in animals who are both so alike and so deeply unlike us. THAT feels like God. God is beautiful, and POWERFUL and playful and randomly cold or cruel. God has no reasons: God exists, God does. And you can see the whole dance of an ecosystem play out and it's endlessly complex and it involves us, we're part of it and we can't keep acting like we're not. That right there is both terrifying but also liberating, because it really does mean your job is bullshit, it really does mean that dumb thing that's bothering you, God doesn't care, God is too busy remembering where it put 1000 seeds to eat throughout the winter and also just slowly growing new root cells to get at more water and also letting its minerals be carved into shapes by a river and idk, lava swirling around in the mantle making tectonic plates bob up and down every 10000 years or whatever and atoms of radiation around Jupiter (I think, I don't actually know how radiation works, just that I'm terrified of it).
I don't know why this simple hobby of looking at birds makes everyone turn into philosophers and poets and theologians about it, but okay, yes I do and I just wrote a bunch about in the paragraph above this. Thomas Gannon, who I mentioned earlier says, basically, "Why is Wordsworth allowed to become ecstatic talking about nature as is, but when the Lakota do it all of a sudden it's some savage/pagan thing, some other" and of course he knows and you know and I know that the why is "racism" but I feel like I (who consider myself an intensely spiritual person) and an atheist who loves nature probably could have an argument that ends up with us both agreeing on all points but what labels we use. In Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway he says that when he was a child he loved fantastical stories and then when he realized dragons weren't real he looked to nature because birds were. But the thing is that Australian saltwater crocodiles can weigh up to 3,300lbs and be up to 20 ft long and how much bigger does a lizard have to be to be a dragon? Because we used to have bigger ones, kind of famously so. It's not either/or it's both/and. The reality isn't more boring it's less boring because it's real and complicated and you can spend a decade of your life studying one species and still not know everything.
O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial, faery place;
That is fit home for Thee!
-William Wordsworth, "To the Cuckoo"
ANYWAY. This weekend I went birding with my friend Caitlin at Nisqually NWR. Like I mentioned in my last post, earlier in the week I had tried to go birding with my new camera at Lake Isabella and didn't see shit, then afterward I got an email saying "Mason county rare bird alert: American white pelican" at the exact place I almost went birding. Not wanting another trip like that, Caitlin and I went to Billy D Frank Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, the preeminent spot for birding in the South Puget Sound. Here's what we saw!
-
A mating pair of Hooded Mergansers
Male
Female -
A mating pair of Yellow-Rumped Warblers
Male
Female -
Mount Rainier
-
Flocks of Cackling Geese
-
A few Great Blue Herons
Idk why he's lookin like such a creep.
-
Whatever this raptor is
Our guess was Northern Harrier, but secretly I hope it was a Short-Eared Owl. -
Coot
Coot. -
Red-Winged Blackbird
He was making the loneliest little cries. The first time I'd seen a single one without a whole flock of friends. -
Canada Goose standing right by the path looking threatening.
-
Some very cute Greater Yellowlegs!
-
More ducks! including: Northern Pintails
-
Short-billed Gull
It's more exciting than a Glaucous-Winged Gull! -
Lone Crow
Regular old crow! -
Green-Winged Teal
-
Lots of mud!
-
Bunny
Invasive Eastern Cottontail -
Spotted Towhee
Just like in my yard!
Here's a link to the ebird report. A handful of other things too. We saw a lot of good shit! And heard some Tree Swallows that I was VERY excited about but never saw any of.
OH WELL
<3 u Sara