A BIRD-WATCHER is a kind of pious
predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or
an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list
of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being
alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century
form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.
There was prestige in knowing birds
in ancient Rome, and there is prestige today. There are also competitive insect
enthusiasts and tree connoisseurs and fungus aficionados, but they lack the
cultural stature and sheer numbers of bird-watchers. There are 5.8 million
bird-watchers in the United States, slightly more than the number of Americans in book
clubs or
residents of Wisconsin. That’s a huge army of primitive hunter-mystics decked
out in sturdy hiking boots and nylon rain gear, consulting their smartphones to
identify or imitate a particular quarry.
There is nothing especially new
about them except for their gear. Two hundred years ago the heartland teemed
with second sons of wealthy European families who could have stayed home
dissipating in traditional style, but chose to go to the New World and find a
new animal instead. Reporting your sightings to the Audubon Society is decidedly
less glamorous than dispatching a new specimen to a museum in Paris or London,
but it’s a kindred enterprise.
Today’s birders are not exploring
new territory geographically, as the early naturalists did; rather, they are
contouring the frontiers of climate change. It’s April, and the
kitchen-window bird observer is limbering up, too. Are the birds nesting early,
nesting late? (Do they know something we don’t?) The reporting such observers do
is crucial.
And what are today’s birds telling
us? The Audubon Society estimates that nearly 60 percent of 305 bird species
found in North America in winter are shifting northward and to higher elevations in
response to climate change. For comparison, imagine the inhabitants of 30 states
— using state residence as a proxy for species of American human — becoming
disgruntled with forest fires and drought and severe weather events, and seeking
out suitable new habitat.
The Audubon Society’s estimates
rest largely on data supplied by volunteers in citizen-science projects like the
Christmas Bird Count (first proposed in 1900, nine years after the first known
use of the word “bird-watcher,” to set the hobby apart from the more traditional
Christmas pastime of shooting birds). The birds in question have shifted an
average of 35 miles north over a period of about 40 years — seemingly
insignificant in human terms, but a major move ecologically.
Such documentation, drawing on
databases and the practices of citizen science, is descended from folk wisdom,
where birds are ascribed a certain predictive power. Folk wisdom holds that they
nest high in anticipation of warm weather (not true) or fly low when they expect
to get wet (true).
Folk wisdom has deep roots.
“Auspice” and “augury” share a Latin origin with “avian.” An augur was a priest
in ancient Rome who studied birds to determine the will of the gods (Cicero was
one). When an elected official is inaugurated today, he or she is etymologically
promoted to bird-watcher in chief. Mr. President, your binoculars. There are no
accidental hawks or eagles in the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” either. This says
more about humans than about birds. They remind us of time, hence the venerable
history of the cuckoo clock. As James Baldwin noted, the whisper beneath the
word “time” is death.
The ancient wisdom of fretting
obsessively over bird behavior has obtained the vindication of modern science.
Hawks and eagles do not appear by accident. When, where and whether they appear
is, absolutely, a portent. The spotted owl is a bioindicator, a species that can
be used to monitor the condition of an ecosystem. In other words, bioindicator
is just modern parlance for omen.
And so the practice of
bird-watching, no matter how geared up and teched out, cannot escape its ancient
roots; or, rather, it has come back around. Birds are not moving north in
anticipation of climate change; rather, they are moving in response to it.
Still, they are becoming predictive in a manner not founded in superstition but
well-documented in reported behavior.
We can’t escape trying to see the
future through birds. Too many canaries were deployed to detect gas leaks in
coal mines, too many ravens launched from ships to find land — bird anxiety is
an essential component of the human predicament.
There is no telling what kinds of
perverse ecological arrangements we will create for birds in the future, or what
new technologies will be introduced to bird-watching. Google Glass, for example,
has implications, and binoculars that double as digital or online field guides
can’t be far away. We have reached an era when our instincts, anxieties and
gadgets collide; our classical relationship with birds is reinforced and our
understanding is enhanced. Unfortunately, we may need to start moving north.
By BRIAN
KIMBERLING
Published: April 19, 2013
The author of the forthcoming novel
“Snapper.”
