For a few days this month, America became a nation of
bird-watchers. More than 3,000 dead black birds started raining from the sky shortly before
the new year broke in Beebe, Ark., prompting widespread concern about ecological disaster, government conspiracy, and
the Rapture. This was not the first time
feathered creatures landed recently in public life. Birding, these days, is
everywhere. In Jonathan Franzen's best-selling novel, Freedom, paterfamilias Walter
Berglund becomes a bird fanatic to conjure meaning in his drifting life.
(Freedom's cover—maybe you have seen it?—sports a large,
teed-off-looking cerulean warbler.) Annie Proulx's new memoir, Bird Cloud, flatlines "into long
descriptions of bird watching," wrote the critic Dwight Garner. These
next months, meanwhile, Princeton will publish three separate bird
guides; Steve Martin will star in a screen version of The Big Year (a tale of
pan-continental birding); and the nation's leading bird-art
exhibition will turn 35. If American life is,
as some people like to say, a tree of many branches, it is starting to seem a
good idea not to stand beneath it.
What are we to make of the renascent birder? To the uninitiated, a
bird-watcher's motives can seem puzzling, if not downright suspect. Rising at
vampiric hours, these people leave polite society behind to spend long stretches
staring not at dazzling vistas or strange beasts but at birds—and often unexotic
ones at that. They pack enough high-end equipment and field expertise to
undertake a hunt but never touch their prey; the consummating act of birding is,
at most, a picture snapped for private use and from a distance, in the manner of
a pervert with a beach pass. Birding is the sort of hobby that seems like a
front for something. Occasionally, it is. (Nathan Leopold, of Leopold and
Loeb, famously claimed to be watching a Wilson's
phalarope instead of slaying a 14-year-old
child.) Franzen links the rise of his bird-watching interest to his mother's
death and goes
on to describe "a creeping sense of shame
about what I was doing." Proulx scoffs at other birders' eagerness to keep "a
list of birds sighted." There's a sense, amid these judgments, that to bird intensely is to dwell on something totally beside the
point.
In fact, the re-emergence of bird-watching in the
culture's limelight is an ominous thing—though not because of anything the
birder does. The hobby rose to popularity in the unrest of the nuclear era, and
it points toward a looming fear of ecological apocalypse. This makes sense. For
bird-watchers, who are trying to keep track of the natural world without leaving
a trace—to conquer nature without smothering it—the struggle not to uncoil one's
strength destructively is constant. Birding is a steam valve for anxiety about
nuclear-age strength and habits. Its prominence today can be seen as a measure
of quiet alarm.
To bird seems ancient, but
it was a product of industrial modernity. The first birders—as opposed to
hunters or scientists—appeared in the late 19th century, partly as a
result of a boom in the natural sciences (which helped flesh out the field of
ornithology) and partly as a reaction against the new effects of manufacturing.
In America, early on, Harriet Hemenway founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society
to fight the industrial slaughter of local birds for hat feathers. But it wasn't
until Roger Tory Peterson, an American illustrator and bird enthusiast,
published his Field Guide to the Birds in 1934
that modern birding came into being. Peterson's work was comprehensive and
accessible, and it offered enthusiasts an approach that didn't require trapping
or felling birds for close comparative study, as much previous work had. The
book instead used visual, auditory, and habitat cues to distinguish species,
letting the untrained birder work with precision from a distance. Birding became
a popular science that left no trace—and that was seen to be a good thing. In
one of the most quietly influential passages of his book, Peterson referred to
birds as "sensitive indicators of the environment, a sort of 'ecological litmus
paper.' " This was the idea that made birding the great hobby, and alarm bell,
of the nuclear age.
Birding took wing as a
mainstream pursuit in the '60s by playing into that era's anxieties. In 1962,
Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a landmark
best-seller arguing elegantly and at length that DDT was ecologically lethal.
She opened with the image of a lifeless world, marked chiefly by the absence of
our feathered friends. ("The birds—where had they gone?" she wrote. "It was a
spring without voices.") Birds throughout heralded apocalypse: The death of
western grebes marked eco-disaster at Clear Lake; sick birds in Detroit gave the
first sign of environmental poison. The book made this de-birded world look like
nuclear cataclysm. If something terrible was going to happen, birds seemed
poised to give the first cry. In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock released The Birds, the paranoid tale of a
small Bay Area town savaged by murderous flocks. Some viewers see it as an
appeal to the same nuclear-age terror, with the birds now serving as
antagonists.
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Bird-watching increased nearly 300 percent in
the two decades after 1960, according to data from the U.S. Department of the
Interior. In 1967, Britain's John Gooders published a servicey book called
Where To Watch Birds, and it sold
almost 250,000 copies.
Birding was also a hobby
suited to the new American middle class—peripatetic, self-possessed, given to
prelapsarian wistfulness. One of the most beloved birding memoirs of all time is
Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway (1997), a
seductive account of his time hitchhiking around the country as a teenager in
the early '70s, exceeding the sighting record for a "big year" with 671 kinds of
birds. The book is written in the errant episodic form of On the Road or Easy Rider, and, like them, it's
based on an idea of the American continent as a large, unharvested field of
experience (in this case, experience of birds). But it also shows how birders'
competitive and broadening ambitions relied on transportation and technological
growth. That trend continues. Today, there are crowd-sourced bird-mapping tools, birding packages
that double as vacation getaways, birding blogs, birding iPhone apps,
and remote-birding Web sites that don't
require watchers to be present in the landscape at all. A few old-fashioned
birders may still practice their hobby in isolation with binoculars and field
guides, but the birding community, these days, has moved on to gather, check,
and share sightings across great distances using the fruits of technological
industry and the jumbo jet.
A few days ago, I set out before dawn to watch
birders practice their art in the middle of New York. Van Cortlandt Park is a
1,100-acre stretch of green land in the Bronx, and with its mixed terrain—open
fields, wide groves, and wetlands cast among the footpaths and tussocks—it's
become something of a birder's urban Mecca. Winter is a quiet time. A snow had
come through recently when I arrived that morning, capping the branches white
and smoothing out the fields. I passed two men running a black dog near the
entrance. Then, until I met my guides, I was the only human being in sight.
A birder is a person who
enjoys privileged aloneness—someone who, in other circumstances, might relish
the idea of returning from a jog while you are still in bed. "If I weren't doing
this walk here, I would already have mapped my morning," Andrew Baksh, my guide,
said as we trotted down an icy path toward prime birding ground. He wore a
navy-blue stocking cap pulled over his ears, a heavy parka, and an orange hiking
backpack, and he lugged his spotting scope and tripod over one shoulder. It was
barely 8 o'clock. Baksh's profession is information technology, but since
falling in love with the birds in his Queens backyard, he's worked up both his
expertise and his investment in the birding community. These days, he maintains
a bird
blog and does work for the New York City
Audubon. He is interested, especially, in birding etiquette, the underlying
tenet of which is to be as unobtrusive as possible. "This is a serious, serious
hobby," he said. "Some people don't like to call it a hobby at all."
I was out with Baksh and one
of the park's bird-loving rangers, Katy Boula, in pursuit of something known as
the American coot. A birder in the park had first spotted the coot, a new bird for Van Cortlandt, on
New Year's Day. Since then, it had been observed in various locales. We'd hardly
left to search for it when Boula whirled around midsentence and pointed
excitedly toward the sky. "Oh, hawk!" she cried. "That was a red-tailed
hawk!" A large bird banked and perched up in an empty tree. A bit later, we
headed east, out to a pond. "Coots are a good bird for this time year," Baksh
said as we drew near. "That would have been very sought-after for the Christmas
count. Of course, a greater white-fronted goose would have beaten everything."
He grinned as if this were a joke. I did, too. Then he nodded toward the water.
"There go the Canadas."
A large group of geese were
out on the icy pond, beyond some trees, and we stopped on the trail to watch
them. Baksh set up his tripod and spent several minutes peering through it,
saying nothing. He was staring at the geese. I wanted to ask a question, but I
talked instead with Boula, who showed me some pictures of coots in her Sibley Guide. Finally, Baksh
spoke. "Yeah," he said. "Nothing there." I took a look through his scope.
Through the lens, the geese looked strangely cinematic, sitting on the ice,
vivid and near, with feathers flickering in the icy wind. I pulled back, and a
bird cried out over the water.
"Wow, strong call." Boula said. "Is that the Carolina
wren?"
Baksh nodded. "It's the Carolina wren."
Boula showed me a picture of
the Carolina wren. "Sometimes, you're not
going to see the bird. You're only going to hear it," she said. "With birding,
it's all in the little details."
Generally speaking, there
are four species of birder at large in the world. The first and least
intimidating group includes those who see bird-watching as an endeavor roughly
equivalent to Tuesday-night poker, volunteer gardening, or mah-jongg—an
open-access hobby and a chance to connect regularly with friends. These people
are frequently novices, and they tend to be extremely chatty in the field. (This
seems eccentric if you are a birder.) Baksh counts himself among a second group,
an autonomous cadre of enthusiasts who set their own schedules and often dwell
on single bird groups or locales for stretches, like a book critic taking a
month to read an author's full oeuvre. Then there are the specialists. These
people focus on one kind of bird obsessively and always, often with accompanying
Web sites. Fourth are the listers, who
chase birds to check them off a list. Some keep life lists (birds they've seen
in their lives);* some keep year lists (starting anew every January); and
others make up to-do lists by country, state, and so forth (certain New York
City listers work by borough). There is, possibly, something compulsive in this
approach. And yet the listers are the sexy ones, the intrepid jet-setters you
may spy fleeing across the tarmac toting bags of optical equipment, trying to
nail those last few birds, a continent away, before their deadline falls.
Baksh once got a taste of this excitement when a rare
hermit warbler turned up in the area. "I was at Jones Beach, studying gulls,
when I got word," he said. He rushed to his car and tore across Long Island,
only to recognize other watchers doing the same. "There was a convoy leading
there, and we all knew each other," he told me. "You could see people with
clenched fists on the wheel." When he arrived at the northern park, a group of
birders were already set up with their scopes, like "paparazzi." Also, there
were actual bird photographers, a group of mercenary commercialists Baksh
doesn't much care for. "They want to get the picture, and they'll do it at all
costs," he said—even "flushing," or stirring, the prize. Birders who become bird photographers are sometimes said to be
"going over to the dark side."
This is an underlying terror of the pursuit: the fear
that all the skill, knowledge, and tech a birder carries will be turned to other
ends until, finally, a rare marvel is flushed. It does not take a novelist to
see the broader resonance of this concern. Despite their reputation as quirky
hobbyists, birders are on the front line of our problematic efforts to defy
nature—to travel faster, reach farther, outsmart it—without encroaching on its
habits. Their worries are the worries of a nuclear power writ small, and we
could do much worse than let them lead us through the forest ahead as they watch
the sky.
http://www.slate.com/id/2280960/pagenum/all/
