Why and the Bird

I sometimes feel sorry for the young reporters assigned the “bird beat”: their editor hears about a field trip or a birding festival, and before you know it the new kid finds herself getting up in the dark and stumbling onto a bus with a bunch of chattering birdwatchers (”birders,” as they politely insist). And then the questions start–only it isn’t the reporter asking them. How long have you been birding? (Uh, 15 minutes.) What’s your life list? (Hey, look at that black bird over there on the ground with the long tail.) What kind of binoculars do you use? (Kind of figured the photographer would let me use his telephoto.)

The bus pulls up at the birding spot, a scrubby patch of woods just like every other scrubby patch of woods passed in the last 100 miles, only probably fuller of mosquitoes and snakes and poison ivy and rabid wolverines. The birdwatchers, birders, whatever, pile out and start hissing names into the sky as if they had a bad case of mass Tourette’s. But at least they’re distracted, and the reporter can dig out her notebook and start posing some questions of her own. She works her way in with subtle variations on the same queries put to her on the bus, dutifully noting that the shabbily clad old man with the British accent has been birding for 672 years, that his life list is up to 8 by 42, and that his preferred binoculars are manufactured at Porro Prison. This isn’t so hard!

And then, in a birdless moment, our young journalist opens her notebook and sends forth the question she so cleverly worked out the evening before: Why do you do this? The very veeries and vireos fall silent in the woods, and the birders only stare. Why do we do it? How can you answer a question like that? How can you ask a question like that? Isn’t it obvious? Where have you been for the last hour and a half?

Some of us in the group have heard the question before, of course, and we trot out the answers we’ve used in the past in the same situation. It gets us outdoors, it introduces us to like-minded people, it can be a contribution to science (oops: Science), it sublimates the hunting urge, it’s another way to collect things, and on and on. We reel these answers off by rote as our young scribe scribbles, then turn our attention to the hawk overhead or the warbler in the woodland edge. These are the answers that appear in the local paper the next morning, illustrated (inevitably) with a mug shot of the dorkiest looking member of the whole dorky group and (inevitably) a blurry portrait of a house finch labeled “mourning warbler.” And maybe they’re the right answers for some birders. But they don’t do it for me.

Ask me the question in a serious mood, and I’ll probably change it silently before answering it. You want to know why, but I’m more willing to tell you how: that my father was a science teacher, that we moved when I was 12 across town to a new habitat with new and unfamiliar birds, that my best friend in junior high had been introduced to birding by his mother. I reveal the mundane details of my early adolescence, you nod sagely, and we leave history behind and get on with our birding.

But why is a different and a much harder question. Could I as easily have become a herper, an iris breeder, a fisherman, a chess master, a Studebaker buff? Are our hobbies interchangeable and their objects fungible? Is there a difference between the checkmarks on my negligently curated life list and the dusty salt-shakers on an old lady’s curio shelf? No, no, and I most certainly hope so!

The great appeal of birding, I think, an appeal not duplicated by any other hobby, is the way that it lets us move between the inside world and the outside, subject and object, ourselves and the targets of our avian obsession. Birds are insistently and demonstratively “other,” inaccessible in all but the rarest situations; yet they are everywhere, around us in every setting, from the Spruce Grouse on a mountaintop in Maine to the Rufous-collared Sparrow on a Quito sidewalk. At any day, in any place, we can see, identify, and put a name to a bird, taking possession of it in a way; but unless we are inveterate inspectors of roadkill, we are unlikely to hold it. We name the bird out loud and the bird flies off; we have and are had at the same time, enjoying the pleasures of acquisition almost simultaneously with the return to self. If this reminds you somewhat pruriently of something else, just listen to a birder gasp at the unexpected appearance of a rarity.

No other hobby can keep difference and identity, the objective and the subjective, so well suspended. For hunters, recreational banders, and porcelain collectors, the point is ownership, the assertion of the subject by acquisition of an object. For painters, bridge players, and bloggers, it’s all about losing the self in the elegance of creation. Birders, though, have it all: we own our objects even as we see them slip away, and we verbally create our enjoyment of them even as we admit their independence and inaccessibility. We are, for the moment, intensely aware of ourselves and our experiences, and of the world outside us that makes experience possible.