Whiteshirted

Birders tend to look alike, but not in the way non-birders raised on Don Knotts and Miss Jane Hathaway expect: though we may on occasion find ourselves tennis-shod, most of us do without jodhpurs and safari helmets, opting instead for the typical outdoorsperson’s mix, equally evocative (whatever its true source) of LL Bean and Goodwill.

I suppose, though, that our very lack of fashion-sense is a fashion-sense of its own, and birders’ habits and choices are as susceptible to trends as anyone else’s. Take the white shirt. Not all that long ago, jeans and a worn oxford were perfectly acceptable in the field; but a new superstition has taken hold: to wit, that white shirts drive off birds.

We know who started this, and the list of those who now subscribe to the idea is a surprisingly long one. The theory is that white “in nature” is the color of warning, a sign to the dear creatures of forest and field that danger is nigh; wear white, says the party line, and birds will flee you as far as they can see you.

I doubt it.

In birds and diurnal mammals, white integument serves a wide variety of signaling purposes; even where it is undeniably used in warning (the flag of a white-tailed deer, the tail-sides of a junco), it is not the color per se but its rapid deployment and equally abrupt concealment that startles conspecifics into flight.

I am convinced that it is the same with white-clad humans: birds, most of which are more visually aware than we can even imagine, are almost always aware of us, and their reactions depend not on what we’re wearing but on how we move while we’re wearing it. Shout, jump up and down, stand right under that fruiting cherry tree, and you’re going to move the objects of your desire up the canyon and away, however correct your camouflage. So just sit down, be quiet, and try not to fidget; the birds will still know you’re there, but they will eventually go about their business, giving you–white shirt or not–a chance to melt into their lives for a moment or two.