The Experience of Birding
Yes, it was fun to see zone-tailed hawks and red-faced and hermit warblers and mountain chickadees on Mount Lemmon today. But nothing beats up-close views of those squeakily charming little pygmy nuthatches, which were much in evidence everywhere there were ponderosa pines.
Tomorrow: the Santa Ritas.
But who notices the heat when you’re watching rufous-winged sparrows?
Another great day with the Fontenelle Forest Bird Club!
Well, name a hobby that isn’t. Close your eyes and picture the “typical” cross-stitcher or car collector or duck hunter or cake decorator.
I know, I know: there are plenty of men who knit and women who taxidermy fish, but mere reality is not the point. The point is that culturally, conventionally, “typically,” our leisure-time activities are allocated to one sex or another — and simple counterexamples, no matter how abundant, just can’t change that. Motorcycle racing is gendered male, and romance reading is gendered female, whatever the true demography of those hobbies might be.
What I find so fascinating about the gendering of birding, birdwatching, and amateur “ornithology” is that it has so perceptibly changed over the years — and not just once but several times. In fact, there is a good case to be made (and someday I’ll make it, given world enough and time) that the history of North American birding is not just marked but determined by those shifts.
The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw some real anxiety about whether birds were a more appropriate object for female consideration or for male. Vertebrate natural history had been very much a man’s world since its invention in the sixteenth century, but that changed in the mid- and late nineteenth century, when suddenly women took to the field (the literal and the metaphoric). The response in the 1920s was the strident reassertion of bird study as “scientific” and “technical,” such that the influential (and eventually hegemonic) circles around such figures as Ludlow Griscom were transformed essentially into He-Man Woman-Hater Clubs.
A short generation before that, though, right at the end of the nineteenth century, some male birders attempted not to reject but to co-opt the feminization of their sport, to transform birding women into an army led by male generals. The well-known example, of course, is the mobilization of “feminine” sentimentality in the plume wars of the 1880s and 1890s, a campaign largely orchestrated by male scientists and conservationists but carried out by garden and bird clubs whose membership was mostly female.
A more subtle attempt to assign gendered roles to birders is attested in a beautifully revealing document I had never seen until I ran across it in (inevitably) the search for something else. On July 31, 1898, the New York Times published nearly two columns urging “more women to take up the study of birds.”
A number of New York’s fashionable women have discovered this, and for the last Summer or two an experienced ornithologist has had out-of-town classes, which have gone afield with him to study birds.
There’s a lot to say about that sentence — the women are “fashionable,” the man is “experienced” — but the main point is simply that while the enthusiasm is female, the leadership is male. There is an especially rich irony in the title of the article, “Opera-glass Students,” an obvious borrowing from Florence Merriam’s Birds Through an Opera Glass; the author of the article (I suspect William T. Davis himself) lists that book fourth in his recommendations, reserving the first two places, like a good New Yorker, for Frank M. Chapman’s Bird Life and Handbook.
Over most of the article, Davis simply spouts unconnected bird facts in a disturbingly stream-of-consciousness way. Only at the very end does he seem to remember that he has a reading audience — and he obviously has a very clear, and very clearly gendered, notion of who that audience is:
There is one advantage in the study of birds … it is not necessary to have a collection of specimens to litter the house….
Don’t you worry, little society ladies.
There are birds that do not scruple to feed on human flesh. Battlefields have always had their black-garbed attendants in the form of vultures and ravens, and even ruddy turnstones are known to have pecked at a corpse or two.
But winter finches?
In 1555, Conrad Gesner reported that he had heard of red crossbills dining on cadavers, a distasteful habit mentioned again half a century later in Aldrovandi‘s account of this “voracissima avis.”
Three hundred years earlier, the English chronicler Matthew Paris warned that these birds were actually capable of accelerating the production of human carrion. After extracting the seeds with their forceps-like bills, the crossbills in his local orchards left
the rest of the apple … poisoned, as if with venom.
Be careful out there.
What could possibly make a fine weekend with friends even better? The title of this entry says it all.
Not only did we get to spend time with Sally and Frank at their beautiful and comfortable Adirondacks camp, not only did we get to meet several others of their delightful friends, not only did Gellert form an instant and lasting bond with two new canine buddies, but Sunday’s birding led to a lifer for both Alison and me.
Saturday evening’s dinner conversation ranged widely and well, with birds prominent but never dominant; all the same, I made sure to listen hard to Pat and John’s excellent advice for our search. Early the next morning found us on a lovely bog road near Saranac Lake, with magnolia and black-throated green warblers and blue-headed vireos singing all around. We walked and listened, listened and walked, and drove a little farther.
And then Sally’s keen ears heard it. The first bird my binoculars found was a yellow-bellied sapsucker — and the second as well, two of those elegant woodpeckers together in a dead, nearly barkless snag. Immediately beneath them, though, another woodpecker. The woodpecker.
A couple of patient minutes later, and this black-backed woodpecker was right on the roadside, not far above eye level and just one thin layer of trees in from where we watched, rapt and almost unbelieving. He — it took a while for the little round forehead patch to be visible even at such close range — drummed repeatedly, a “tight” series of a dozen or more beats coming too close and too fast together to distinguish and to count. A minute or more passed between drums, when the bird slipped to the back side of his perch and vanished, a sobering reminder of how fortunate we were to be standing on the road when he called the first time.
After several minutes of this, he flew back across the road, where he took a high perch in the open, more distant but photographable even for me. Again, he drummed continually, this time less frequently, the intervals filled with short bouts of preening and that golden crown glinting in the morning sun.
We left the bird enjoying the sunshine, but he wasn’t alone. Just as he’d been attended by two sapsuckers when we first saw him, it took a scant few seconds for a sapsucker — one of the original two, or a third bird? — to join him in his preening tree, where the sapsucker maintained a respectful three or four feet of distance.
What all that was about isn’t at all clear. Though the smaller birds kept their distance, there was no obvious aggression on the part of the bigger black-back, and no clear signs of anxiety on the part of either species. All three of the perches taken by the black-back were in decidedly dead wood, making it seem very unlikely that the sapsuckers were guarding sap wells.
A mystery — and one that surely makes it worth seeing this species again. And again and again.