On New Year’s Day, I suited up, slung my binoculars over my shoulder, found the smallest notepad in the house and stuffed it in my pocket, issued unnecessary and finicky last-minute explanations of where food and diapers were to the grandparents who would be running the circus in my absence, and I tumbled out the door into the light and wind.
There’s a special way I hold a small notebook and pen at the same time as my binoculars so that I can still adjust the focus wheel, I realized, as my fingers automatically arranged themselves into the odd and necessary positions. It felt wonderfully relaxing, like slipping a tired body into a hot bath. It felt deeply charming, like having a friend-crush.
Yes, this is how I talk about holding binoculars. I hadn’t been out birding since my birthday eight months earlier. I know whales and dolphins can go for a long time without breathing, and that’s cool and remarkable and interesting, but for a birder to go eight months…let’s just say the nature show of my life was about to take one of those really dark turns where you wonder how the cameraperson lives with herself after witnessing such a scene and not intervening.
As soon as my excursion went off-script I knew I was—as my children say, for no traceable reason, in order to celebrate moments of return to homeostasis—“back in the band!”
I was slated to walk my 3.5mi block looking and listening for as many individuals and species as I could possibly perceive in order to contribute my findings to the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, and I’d literally gone off into the weeds in a nearby cemetery to locate the toffee-sweet burbles I suspected were rising from a handful of American Tree Sparrows (AND THEY WERE. WOOT.)
This is how one goes birding, turning the self over to the search to such a degree that climbing through snowbroken weeds is purely incidental. It barely registers. Hardships of snow and ice and wind and tired feet are just the little crunchy bits on top of the chocolate bar.
After three years of almost constant vigilance for the quicksilver needs of two new humans, the emotional equivalent of sitting under an arctic summer sun that DOES NOT GO AWAY, it felt intoxicating to offer my powers of perception, which are obnoxiously acute, to the more spacious and low-stakes pursuit of data. Plainspoken, beautiful, artless data. Oh, sweet, sweet Citizen Science. Thank you, Area VII of the Ithaca CBC, for enlisting me to count your birds.
Why do that? Why count birds? You will never count them all, nor get them all identified correctly, nor do the birds care what you’re doing. You’ll come up with next to nothing one day and a gajillion birds the next, so how can one day of counting have any relevance?
For one thing, as my ultra-runner nutrition coach Jess Elster never tires of saying (and thank goodness she doesn’t), it’s small efforts and their consistency over time that make the biggest difference in our lives. The Ithaca CBC has been happening every winter for 122 years. [There is likely an Audubon CBC near you, too, and you can help with it.] Yes, it’s only one day, but repeat that effort 122 times, and you start to get pretty meaningful data. No, the science isn’t perfect—with people changing their routes, the weather varying widely, the number and experience levels of the counters ranging hugely— but keep showing up, doing your best, over and over, every dang year, and the data builds. Scientists can use it to see shifts in bird populations, track relative health and vitality of different species, and even anticipate troubled times.
On the individual level, too, counting matters. Naming matters. The birds couldn’t care less whether I know a Song Sparrow “chip” sound from a White-throated Sparrow “chip” sound, but the act of discerning between them brings me immense pleasure. To see the broader similarities (both species hang out in brushy areas; both are small and stripey and brown, etc.), and then to enter the tiny spaces where differences emerge like stars from behind the clouds, is to shed, for a moment, the tiresome fictions we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world works, and step into a wildly freshening, untranslated reality.
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For six years I taught at a college that offered first-year writing seminars to the students, to be themed at the discretion of the instructors. I suppose, like the farmer next door who said I could “take whatever [I] want[ed]” from his produce fields, folks at the college who said, roughly, “teach whatever topic you want, as long as they write essays,” didn’t quite know who they were talking to.
My First-year Seminar, The Avian Persuasion, offered the placebo topic of avian literatures, while dealing the hard drug of bird identification. I quizzed them every week with slide shows and audio recordings, and by the end of the course, every student could identify over a hundred local species by sight and sound.
Even I doubted the sanity of this project. I was in the English Department, for crying out loud. And almost no first-year student is interested in bird identification. But I kept showing up, kept believing it was worth it, because my gut wouldn’t let me do otherwise, and something interesting happened. After a few weeks of terror and outrage at the quizzes, a few students started trickling in a little breathless, late, saying they’d seen a Red-bellied Woodpecker on the way to class. Like, up close.
In the weeks that followed, some began to wear their odd new skill with a slightly ironic pride, parading themselves in front of non-bird-literate friends as weird but delightful curiosities, somewhat impressive minor freaks. I heard an Eastern Bluebird just now. Over that way, they could say— and mean it.
The same night I heard my first book of poems was going to be published, I was traveling, and went to bed late in California, celebrating. I was woken at 5am by a text from a student in New York who had found a Cedar Waxwing on the ground. I told her to get it to a safer place up higher and leave it alone and check on it in a few hours. I went back to sleep. I woke again at 8am to a text explaining that she and a group of her friends, some also new birders, had brought the bird inside their dorm room, and that it liked guitar music!— but wouldn’t fly. By the time I’d typed out that they really needed to get the bird back outside, they’d sent another text, explaining that the bird had suddenly been able to fly again after a little while. I said yes, what do waxwings eat? They typed back excitedly: berries! Yes! I said. And berries get old and fermented. What’s wine made of? Oh, wow, they said. Yes, I said, your bird was drunk.
Of the two things, my book getting published and my students intersecting with an intoxicated waxwing, the latter event has perhaps meant more to me over time. Not because I’m egoless, but because I’d already gone through the most meaningful part of my book, which was the making of it, the writing of it, its process, which is to say, for me as the writer, its life. The book’s publication, though extraordinarily exciting, was, it turns out, an afterthought— a result. And as such, it was a passing thing. The students, on the other hand, gathering up a drunk bird in the east coast morning, were having an experience. They were becoming part of the process of noticing. Process continues where results eventually become antiquated.
“The result only matters insofar as it energizes and informs the process,” one of my favorite teachers once said. When I identify a bird, when I pull up the syllables we English-speaking homo sapiens have assigned to its slight earthly body from the partial but enthusiastic bird-crazed encyclopedia of my mind, nothing happens in the great wide world. But inside of me, the process of seeing, recognizing, and giving voice to the reality I can perceive is sparking and glowing. That glow begins to illuminate.
On days when I have named as many birds as I can, it’s easy to see and say what a good life I’ve already had, even the shitty parts, which are also anatomy to discern and name, just like a sparrow’s field marks. On the days when I’ve named all the birds I can, I’m deep in the process of seeing, and saying, what fantastic luck it is to have arrived on this planet, sentient.
Caroline, I love this, and ever-so-sentient you, the writer. Thank you for enriching my life in such an uplifting way. Can’t say how much.
Your joy of children, writing, birding (to name JUST a few) is utterly infectious and inspiring to experience first hand. We are fortunate to be able to see through your keen lens. Always a gift to savor and learn from!