Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Birding

Ever since I read Charlie's post about why he is a birder, on Charlie's Bird Blog, and browsed the "Reasons to Become a Bird Watcher " section in the archives on 10,000 Birds, I've thought about writing my own post about why I love to get out there and watch birds. This isn't really it.

But today I read a very satisfying essay in the New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen, "My Bird Problem," (August 8 & 15, 2005) that someone clipped out for me. The essay is about learning to love, dealing with death, what we do to the environment, the hell that is other people, and a love of birding. It did not go unnoticed among the nature bloggers--Rexroth's Daughter at Dharma Bums writes about it here.

Here is one passage from the essay that particularly struck me, where Franzen describes his "proper introduction" to birding, on a walk in the park with two "serious birders."
We started at Belvedere Castle, and right there, on the mulchy ground behind the weather station, we saw a bird shaped like a robin but light-breasted and feathered in russet tones. A veery, the brother-in-law said.

I'd never even heard of veeries. The only birds I'd noticed on my hundreds of walks in the Park were pigeons and sparrows and, from a distance, beyond a battery of telescopes, the nesting red-tailed hawks that had become such overexposed celebrities. It was weird to see a foreign, unfamous veery hopping around in plain sight, five feet away from a busy footpath, on a day when half of Manhattan was sunning in the park. I felt as if, all my life, I'd been mistaken about something important. [emphasis mine]
It's an eerie feeling, an epistemological miracle, when you see a bird for the first time the day after you learn it's prevalent in your region; it's a startling revelation to find that there are 40 different species observable in a morning in your yard in the spring, where you would have guessed 4 or 5 before making the count. Birding shows you something important about the complexity of the world, watching birds grounds you firmly on the earth, in the moment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pamela,

A great post on a topic that is so hard to explain. Those epiphanies that suddenly root us in the natural world. I still remember the strange looks when a friend introduced me to some of her friends.. "This is Clare, he uh, likes birds", and the satisfaction of introducing that friend to the small hidden wonders of the bird world, in the form of a Hermit Thrush.

Anonymous said...

I suppose it's somehow grounds us to earth to think that birds don't really seem to need US at all. Maybe, to them, we're just occasional good fortunes with feed bags...