King of Birds

The setting sun is in our eyes. The birds are hard to see, moving far too fast to see any details about them. Some part of their head is a deep red color, you catch flashes of it when they come out of the sun. The rest of them is starkly black and white. I have ideas, but I don’t know for sure. Shorebirds have never been my strong suit.

My wife is searching Google images on her phone, but Google thinks that “tern” is a misspelling of “turn”. Three more come by, sleek black and white birds with splashes of vermilion across their faces, skimming the shoreline in tight formation, beaks open, skimming the water from time to time.

I have a bird book. It’s at home on the sideboard. It’s been too long since I did this sort of thing, birdwatching. It didn’t occur to me that I might want the book. The binoculars are automatic, they nearly always make the trip even if they spend the majority of it tucked at the bottom of a bag or rattling around in an ammo can.

I grew up birding. My father was a biologist. Birding was just one of many things we did on family hikes. There were plant pressings, lizards caught and sometimes kept. Snakes, snails, frogs, insects too. But I always liked watching the birds.

There’s something wonderfully ephemeral about watching birds. They’re there, but then at any given moment they can flutter tiny wings and disappear into a thicket of trees, or swoop huge spans of wing that slowly and majestically lift their bodies up into the air until they become just a thin black line on the distant horizon.

I may not have actually pursued identifications and list making much in my adult years, but I’ve never tired of watching birds be birds.

I started traveling using my feet. Start where you are, with what you have right? I started hiking. I traveled to the Sierra Nevada, the Trinity Alps, the White Mountains, the deserts of Arizona, Utah and Colorado. I spent a lot of time out there on trails, resting on rocks, wondering, what is this thin wisp of plant clinging to life on the edge of a sandstone cliff? What is this hummingbird buzzing me like an angry hornet? Spend enough time outdoors and you become a naturalist.

That I remain, after all these years, drawn to birds could be old habits not dying, but it could also be the simple fact that birds are everywhere. Even in the densest examples of human population where the crush of people is often literal, like Ciudad de México or the entrance to a subway in New York at rush hour, there are still birds there. Sparrows, pigeons, starlings. Survivors.

Watching birds teaches you to see the world a bit differently. You’re always alert to flittering movements in your peripheral vision. After a while you start to scan the tree line, the edges of the marsh, the place where the buildings meet the sky, the borderlands, the places where movement begins. You quite literally see the world differently.

Birds lead you to look at the world differently, to be part of the world in ways that you are not without them. Birdwatching requires that you be both in your self, mindful and aware of your surroundings (lest you trip and fall, or worse), but also to be out of yourself, to be aware of the other and its movements, its awareness. It’s a reminder that you are not just in the world, but an active part of it.

Watching birds becomes a gateway to much more. You can’t spend much time watching birds without starting to think about insects and sticks, bushes, trees, water, habitats, ecology, geography, weather, architecture. Everything on earth is intrinsically linked to everything else.

Now that I have two young children I’ve decided to get back into the world of birding, identification, lists and all. In part because it’s a good way to get out in nature. There’s nothing that teaches so readily or excites children so much as nature.

I want to be able to teach the art of birdwatching to my children. They’re less than a year old right now, far too young to use binoculars or even pay attention to anything for more than a minute or two, but they already enjoy watching the robins and blue jays that prance on our deck at home.

I’m not trying to get them bird watching right now though. I’m relearning the art myself. Relearning how to identify, how to observe birds and their world. You can’t teach your children something if you aren’t already well versed in it yourself. Moreover you can’t hope to instill any sense of enthusiasm if you don’t have it yourself. Even babies have powerfully accurate bullshit detectors.

I don’t necessarily care if my children get into birding or not. It’s not the birds I’d like them to care about; it’s the sense of curiosity about the world around them that I’d like to pass on. It’s that sense of curiosity and wonder that makes bird watching worth doing and that curiosity carries will beyond the binocular lens. Bird watching is part of the lost art of paying attention to not just the world around you, but the details within that world, to stop, to watch, to make something else the center of your world for a few minutes and to consider its world, to see how it lives, what it does, what it wants, how it lives. To observe, to really watch. To record what you saw when it makes sense to do so and to just watch and enjoy when it doesn’t. That’s bird watching. At least that’s what it means to me.

I was brought up in nature — birding, hiking, camping, backpacking, fishing, climbing, kayaking. These were the things my family did for fun. I want to create similar experiences for my kids, to take them out into nature to watch and identify wildlife, to cook on camp stoves, to smell wood fires warming coffee in the morning, to cozy up in a sleeping bag, to watch the stars from inside a tent, to hit the trails at dawn and head for the high country of the mountains because the high country is where human beings are meant to go, to push yourself, your knowledge of the world, your understanding and feeling of being alive beyond where it is today.

The world is ever-changing, always new. There’s always something enticing around the next bend. I don’t want them to say, “look daddy, a bird”, but “daddy, what kind of bird is that? What is it doing? Where is it going? Why is it doing that? Where does it sleep? What does it eat?” and the thousands of other questions a curious child will think of — questions I can’t even imagine.

I’m not 100 percent sure yet what I think the role of a good parent is, but I lean toward this: that you point them in the right direction and get the hell out of the way. Answer the easy questions so that they have a start, and the confidence to start asking the really hard questions, the ones I can’t answer.

The best ways to get them started on the curiosity road is to get them out exploring the natural world, exploring it in detail, watching birds, hiking trails, climbing mountains, watching the pines sway in the wind while you eat lunch, seeing the stars through the screen of the tent, and all the other things I did and wished I had done as a child.

But you can’t teach your children these things if you don’t do them yourself. If you don’t have a curiosity about the world you won’t be able to pass it along. You can’t fake it.

So I’m getting back into the natural world, into bird watching down here on the shores of the Gulf coast because I want to re-learn everything I once knew, still do know, buried somewhere deep down, and pull it back up to the surface so I can enjoy it again. Maybe I can even pass it on.

I can remember a time when my whole world could momentarily be forgotten and everything about the world suddenly wrapped up in the skittish flitter of a warbler or a Sanderling darting the shoreline or a Black Skimmer, ahem, skimming the shoreline, its partly-red bill strikingly red against the blue of sea and sky, its mouth open as if trying to swallow the ocean whole.