Out Birding

The summer​ after my first year at university, I worked in Panama as a research assistant for an evolutionary biologist. We were based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, which was formed in 1913 when the Chagres River was dammed to help make the Panama Canal. The buildings, clustered on the edge of the reservoir, house a few dozen rotating scientists and a similar number of guardabosques, who patrol the area in camouflage fatigues looking for poachers and re-hacking paths swallowed by the jungle. The rest of the island belongs to the many creatures that inhabit it, including ocelots, anteaters, sloths, monkeys, toucans, bats and crocodiles. The humidity is unbearably high. Bright uloborus spiders spin huge webs between the rafters of buildings. Ocean liners the size of city blocks drift past.

Christina Riehl, the biologist I was working for, studies the greater ani, a dark blue iridescent cuckoo with a crooked beak. Not much was known about the greater ani before Riehl came to Barro Colorado as a graduate student fifteen years ago. They’re communal nesters, often building shared nests in tangled shrubs around water, and Riehl wanted to understand the way they co-operated. To reach them, she needed to motor around the island and its surrounding peninsulas in a small tin boat. When I arrived, she had a team of graduate students and research assistants working for her. Each morning, two boats were sent out to popular nesting locations. We would idle in the water scanning the shoreline, then, after spotting an ani, we would track it slowly, looking for its nest. Old tree stumps lay under the turquoise water, sometimes scraping the bottoms of the boats. We’d make notes after surveying an area. ‘Gigante 1: Nothing.’ ‘Buena Vista 2: Nothing.’ ‘Peña Blanca: Two anis near large rock, no nest.’ Clear skies almost invariably turned into heavy thunderstorms by early afternoon and the rain would come at us like a grey wall; we would open the throttle of the boat to outrun it.

Riehl has discerned a number of unexpected features of greater ani social life. Breeding pairs form small groups around nests, and when the first female in a group lays an egg, the others will roll it out of the nest into the water. When the next female lays an egg, the others, except for the first, will roll that out of the nest too. They keep doing this until the last female has laid an egg, at which point the behaviour stops. Each member of the group now takes a turn incubating the subsequent brood and the chicks begin to hatch. Apart from their reluctance to egg-roll once they’ve laid their first egg, there is nothing to suggest that individuals have any particular feeling for their own offspring. Chicks are fed fairly. All this may seem strange, but it reflects sophisticated evolutionary interplay. C0-operative breeding allows for more consistent protection of nests, reducing predation, and increases the resources chicks have access to, vastly improving chances of fledgling survival. The benefits are so great that, about 15 per cent of the time, anis will lay an egg in another group’s nest. Rejected eggs serve to root out these free riders, promoting the group’s ultimate cohesion.

This knowledge didn’t come easily. After finding a nest we would return almost every day, numbering and swabbing each egg to capture the mother’s DNA. To distinguish between chicks – and to distinguish between adults in years to come – we placed small metal bands around their spindly legs as soon as they were big enough to hold the weight. We checked cameras and sensors and recorded mating calls. Sometimes monkeys destroyed nests we had spent weeks locating; sometimes snakes ate the eggs; sometimes nests were abandoned inexplicably.

It was drudgery, but drudgery in service of a greater objective. One has to be a bit dogmatic and mechanical to advance science. Thomas Kuhn described the ‘restricted vision’ essential to research programmes, which allows for ‘a knowledge and understanding of esoteric detail that could not have been achieved in any other way’. To make an empirical claim you need data, and to get there you need to spend time collecting data. Coming to know the world – really coming to know the world – is hard work, even if you’re just trying to understand one bird.

My own efforts lacked competency. On my second night in Barro Colorado I fell ill and had to be taken to a hospital in Panama City. I backed boats into trees. I didn’t know how to look through binoculars. My eyes grew sore. I got sunburned. After finishing on the water in the afternoon, the others were happy to spend the rest of the day birding. Riehl once travelled to the Darién Gap to look for birds. My co-workers logged sightings on their phones and stared intensely at the sky. I mistook vultures for snail kites and cormorants for ducks and grackles for anis and martins for flycatchers. I saw one PhD student shaking with excitement after spotting a pygmy kingfisher.

This enthusiasm confounded me. Watching birders in the middle of the act, weighed down with binoculars and cameras, standing in silence, is a bit like watching a church service. As Mary Oliver wrote, ‘do you bow your head when you pray or do you look/up into that blue space?’ The intensity of locating something so small and quick requires both force and passivity. Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour, the ‘nakedness of their seeking’ and ‘so-public twitching hunger’, as Jonathan Franzen, a birder himself, has put it, mysterious and, to me, somewhat off-putting.

Birding for science has the more clearly delineated goal of describing the natural world, of explaining the otherwise inexplicable. Observations are purposeful; the enterprise is clear. Recreational birding seems nebulous by comparison. The first birders, rather than seeking to explain or exploit nature, considered the ways in which the experience might settle what Thoreau called the ‘reptile and sensual’ animal in us. In her 1898 birdwatching guide, Birds through an Opera Glass, Florence Merriam wrote that ‘it is above all the careworn indoor workers to whom I would bring a breath of the woods, pictures of sunlit fields and a hint of the simple, childlike gladness, the peace and comfort that is offered us every day by these blessed winged messengers of nature.’ Kant saw nature as allowing for a special kind of harmony between our understanding and imagination, a ‘lawfulness without law’ in which we realise both the rules that organise the world as it is and the world’s ‘freedom, without particular purposes’, an effect epitomised in ‘the beauty of flowers’ or ‘the plumage of birds’.

In his recent memoir, Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Random House, £15.99), Christian Cooper describes birdwatching as a child on Long Island. The solitary attentiveness appealed to him, and the activity in turn shaped the way he saw himself. Social stereotypes, he realised as a young man, were like the overall ‘jizz’, or gestalt, generated when a birder glimpses a familiar bird. ‘You hear a snippet of sound or catch a glimpse of colour or behaviour, and your subconscious mind has already reached certain conclusions about what the bird might be.’ He was birdwatching in Central Park when the 9/11 attacks took place, and remembers a fellow birder refusing to leave the park despite the sirens and drifting debris. He compares a brief relationship to an encounter with a hooded warbler. He was birdwatching on 25 May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis.

That day, Cooper was out for a walk in a protected section of Central Park when he encountered a woman walking her cocker spaniel. The dog wasn’t on a lead, so Cooper approached the woman and asked her to leash it; she refused to comply. He then took out a bag of treats he was in the habit of carrying to lure dogs away from trees. The woman shouted at him and Cooper began recording her. Flustered, she asked him to stop, then threatened to call the police, saying: ‘I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.’ Which is what she did.

Cooper posted the recording on Facebook and his sister posted it on Twitter. It spread quickly and was picked up by media outlets just as the video of a white police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck began to circulate. Cooper became something of a celebrity. He sat for a number of interviews over the next few years and, in 2023, hosted a National Geographic documentary series called Extraordinary Birder, for which he travelled around the country looking for birds.

In his memoir, Cooper links his encounter and Floyd’s killing. ‘For once, all Americans could witness for themselves, in moments adjacent to each other by a few hours, what we African Americans have been saying for decades,’ he writes. ‘In the morning, the underlying bias affecting police perceptions; and in the afternoon, its fatal consequences.’ He is right that the line between everyday racism and hate crimes can be very thin. But it’s unclear exactly what we’re supposed to take from Cooper’s story beyond this. Are we meant to see some parallel between his birdwatching and social justice? In the aftermath of the 2020 protests, a number of industries made efforts to increase the visibility of Black people. For someone like Cooper, who benefited from this trend, there is a choice to be made. Do you allow yourself to be typified as the ‘Black birder’? Or do you downplay the importance of race and risk seeming disingenuous?

Amy Tan also recently published a birdwatching book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Little Brown, £20), a collection of birding journal entries recorded during Trump’s first presidency and the Covid pandemic, accompanied by her own drawings. Although this was one of the more tumultuous periods in recent American history, Tan’s diaries are serene. ‘While watching hummingbirds buzz around me,’ she writes in her first entry, in September 2017, ‘I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me.’ A few months later, looking at her bird feeders from her bathroom, she sees a sick pine siskin, unable to eat – a sign of a salmonellosis outbreak. She tries to catch it but fails. ‘I’ve taken down the feeders,’ she writes. ‘I gave away the bird food I had recently bought, sacks of sunflower seeds and nyjer, blocks of suet. I am not sure I will ever use the feeders again.’ Four months later, after the outbreak has ended, she puts them back up.

The drama of the book takes place within the narrow arena of Tan’s backyard in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. Townsend’s warblers, white-throated sparrows, chestnut-backed chickadees, pygmy nuthatches and dark-eyed juncos battle for space around birdbaths; Tan buys hot pepper suet to keep the squirrels at bay, experiences ‘new bird tachycardia’ and goes through a thousand mealworms a day. ‘My view of seasons no longer follows the Earth’s spin axis,’ she writes. ‘Spring, summer, fall and winter have been replaced by spring migration, nesting season, fledging season and fall migration.’

It’s a not unwelcome myopia. The rare interruptions from the outside world come as asides. Sometimes wildfire smoke floats from the north-west through the Bay Area and Tan’s backyard remains empty for days. In spring 2020, when the pandemic begins, Tan considers some titmice. ‘Almost everything seems like a potential transmitter of disease and death – the groceries, a doorknob, another person,’ she writes. ‘But not the birds.’

It is easy to imagine one of the characters in Tan’s novels taking up birdwatching. Her protagonists, primarily Chinese-American immigrant women and their first-generation daughters, reveal suppressed emotions through small actions and indirect statements. They are constrained by the social expectations peculiar to American-born Asian women: be good in school, dress conservatively, speak softly, marry a white man. Tan doesn’t mention race in her journal, but on her website she explains that when ‘racism against Asians became more blatant’ in 2016, she turned to nature for ‘calm and resilience’. The pandemic, and the conspiracy theories about Wuhan, only made things worse. A study of hate crimes in the US during Covid found that anti-Asian incidents more than doubled in 2021. Thirty per cent of Asian Americans said they feared being attacked because of their race and almost half said they had experienced some form of racially motivated harassment or assault in the past year.

The most frequent criticism of Tan’s work is that her success is predicated on portraying Asia, and Asian Americans, in ways that make white readers feel good. Against the stereotype of Asian culture as patriarchal, the Asian-American women in Tan’s books are liberated; against the stereotype of Asian culture as illiterate, her characters are writers. It’s tempting to view her diaries as similarly unchallenging, with Tan sublimating her anxiety about racism into a book about birds.

It is a difficult balance to strike. In a short, impressionistic graphic novel called It’s a Bird, which Cooper wrote for DC Comics only a few months after the Central Park incident, a Black birdwatcher looks through binoculars at a tree and, instead of seeing a warbler, sees George Floyd’s face. Cooper has adopted one attitude; Tan another. Both are valuable in their own ways. But neither writer takes on the more complex dimensions of racism, such as the fact that many anti-Asian hate crimes are perpetrated by Black people or that Asian Americans have been instrumental in rolling back affirmative action in hiring and university admissions. It’s hard to imagine birdwatching holding many insights there.

Near the end of my summer studying the greater ani, I decided I would never go birding again. It’s a promise I’ve kept. I felt trapped on the island, which has only a few crossings to the mainland each day. I was frustrated by the zeal of my colleagues, who seemed too excited about too little. Most mornings I was woken by the yells of howler monkeys. I knew this reaction was melodramatic. The island was by most measures a paradise. I ate mangoes fresh from the tree, skinning them with my Swiss army knife; I cracked green coconuts on the ground and drank the water from their shells. And, at times, when my adolescent impatience abated, I was struck by the tenacity of the scientists I was with. On the island with us were researchers studying ants and primates, fig wasps and reptiles, rodents and bats. During thunderstorms, a team studying lightning would set up their camera equipment on the porch. Little of this research would make it out to the general public. At best it might end up in an academic journal, and maybe inform the writer of a reference book. But they were doing it anyway, buried deep in their craft. Much to the better. The world rarely offers itself undistorted, and the project of straightening it out is meticulous and error-prone, riddled with dead ends and endlessly demanding.