The Verb 'To Bird'
Sightings of an Avid Birder
by Peter Cashwell
Paul Dry, 273 pp., $14.95
The Big Year
A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
by Mark Obmascik
Free Press, 268 pp., $25
Going Wild
Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness
by Robert Winkler
National Geographic, 208 pp., $16
AS AN AMERICAN PASTIME, birding is hardly new. It goes back at least to the father of American bird writing and painting, a French immigrant named John James Audubon. With his 1827 Birds of America, Audubon initiated the American obsession with bird-watching (which, in pre-binocular days, was usually synonymous with bird-shooting). But birding remained a rather limited and privileged enthusiasm, and its literature consisted mostly of sentimental Victorian effusions and ponderous, heavily detailed identification manuals.
Then in 1934, a twenty-five-year-old or-nithologist from Jamestown, New York, published the first in a series of illustrated guidebooks that would revolutionize recreational bird-watching. Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds introduced the brilliantly simple principle of illustrating each species with distinguishing "field marks," indicated by arrows and accompanied by simple descriptions. His guide made bird-watching accessible to the masses--and the masses came. According to a recent study, one out of seven Americans now at least tries to identify birds, if only at backyard bird feeders. Some three million consider themselves active bird-watchers, and over two million keep "life lists," a practice that is generally recognized as the mark of a serious birder. In this country birders support a multimillion-dollar industry that supplies everything from birdseed and squirrel-proof feeders to high-tech spotting scopes and bird guides--not to mention bird-embossed stationery and T-shirts.
Apart from a few enduring classics--such as J.A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967), Peter Matthiessen's The Wind Birds (1967), and John Hay's The Bird of Light (1991)--"birding" (the active pursuit of birds, as opposed to the passive appreciation of "bird-watching") has received limited literary recognition over the years. "Birding," as a noun, is still not found in many dictionaries, nor is it recognized by my word processor's spell-checker.
In recent months, however, a flock of books about birding has appeared, each approaching the subject in deliberately literary ways. Peter Cashwell's The Verb 'To Bird': Sightings of an Avid Birder, for instance, is liberally sprinkled with literary references, and the author gives an overview of birds in myth and literature (including such howlers of bird-writing as Fear not, grand eagle, / The bay of the beagle!) before proceeding to his own adventures in birding. An English teacher living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Cashwell gives his book a faux-grammatical structure, dividing it into three sections: "Birding," "Birds," and "Birded." Chapter titles are often literary puns ("Great Unexpectations"), and their contents are summarized by a list of wry subheadings in the manner of eighteenth-century novels.
Although it contains a fair amount of detailed and often vivid description of the birds themselves, The Verb 'To Bird' is more about birding than birds, more about the behavior and psychology of birders (primarily the author) than about avian migration or mating rituals. In some chapters the birds are merely hooks for narrating a domestic drama, as in "An Owl for the Moping," in which a stressful family holiday is redeemed by the sighting of a great horned owl. Occasional trips to such places as Long Island and Iowa provide fodder for observations on regional cultural differences as much as opportunities to see new species.
All of which is to say that Cashwell has the true essayist's instinct for digression and for filtering everything through his own sensibility. His style is breezy, satiric, and self-mocking--as well as full of word play, pop-culture references, and hyperbole: a yellow-shafted flicker perching in a tree is described as "the ornithological equivalent of Pat Boone performing heavy metal songs in leather, studs, and tattoos." It's a style that seems modeled on that of humorist Dave Barry, down to the use of CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis. The result is amusing and witty, but, like Barry's, it works best in short doses. Cashwell is a little too in love with the archness of his own voice; after a while the constant punning begins to wear thin, and the references to such pop phenomena as Scooby-Doo and Faith No More sound mannered and dated.
More troubling, the author's determination to write in a high-octane style often leads him to strain after effect. In "The Cardinal Sin," for example, he constructs an entire chapter around a protracted search to find out "Why is the cardinal called the cardinal?" When he finally stumbles serendipitously on the answer (the cardinal was first given that name by the early French Catholic explorer LaSalle), he claims a life lesson drawn from birding skills: "I had learned much more than the origin of a single name. I had learned that the nature of birding is far more universal, far closer to the path of wisdom, than I had ever dreamed." The lesson seems more a literary effect than a genuine revelation.
It's too bad that The Verb 'To Bird' is so frequently overwritten, for the style tends to overwhelm the book's virtues. Cashwell's descriptions are most effective when most concise. Regarding the brilliant coloration of the painted bunting, he comments, "When you blink, it leaves an afterimage." When his comparisons are based in felt experience rather than verbal cleverness, they are often quite evocative. "If pelicans were drivers, they'd own huge, rectangular American luxury cars with plush interiors," he writes, and the passage goes on to convey wonderfully the appearance of untroubled serenity these magnificent birds have in flight.
Some of his chapters are genuinely moving, such as "Laughing at Broken Hammers," a meditation on the enduring legend of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The ivorybill, a denizen of old-growth Southern swamp-forests, has not been reliably sighted for several decades and is presumed extinct. Despite intense and fruitless searches for the bird, birders continue to hope the species survives somewhere, if only because its nonexistence cannot be conclusively proven.
Even the author is subject to such phantasms of desire as he recounts an ambiguous sighting of a large woodpecker in a South Carolina swamp that may, just may, have been an ivorybill. For once, his pathos and comparisons seem richly earned, and he expresses a universal lesson about human longing in the shape of a bird.
A DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE APPROACH to birding is dramatized in Mark Obmascik's The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession. If for Cashwell birding is about surprise, uncertainty, and "yielding to the unexpected," for Obmascik it is rooted in the hunting instinct: going after a specific prey and bagging it. He even suggests there is a gene for birding, and that it is, at bottom, an obsession.
The Big Year chronicles what may be the least-known national competition in the United States: an annual quest among birders to see who can accumulate the highest total of species sighted on the North American continent in twelve months. Specifically, the book describes the annus mirabilis of 1998, when an amazing total of 745 species was reached by one of the participants. The record, which will likely never be broken, was due to a number of unusual circumstances: a powerful El Niño that brought Pacific pelagics to the West Coast, a series of Asian storms that blew dozens of almost-never-seen birds onto the Aleutian archipelago, and a freedom and flexibility in air travel unlikely to return after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Certainty, not surprise, is the objective of Obmascik's three main characters, who seem chosen to represent an extreme range of personality, motivation, and resources. Sandy Komito is a roofing contractor from New Jersey, a self-made millionaire who already holds the highest score for a year and is determined to spare no expense, nor any other birder, to shatter his own record. Ed Levantin is a comparatively mild-mannered corporate executive from Aspen, Colorado, who, after several unsuccessful attempts to retire, feels he can finally indulge his lifelong passion for birds in this ultimate competition. And finally there is Greg Miller, a young, overweight, under-funded, self-styled "loser," reeling after a painful divorce and subject to depression, who embarks on his Big Year as a way of regaining self-esteem and purpose in his life.
WHILE CASHWELL FLAUNTS his personality in The Verb 'To Bird', Obmascik assumes in The Big Year the role of the invisible, omniscient narrator, relating his birding troika's year-long adventures. Though he conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and did extensive field research, Obmascik "did not personally witness a single day" of the competition. But his three protagonists appear to have been more than willing interviewees, revealing personal, candid, and often embarrassing information about themselves, thus allowing much of the narrative to be effectively told from inside their heads.
Obmascik deftly weaves the three characters' stories so that the narrative has the feel of a horserace, with the accumulating count for each competitor appearing intermittently as mile markers. His style is restrained but lively, and when he does offer an occasional extravagant simile (the Mexican chachalacas "sounded as if Ethel Merman had swallowed a rusty trombone"), it spices up the narrative without overwhelming it.
ACTUAL BIRDS in The Big Year seem almost incidental: arbitrary targets, like ducks in a shooting gallery, or markers in a testosterone triathlon by land, sea, and air. As Al Levantin observes, "Big Year birding wasn't even birding; it was traveling to birding." After an expensive, tiring trip by Sandy Komito to see a Xantu's hummingbird in a backyard in Vancouver, the actual sighting occupies one sentence. "The Xantu's hummingbird stayed long enough for Komito to snap a few pictures." This exquisite tropical bird's accidental visit to North America is not given even a cursory description. As Obmascik puts it, "It was the chase, not the bird, that made [Komito's] chest throb."
Despite the book's intriguing characters, narrative drive, and journalistic skill, one comes to feel there is something distasteful and petty, even reprehensible, in the obsessions of these men. The whole point of the Big Year seems to be out-competing, out-enduring, out-foxing, out-exploiting, and, above all, out-spending the other birders. Moreover, the explosion of information technology seems to have rendered individual skill and knowledge, or even social skills, irrelevant. The North American Rare Bird Alert, for instance, allows instant online notification of a sighting anywhere on the continent, or "one-stop shopping for the seldom-seen."
There is an unnatural quality to the whole enterprise. Many of the sightings occur in such non-wild settings as trailer parks and Wal-Mart parking lots, and the birders seem to spend more time on planes or listening to radio reports than they do in the field. The most bizarre example of the unnatural nature of the Big Year is the Himalayan snowcock, a grouse-like bird that Levantin and Miller pursue in a hair-raising and stomach-churning helicopter flight through the cloud-covered ridges of the Rockies.
As its name suggests, the Himalayan snowcock is actually a native of Kashmir and Pakistan, but during the 1960s and 1970s a rich American hunter imported and released 1,569 of the birds into southeastern Nevada to provide a large tasty game bird for hunters. The snowcocks proved so elusive they flopped with hunters, but the Ruby Mountains have become a mecca for birders with a passion to see an artificial bird in a wild setting. One can envision a time not far off when other exotics--penguins, perhaps--will be introduced into the wild specifically to feed the insatiable appetite of Big Year birders.
The most troubling aspect of the book, though, is its unquestioning presentation of birding, especially Big Year birding, as essentially a competitive sport in which the natural world is little more than an outdoor gymnasium whose health and protection is not the concern of the participants or the writer.
The most startling revelation in the book is left frustratingly unexplained. In a chapter set on the remote Alaskan island of Attu, Obmascik writes, "Every year for the past decade or so, museum and federal agencies had quietly sent gunmen to Attu to shoot rare birds for their collections." The targets of this license-to-kill included a great spotted woodpecker, which, Obmascik tells us, was "one of the first" ever recorded in North America before Avian Agent 007 "summarily blasted it with his shotgun." Come again? Are the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty and the Endangered Species Act suspended on Attu? Obmascik never explains, and the only outrage expressed is by the tour leader, who moans that a "great spotted woodpecker would have been the bird of the decade for dozens of his paying guests."
ODDLY, THOUGH, Obmascik's birders are somewhat redeemed by the very absurdity of their quest. There are, as he points out, no material rewards, no celebrity, no offers of endorsement connected with the Big Year. The only rewards are being the best and breaking a record. The prestige, such as it is, is among a rather limited number of other birders. In this sense the Big Year is a "pure" amateur sporting event, in the way the Boston Marathon used to be, and as few remain.
The day may come when Big Year competitors will be paid to wear Zeiss T-shirts and David Sibley Feed caps, when the likes of Komito, Levantin, and Miller will be tracked by ESPN video cams or featured in the latest reality-television show ("Survivor: Cape May, New Jersey"), but for now they pursue their goal and endure its hardships for the thrill of victory alone.
In the end, despite my reservations about their motivations and methods, I could not help but feel a certain admiration for these men. Like anyone who lives for impractical passions--whether it be stalking feathered rarities, playing jazz in small nightclubs, or, for that matter, writing books--they are willing to sacrifice money, pride, health, security, the comfort of home, and the companionship of family and friends to pursue the elusive bird of desire.
ON THE SURFACE, Robert Winkler's Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness is the least impressive of the recent books. Despite the title, the adventures it describes are anything but wild. Winkler writes in a relatively plain style, largely devoid of the word play, humor, and cultural references of Cashwell, or the vivid characterization, psychological insights, and narrative momentum of Obmascik.
In range and subject matter, too, Going Wild is the most circumscribed. Winkler limits himself to the "suburban wilderness" of Connecticut's Fairfield County, a stone's throw from Manhattan and certainly one of the most tamed and thoroughly explored areas of the country. He does so in part because of his stated mission to demonstrate that even in such densely settled areas the possibilities for encounters with wild birds are numerous and rich. But he also does it out of practical necessity. Though he lives in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, he himself has led the peripatetic and modest life of a freelance writer, moving every few years from one rental to another, currently residing in a basement apartment in Newtown.
Going Wild is also probably the least likely to attract readers who are not already interested in birds or birding. Winkler focuses nearly exclusively on the birds themselves, and, with few exceptions, they are common and familiar species. He deliberately eschews the competitive spirit of the Big Year, or even of Connecticut's much-reduced version, the Big Day, which he says involves "a level of intensity that may not be altogether healthy." He has even stopped participating in the venerable Christmas Bird Count because he eventually found organized counts "too routine and mathematical," and "wanted to go deeper."
BUT FOR ALL ITS LACK of literary ambition, charged personality, and dramatic narrative, this book gradually won me over. Winkler's self-circumscribed excursions and restrained narrative presence were a refreshing contrast to the frenetic continent-hopping and self-absorption of the Big Year birders, his unadorned style a welcome corrective to the self-conscious literary flourishes of The Verb 'To Bird.' Because Winkler's is a restrained sensibility, one savors those unexpected moments of whimsy that occasionally pop up. One bitter winter morning he plucks the ice coating that had formed on the dead leaves of a mountain laurel, "a transparent replica of the leaf it had covered, complete with venation. What could I do with such delicate, ephemeral things? I swallowed several."
IF FOR NOTHING ELSE, I'm grateful to Going Wild for expressing my long-standing gripe with American filmmakers. In the chapter "Bird Songs of Hollywood: An Unnatural History," Winkler indicts Tinseltown, with uncharacteristic sarcasm, for being "tone deaf to the songs of birds." Whether it is placing red-tailed hawks on deserted Pacific islands, loons in suburban backyards, or South American toucans in boreal forests, the cavalier ignorance of even the most basic ornithology in creating soundtracks has spoiled films for me for decades, and I was delighted to see someone finally taking Hollywood to task.
In stark contrast to the Big Year Birders with their oblivious charges into nature, Winkler exhibits an understated but strong environmental ethic. When he unexpectedly comes upon the ground nest of a worm-eating warbler, the first he has ever seen, he not only does not touch the eggs or the nest, but moves quickly on, knowing that "it would have been a death sentence for the eggs, because the scent of a human, often leading to food, attracts predators."
What gives Going Wild its unexpected power is Winkler's accumulating observations and genuine devotion to his local haunts. He invests himself in his birds through careful attention and long familiarity. His analysis of the various calls of the barred owl, for instance, is illuminating and lyrical: "Forget what you might have heard about owls as portenders of doom. Owls are optimists. Properly interpreted, their language has the power to light dark nights and dark souls." In describing the kill of a cardinal by a sharp-shinned hawk, Winkler reacts viscerally to a hawk's plucking at a still-living cardinal's breast, calling it "fiendish"--but he concludes that "the Sharp-shinned Hawk hunts in gathering dusk and respects neither the cardinal's beauty nor the nature writer's sensibility."
ABOVE ALL, Going Wild convincingly demonstrates the value and power of attachment and locality. Winkler sees deeply into Fairfield County. He restricts his travels and observations to his immediate area, not in the spirit of artificially limited bird-counting exercises, but because in so doing he comes to know his home ground with deep familiarity, intimacy, and affection.
When a potentially destructive project is proposed in his beloved Sherwood Island State Park, his years of carefully noted bird sightings and nesting records help him mount a successful campaign against it. And when his opponents accuse him of gross exaggeration in comparing Sherwood Island State Park to the Grand Canyon, Winkler replies, "Well, it's the Grand Canyon to me"--a ringing rejoinder that must resonate with anyone who has ever cherished local places, and the birds that inhabit them.
Robert Finch is the author of five collections of essays, most recently Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays , and is coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing.