How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher
by Simon Barnes
Pantheon, 240 pp., $17.95
A MORE ACCURATE TITLE FOR this book would probably be You May Already Be a Bad Birdwatcher, for its premise is that just about everyone, merely by instinct and social osmosis, is attracted to watching birds and can already identify, at least generically, a handful of the most common birds--e.g., "swan," "goose," "duck," "sparrow. " The assertion is undeniable, but it also seems trite and vacuous, something like the astonished realization of Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme that "for more than 40 years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!" Big whooping crane.
This is too bad, because in the end I found Simon Barnes an interesting writer and How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher a worthwhile read. His initial approach, however, seems dumbed-down, condescending, and overwritten, as if he doesn't really trust his readers or the inherent interest of his subject.
Actually, this is not a "how-to" book at all. The information it conveys about birds and birdwatching is thin and superficial. Here, for instance, is the sum of Barnes's advice regarding binoculars: "Get a pair." Any pair. Quality doesn't matter. Nor does he have much to say about becoming a "better birdwatcher": "It's just a matter of getting the habit. The habit of looking. And listening. . . . " Encouraging and inclusive, perhaps, but it tends to belittle the effort, dedication, discipline, acquisition of knowledge, and, yes, better equipment that it usually takes to develop into a genuinely accomplished birdwatcher, and the increased rewards of doing so.
In the opening chapters Barnes attempts to inflate the significance of birdwatching by dismissing such "lesser" hobbies as stamp, coin, and matchbox collecting: "I find it hard to believe that people like these things for themselves; they are just a medium for collection mania." As a former teenage numismatist, I can vouch that even dedicated coin collectors bring as much aesthetic, historic, and discriminatory passion to their subjects as amateur ornithologists do.
Even more off-putting is his ploy of exalting the status and significance of birds by demeaning other animals. Yes, we all know that birdsong and flight have inspired artists throughout history. Not content to acknowledge this, however, Barnes quotes "Ode to a Nightingale" and then sneers, "Keats would not have written the same poem after smelling a pile of dog turds. Humans cannot sympathize with dogs, with fellow mammals, in that way." This from an Englishman!
After a few chapters I began to wonder: Just who would read this book? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of bird identification will already feel beyond its scope. Adults who have never actively birdwatched are not likely to be turned onto the sport by a book that contains no pictures, drawings, or diagrams of the birds themselves, and is woefully short on the particular characteristics and behavior of individual species.
If anything, the book seemed aimed at a peculiarly specialized audience composed of people who may have thought about birdwatching, but have been deterred by an intimidating concept of its difficulties, or by the superior attitude of those obsessive birdwatchers Barnes calls "twitchers." The extent of such an audience, if it was ever significant, was basically eliminated with the appearance of the Roger Tory Peterson guides in the 1930s, which made birdwatching accessible to virtually everyone.
At first, the book's main attraction seems to be the engagingly English tone of its author: wry, witty, self-deprecating, at once proper and slangy, and given to admittedly bad and "naughty" puns ("Some birdwatchers call great tits 'Dolly Partons,' ho ho ho"). This is not necessarily a recipe for literary failure. After all, no one ever learned much about maintaining a Harley by reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Moreover, Barnes shows a knack for making interesting correlations between birdwatching and the larger sphere of human experience. Unfortunately, just as he tends to puff up his subject unnecessarily, he tends to spoil these connections with exaggerated corollaries. For instance, he observes, "birdwatching embraces both halves of our natural desire for contradiction. It brings us enhanced enjoyment of the ordinary, the easy, and the safe, and it brings us high drama and gratification and dangerous delight." Nice enough, but then he goes on, "Rather like life, really. And that is what bad birdwatching is all about. Life, that is to say." Well, as Emerson might say, "What isn't?"
This tendency to make overinflated claims for his subject risks provoking involuntary perverse reactions in the reader. I finally came across one too many such Hallmark-like comments as, "Birds can light up your life just a little, wherever you happen to be," and wished myself looking at a snowy egret with the author, just so I could quip, "Wouldn't that look nice on a hat?"
Still, any writer who expresses a dislike for Jonathan Livingston Seagull can't be all bad, and, in fact, Barnes becomes less sappy, his attitude less superior, and his observations more subtle as the book progresses. For instance, in the chapter "Simon knows the names of things," he notes that the simple act of naming a bird can change our relationship to it, but he also cautions the reader against getting "all silly and new-agey about this."
"Birdwatching," he reminds us, "is almost by definition a one-way relationship." He also eschews his earlier sentimentality with such observations as, "Alas, you can't rely entirely on birds for their good taste: rubbish tips, as we have seen, are a favorite [habitat]. So are sewage farms and nuclear power stations." He even has the courage, rare among environmentalists, to admit that confronting global ecological issues can often seem "frightfully dreary" and "humdrum," while nonetheless passionately defending the necessity of doing so.
The later chapters, in general, contain a great deal more adult intellectual fare. "Teeming Hordes," for instance, is an engaging introduction to the critical concept of biodiversity--though here again, Barnes can't seem to resist drawing politically correct lessons from natural phenomena: "We are here to celebrate diversity. That is what birdwatching means." It also includes an intelligent critique of "the myth of perfection" in evolution, illustrating that the lay evolutionist is just as prone to myths as the lay creationist.
Barnes's descriptions of his own birding adventures, and some of his birding partners, are entertaining and intriguing, particularly the character of Shirtless Tim, whose predilection for spartan and uncomfortable camping conditions Barnes describes as "a certain gluttony for austerity." At the same time, I could have wished for more hard information about things unfamiliar to the American reader. For instance, he gives a tantalizing description of the Scrape, a portion of the Minismere Reserve that he calls "the most famous bit of habitat in British birdwatching," without really locating it or explaining why it deserves this hyperbolic appellation.
Several of the concepts Barnes discusses are well-plowed ground, but are nonetheless worth revisiting. "Bad Birds" poses interesting questions about E.O. Wilson's notion of "biophilia," or the inborn attraction of human beings to life and life processes. Noting nature's inherent amorality, cruelty, and indifference, Barnes asks, "Why do we turn to it? Why are we so enthralled by its beauties?" These are deep questions, with profound scientific, philosophical, even religious, implications; but his answers are disappointingly bland and solipsistic, e.g., "We humans are part of nature, and part of us indeed reacts very strongly to the natural world." Better are some of his specific ecological observations, such as the counterintuitive fact that it is not predators who control prey, but rather the number of prey that control the numbers of predators.
The best chapter in the book is "And All That Jizz," a fascinating discussion of one of the less-recognized, though central, elements in good birdwatching; that is, the ability to recognize birds by their "jizz" or gestalt: that configuration or pattern of physical, behavioral, and numerous other characteristics that enable experienced birdwatchers to identify from a brief glimpse, or at a great distance, or under poor conditions. Here is an instance where Barnes could justifiably have made larger claims for this aspect of birdwatching, for pattern recognition is still an underappreciated and under-cultivated learning resource in human beings.
Towards the end of the book, Barnes confesses that he wrote it with "an evangelical purpose as strident as a great tit's song"; namely, to open the eyes and ears of his readers to the wonders of nature through birdwatching. A worthy goal, surely, but How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher ultimately works neither as a guide to birdwatching nor, primarily, as a celebration of nature, but, rather, as an entertaining account of his own adventures with birds and an often-perceptive exploration of certain traits of human nature illuminated through the prism of birdwatching.
This is ultimately an intellectually rewarding book, but its author should have had more faith in his readers and put more of the good stuff up front.
Robert Finch is author, most recently, of Death of a Hornet and Other Cape Cod Essays and coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing.