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When I was a kid, we had one of those singing bird clocks hanging on the wall in our kitchen. At the top of each hour, a different recorded bird song would play. The concept of 7:00 (a.m. or p.m.) still triggers the sound of a mourning dove’s call in my mind. This was the sort of connection with the natural world that I grew up with – an appreciation, sure, but a mediated and largely contextless one. As in, yes of course birds are nice, but let’s hear them from inside the home, rather than meeting them on their own turf. I was an indoor child.
I’m generally interested in reducing the mediation and increasing the context in how I relate to the world outside my human mind/body – and I’m certainly more interested in and comfortable with the outdoors now than I was raised to be. Getting into birds felt like the next natural step in unlocking my relationship with the natural world and my place in it.
I first got interested in the idea of birding when I read Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing.” It’s a book I am constantly recommending to others and have gifted to a number of friends. Odell is an artist, teacher, and writer, whose medium is mostly attention itself. “How to Do Nothing” gives many pathways for rediscovering, connecting with, and re-narrativizing our attention – through community, art, examples from history, and more mindful use of technology. Odell is also big into birds, and makes a compelling case for bird-watching as a sort of Platonic ideal of attention. She writes:
Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out what and where it is.
In the last year I’d downloaded the birding app Merlin (more on that later) – never opened it. I’d also purchased a copy of “The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America” at an estate sale and never cracked the spine. I brought my field guide, my app, and a pair of borrowed binoculars (thanks to Marfa Public Radio’s Mary Cantrell for those) to attend “Birding for Beginners” at Davis Mountains State Park last week.
The crash course in birding was led by Ranger Charlie Ewing (who some of you may know as the host of “Sunday Evening Coming Down”). There were about a dozen of us, lined up in folding chairs in the Interpretive Center. Ranger Charlie walked us through the basics of bird identification, many of which seemed so obvious, except they weren’t, because I’d never noticed them before. I realized I’d been thinking of birds as mostly flashes, sweeps of color, and paid little attention to their actual features. We started with shape and size. I knew the general shape of a robin vs. a sparrow, but would have been hard pressed to actually describe the difference. And while of course we can all determine a very small or a very large bird, the difference between small and medium seemed entirely too subjective to me.
But as we learned to look at discrete features of various birds, it was like a kaleidoscope coming into focus. Particularly fascinating was learning about the variety of features one could identify just on a bird’s tiny, flitting head. Eye rings, spectacles, auriculars, malar markings, supercilia … so many details to notice and so much terminology to learn. It’s doable in a still photograph, of course, but I wondered how I’d do it when I was looking at an actual bird doing its bird things – they’re not exactly known for sitting still. And the vocabulary was like a new dialect. For example, Ranger Charlie explained that bird people tend to prefer the word bill over the word beak, which frankly boggled my understanding of both words.
Ranger Charlie concluded his presentation, and then it was time to actually go look at some birds. We gathered around a window at the back of the Interpretive Center, where there was a speaker mounted on the wall amplifying the sounds of the birds outside. The scene framed by the window was a little bird paradise, with a water feature, suet feeders, and shade trees. It looked almost like a set for a stage play starring birds. Almost immediately, someone said “Just a lot of doves…” in a disappointed tone. Doves? That’s a bird! I thought. Isn’t that what we’re here to look at? I watched them through the window and they reminded me of my backyard chickens – they were sort of squabbling with each other, preening a lot, and being a bit clumsy. But they were also so beautiful. That beige-grey-slightly-lavender shade of a dove, like the underside of a mushroom, is one of my favorite colors.
Then, a non-dove appeared perched on a feeder — a Scrub-Jay! No, I hadn’t learned bird ID that quickly, Ranger Charlie helpfully pointed it out by name. Suddenly I remembered I had binoculars hanging around my neck. I brought them up to my face, and … nothing. The eye caps were still on. I removed them and tried again, careening wildly around trying to match the location of the bird I saw with my eyes up with the view through the binoculars, which is harder than it seems. Finally, I landed on the Scrub-Jay and focused.
The background was soft and blurred, the light was diffuse, and the object of my attention was crystal clear and so, so beautiful. The Scrub-Jay’s soft blue feathers glinted as its body made constant micro-adjustments to hold on to the swaying feeder. Its little bill moved precisely, tearing off chunks of suet. I realized quickly that I’d gotten myself a little stressed out about bird identification and all I didn’t know. But the actual bird watching … this is where it’s at. I made a mental note to buy my own binoculars.
After the official course concluded, I spent some solo time in the bird blinds in the park. I assumed that an essential part of bird watching was being quiet, but I soon realized that one activity people like to do in these things is identify birds out loud, and correct one another about bird identification. I stayed silent and just watched. This sweet grey-brown one looks like its belly is blushing. Oh! Look at that flash of yellow! Who’s having a little squabble over there? Just a lot of doves, of course.
A couple of days later, I met up with Katie Inglis at Sunset Park in Marfa. Katie is the co-founder (with Abby Marshall) of Marfa Bird Club. I wanted another perspective from an experienced birder, and I kind of wanted to know – am I doing this wrong?
“When we started the club, I was like, one of the things that this has to be about is it has to be super inclusive,” Katie told me. “It has to be very chill. You don't have to have any prior knowledge, any equipment, any experience, any money. So that it could be a free thing that we can do together and we can learn from each other. And it's very antithetical to the classic way that birding has been.”
I asked Katie about this seemingly competitive element of birding. “ I hate to see something as innocent and precious as birding, or being out in nature, being turned into something so competitive and something that people spend so much money on and people argue over,” Katie said.
I told her about how when I was looking through the binoculars, I didn’t really care about what kind of bird I was looking at – even if it was just a common dove. I was just enjoying the show. I didn’t understand the dismissiveness toward the “regular” birds.
“It's also so stupid because what's common in one area is not common in another area,” said Katie. “Therefore, nothing is really common. I hate it when people get all snobby about the birds. Because it literally takes all kinds. It's an ecosystem.”
Katie told me that people who track all the birds they see are called “listers” – she doesn’t really identify as one of those, but she keeps found feathers in her field guide and marks down some of the dates when she’s seen particular birds. But identifying as many birds as possible is clearly not the point. So what is the point?
“Well, I think that birds are a really important marker of place. So if I'm ever traveling and I have an opportunity to go for a walk or to sit like we're sitting in the park, if I can notice the birds, then it reminds me of when and where we are. And that itself can be super grounding.”
Sitting on the park bench, next to the train tracks, Katie pointed out something I hadn’t noticed – a nearby flurry of loose downy feathers in the grass. It looked like a cat or another animal had gotten to a dove. Then, up in the tall pine tree, a robin.
“This is cool,” she said. “Because we don’t have robins here year round. They’re just migrating.”
Katie told me more birds come through Texas than anywhere else in North America – we’re directly in the path of many major migrations. “And here, being in the desert is really interesting because you also get a lot of desert birds, which people don't get in other places,” she said. “I think that people perceive the desert as being relatively empty, but it's very full of life.”
I felt buoyed by my conversation with Katie when I set out the following morning at sunrise for my first solo birding expedition. I headed to the Marfa Golf Course, which Katie had told me is the best birding spot in town, with my borrowed binoculars, my field guide, and my phone, hoping to put everything I’d learned to use. The morning was crisp, and the plateau felt as wide-open as ever.
The second I stepped out of my car, I was highly aware of just how many birds I was hearing. As I walked across the grass and toward a cluster of trees, the general sense of “bird sounds” began to kaleidoscopically focus again. I started to mentally pick out different songs and sounds. I saw my beloved doves and lots of little blackbirds. One of those blushing-belly birds I’d seen at the state park, and a flash of orange red going too fast for me to see anything other than its color. There were dozens of little brown birds pecking through the grass, periodically alighting as one big swoop, together, to land in a tree.
I took out my phone and opened Merlin. I started a recording and suddenly birds were populating the screen. Eurasian Collared-Dove. Canyon Towhee. Brewer’s Blackbird. Vermillion Flycatcher. I had my binoculars in one hand, my phone in the other, and my field guide tucked under my arm. I didn’t know where to look for a moment — I didn’t want to miss anything, but I also wanted to learn something.
Then, I heard one bird sound I know very well, because of some frequent visitors to my yard: the tapping of a woodpecker. I set my phone and my field guide down on the ground, and tried to follow the sound with my eyes, going up and up the large tree next to me. I spotted it through my binoculars, high on a skinny branch, and looked as carefully as I could. It was black and white all over, but sort of buff-colored on its chest - not as bright white as other woodpeckers I’d seen. Its head was a little more rounded and less hammer-shaped than how I picture a woodpecker in my mind. It didn’t have any red. The words “Ladder-Backed Woodpecker” were welling up from somewhere in my brain. Had we talked about these in “Birding for Beginners”? Was I making that up? Where’s my app, where’s my guidebook? Oh right, they’re on the ground. But I didn’t want to look away — there’s nothing more charming than watching a woodpecker peck.
I watched the woodpecker until it flew away. I watched some other birds. I saw a couple of aoudads wandering around the other end of the golf course. I listened to the combination of bird song, trees rustling, and sprinklers spraying. I looked at the mountains. I enjoyed the show.
