Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

"Birding shifts your perceptions, adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us. In my life, it has been a window into the wondrous."

birds communicate the same ways we do: through sight and sound. So they’ve evolved a stunning range of patterns and colors and, among the songbirds, an astonishing musical repertoire, and we humans are equipped to revel in all of it. Our vision and our hearing are our go-tos for interpreting the universe around us, and the birds oblige by filling our little corner of the universe with living, singing vibrance.

Being Black and gay, I find the “Who’s More Oppressed?” sweepstakes exasperating. There can be no winner, and it creates the false impression of a stark divide between communities

knew from growing up my whole life among Catholics—including my own grandmother—that while the leadership of that church is dogmatic, the ordinary folks are pragmatic, make up their own minds, and tend toward kindness.

Some people collect stamps, some coins; birders collect not actual physical birds (anyway, not since the days of the old-time naturalists, who didn’t count it if they hadn’t blasted it out of the sky with a shotgun) but sightings. Every birder keeps lists, whether it’s a life list (every species seen in one’s life) or a day list (the birds seen today), a county or state list (birds seen in a particular jurisdiction) or a yard list (birds seen in one’s backyard). For some, listing is primary; sadly, they hardly get to know a bird or appreciate it, just as long as they can check it off the list, and then they’re on to the next one. And then there are the absurd lists: birds seen from the bathroom window; birds heard in the background during TV commercials; birds seen while driving on an interstate (not recommended for obvious reasons of highway safety).

Even for birders obsessed with checking off another box, the first pleasure of birding—the beauty of the birds—still lurks at the heart of why we do this.

One of the best things about birding is how it pulls you out of your inner monologue and forces you to observe a larger world. That aspect helped save me as a closeted kid, and it sets to work now. There’s a Hooded Warbler to find here, and all my concentration pours into scanning the lower branches and listening.

The best way to learn birdsongs is not by listening to recordings; with that method, they’ll all start to blend together fairly quickly. A better method: When you hear something you don’t recognize, spend the time to track it down! And don’t stop, no matter how long it takes, until you not only see the bird but see its mouth fly open, its throat vibrating, and its tail shaking with the force of the sound (otherwise you may get faked out by a bird that’s not actually the songster but happens to be in the same tree). This has two advantages: (1) You’ll hear the song a ton of times before you actually see the bird, allowing repetition to aid with retention; and (2) you’ll associate the sound with an experience in the field, rather than some abstract recording listening session, so you’re much more likely to remember which one makes that sound.

Two misconceptions that held sway in the 1990s (and that horrifically is resurging today) converged to fuel the animus: (1) Anything gay is inappropriate for youngsters; and (2) comics are strictly a juvenile medium. The first falls flat immediately when one considers that there are gay kids, as I had been; gay parents and relatives; and gay people and issues in the news, a constant feature in the era of AIDS. The mere existence of gay people could no longer be considered taboo, and the assumption that any mention of gay people requires discussion of explicit sexual content is patently false; Alpha Flight #106, with a story as sexually safe as a cloistered eunuch, is the perfect rebuttal. (Besides, nothing that moved the sexual-activity needle beyond the somewhat suggestive, regardless of the orientation involved, could get past the Comics Code Authority, a 1950s relic that reviewed all of Marvel’s and DC’s books at the time.) The second is a peculiarly American stance, since comics in Europe and Japan are just as likely to be read by adults, and even on U.S. shores the notion that only kids read comics is belied by the millions of comics fans over the age of twenty-one.

I don’t do physical violence—never have, hopefully will never have to. As Isaac Asimov wrote in his science-fiction classic Foundation, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”)