Birding Through The Year: Summer 2023
Dickcissel. Photo by David Hoyt.
words by David Hoyt
Love and the Incidental Dickcissel
Find a place that you love with all your heart, gather your peers and defend it.
—Baptiste Morizot
L’Inexploré (2023)
I’m tempted to say that I’ve spent the summer birding incidentally. This represents a bit of a capitulation to the statistical biologists at eBird, from whom I have appropriated the category of “incidental” to define my behavior as an observer. From the perspective of Big Data as applied to citizen science, this means “a bird you saw when you weren’t out looking for birds, and therefore isn’t very meaningful.” For me, in contrast, it means “a bird that I saw when I wasn’t out looking for birds, and therefore is often very meaningful.”
I’ve always been amused when eBird elicits, at the finalization of every checklist, a declaration of intentions: “Was birding the primary purpose of your outing?” As if the possibility that I saw King Kong in Thatcher Woods will mean different things depending on whether I was looking for it or not. Undoubtedly, there are sound statistical reasons for this somewhat legalistic question, probing as it does my interior mental state as would a courtroom lawyer. “Did you, or did you not, Mr. Godwit, intend to photograph the six Bohemian Waxwings that morning at 6:30 a.m., or did they incidentally fly in front of your camera as you were taking a picture of the blooming Obedient Plant?” In the logic of Western law, for which individual intentionality is everything, this distinction could mean the difference between a conviction of first-degree murder or manslaughter. In the manipulations of citizen-science generated data, it is the difference between significance and insignificance.
Cooper’s Hawk. Humboldt Park, February 12, 2021. Photo by Alex Muench.
Incidental Bird #1: The Front-Yard Cooper’s Hawk
Coffee in hand, head still fogged with sleep, I step outside one morning and immerse myself in the wildflower garden that is our front yard. I examine the flora, greeting old botanical friends and searching for new ones that may have arrived overnight. From my peripheral vision I detect motion and look up. A hawk, most likely a Cooper’s, descends rapidly from a parkway tree, wings outstretched. At an invisible, mid-air locus above the yard, the hawk alters its trajectory by a crisp 45 degrees, ascending forcefully and out of view. I barely see the bird itself, but begin to notice a rain of downy, gray-white feathers drifting down through the morning sunlight. They are plentiful, and float languidly, like cottonwood seeds in June.
I might just as easily choose the term fragmented to define my experience of this season of memorable, unintentional encounters. During a period of destabilizing climate marked by drought, toxic palls of wildfire smoke, record-breaking downpours and unbearable heat, my own sense of personal and seasonal time ceased to be continuous. There were days, for example, when I did not go out into the woods and fields because my 3M respirator mask—the hard rubber kind that makes my breathing sound like Darth Vader—ordered when the Chicago-area Air Quality Index (AQI) tipped over 200, had not yet arrived. Other days were simply too hot. Even on cooler days, the cumulative fatigue of earlier stretches of heat sapped me of enthusiasm. Extreme weather plays havoc with intentionality, making it more difficult to purposefully observe nature. My activity, in birding as in much else, becomes fragmented.
As central as questions of intent are to citizen science and the law, neither enterprise could make much sense of an Emily Dickinson poem—”These are the days when the birds come back/A very few— /a bird or two.” This is the sort of language that strikes much more closely to what it is that makes us care enough to submit checklists in the first place, purposeful or otherwise. Yet, the poetry is not all stacked on the side of individual Romantic observers. The rigorous sorting and assembling of data are what allow for the stunning migration animations, geographic models of bird movements over the course of a year, entire populations sloshing from one hemisphere to another like liquids in a basin, providing a god-like view of something that no human being has ever witnessed in its totality, but, like the smallest particles of matter, our instruments tell us must be out there.
Pileated Woodpecker. Indiana Dunes, November 1, 2022. Photo by Dustin Weidner.
Incidental Bird #2: Pileated Woodpeckers in the Park
A path for cycling runs along the prairie river, low and lazy in late summer, dolomite shoals lifting up here and there to support decadently large Rose Mallows in full flower. The banks of the river slope very gradually from the surrounding countryside. I imagine large herds of animals a century or two ago—bison, elk, deer, even solitary wolves and bears, comfortably sauntering down from the sun-dried prairies to have a drink and bathe, or racing there to escape from a rampaging prairie fire.
Birds in flight take on a different aspect when seen while cycling. Just as a passing car can flush the meadowlarks or sparrows from roadside brush, a bicycle creates an invisible wake that throws birds into the air ahead of and beside us. From an oak-studded field to the right, a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers in full flight cross our path at eye level. They are large birds and it occurs to me that it would be painful and messy to collide with one. In fact, they are so big that I don’t realize what they are. They fly in synchrony, nearly every beat of their wings timed together. Their necks are long, made longer-seeming by the woodpecker bill, their crowns are dark red, and the alternating white-and-black coloration on their outer primaries are like the keys of a piano.
I stop, but lose sight of them. We move forward once more, and they fly across our path in the other direction, across the field, slowing to orient themselves from the horizontal to the vertical plane of an oak tree, to which to gracefully attach themselves. They peck the tree trunk for a few moments, then disappear into the forest.
The sublimity of such graphic representations arises from the sense that one is beholding something ancient and enormous. Yet it is equally profound to consider that each bird, each particle in the avian flux, exists only as paired with at least one human observer. Each pixelated dot on a migration map is a set number of human eyes, matched with a set number of birds that made their own decisions to fly. The animations are thus a co-joint, inter-species production of scientific knowledge. Behind such artifacts is human purposiveness as much as bird behavior (and perhaps even bird purposiveness), and a testament to the joy of looking that undergirds both art and science.
Incidental Bird #3: Barred and Screech Owls Mob My Tent
My memories of nights spent sleeping on the ground are full of the sounds of small, unknown things falling onto the taught nylon tarp that is our roof, raindrops trying to get inside, the throbbing insects of summer evenings, and the rummaging of tiny mammalian feet in the leaf litter. I hear all of this because I never sleep the first night in camp. When the small feet stopped rummaging this time, I heard the first owl.
“Whoo who cooks for youoo-oo-oo?” Faintly, at first. After a while, it is answered by another, from the other side of the tent in true stereophonic fashion, confirming that the territory has been secured. They must be only yards away. It is past midnight. The campground, largely empty, is completely quiet. I grab my phone and attempt to make a recording. By now, there are three of them, and they are no longer asking questions about who-cooks-what, but are cackling like a posse of insane gangster parakeets enacting a forbidden ritual. I discover that the nylon tent fabric muffles even this demonic cacophony and see only flat static on the sonograph. Too tired to get out of the tent to make a proper recording, I lie back down and let the performance wash over me.
From a lower elevation, mid-story, the Barred Owls are joined by a gentle, softer sighing. The sighs move closer, become more confident, and finally bloom into the full whinny of an Eastern Screech Owl, then several.
I listen for another hour, until even this secret conversation of the nocturnal forest is not enough to hold back sleep.
The tension between Big Data and individual experience is insurmountable. No one writes of their spark bird being a chart of breeding bird populations. More often, an interest is nurtured by a relationship, a partner, a deep personal experience, or an upbringing. But intentional data and the incidental experience exist in a necessary reciprocal relation. The spark of individual passion can lead to and sustain the purposive activity that builds reliable systems of knowledge. Causal inferences can then become possible, hypotheses as to the effects of human activity on birds, ecosystems, and global climate can be formulated and revised.
There is a similar contradiction in our experience of the weather, one that is frequently pointed to as lying at the heart of our failure to act decisively against climate change. We don’t purposively experience the weather—at least, most of us other than storm-chasers and meteorologists. We encounter it, and especially extreme events, incidentally, without meaning to. The irony is that patiently, purposefully accumulated climate data have been telling us that the planet is warming, that weather events are becoming more frequent and extreme, for a long time now. Yet this has not had the effect of massively mobilizing people to demand change. In fact, our knowledge of the climate, as of bird migration and bird behavior and much else, has never been more refined and even aesthetically impressive as it now is. Think of those migration animations, or of what we know of migration’s effect on the physiology of the Blackpoll Warbler. This is so even as both climate and many wild bird populations are poised on the brink of collapse. Science is presiding—in all its astounding ability to generate images and understanding—over dying objects, Gaia chief among them. Knowledge accelerates together with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of habitat, but does not seem to impede them. A similar observation was made by conservation activists and professional ornithologists a century ago, those men tucked away in museums and university faculties with their drawers full of skins, more interested in anatomical relationships than with the disappearance of live populations. While the actors have certainly changed positions since then—the consensus within the scientific community unambiguously supports rapid and drastic social and economic action in response to climate change—within our civilization as a whole, the broader logic still applies.
This is where the preciousness of incidental observation comes in. Data alone, though supremely useful, will never save us. It never has. Data and “smart” policies can only save us when combined with passion and action for change. The data should direct the actions taken, of course, but the passion to move forward comes from love. It comes from the kind of jolting love felt in an incidental encounter in a café; for a cloud of incidental butterflies in a summer garden, or for a column of ants under an incidental forest log; or for a majestic and mysterious bird, glimpsed from the window of a speeding car, incidentally.
Incidental Bird #4: Dickcissel in a Prairie
Growing up in the Midwest, I often wondered who really belonged here. I didn’t feel like it, and I suspected that anyone who did was faking it. Everything about the human landscape feels temporary, ramshackle, imported. The buildings are barely enough to withstand the continental swings of temperature or the tornado winds. Movement in winter is only possible in the wake of mountains of road salt deployed against ice, coating everything with a grime the color of old snow melting over bare earth, acre-tons of soil per year eroding into the Mississippi watershed. Whatever eventually grows in the ground was brought here from someplace else.
It is easy to feel lost in such a landscape, bereft of landmark hills or charming outcrops, whose majesty lies not in it rugged irregularity, its charming variety of features, or its breathtaking elevations, but in its simple extent: like the ocean, it goes on, and on, and on. Other landscapes have been exploited while retaining their broad contours. On the prairie, all that remains of what came before are the sky and the flat earth and the line where they meet.
When I first learned of the category of “grassland bird,” it struck me as a sort of ornithological fantasy, even a joke. All the special sparrows, the bobwhite, the Bobolink, the varieties of grouse and the prairie chicken, they are described dispassionately in mid-20th century handbooks as if they should be thriving in my backyard—the same backyard colonized by militant rows of corn, planted ever-more closely, standing at attention at the very edges of property lines.
Who is the Peterson Guide kidding? There are no grassland birds here, because there are no grasslands. There are the beautiful and hardy friends who inhabit our backyards, of course, but a Dickcissel? I’ve spent much of my life crossing the gridded landscape of agricultural America, and I had never seen nor heard a Dickcissel. It is not a commodity product sown and harvested in the field, nor stocked for hunting in the woods and wetlands. Therefore, it must not exist in nature.
Imagine my surprise when I finally saw one, incidentally, on a piece of land recently restored, quite purposefully, to something modestly resembling the flora of a rich, rolling prairie field, thriving under the sun of an Illinois summer.
The land itself caught my attention first. It was obviously an old field taken out of agricultural production, and then seeded and carefully managed. Now, high stalks and flowers of all architectural dimensions waved across a good sweep of land, each pursuing different strategies of shape, color, and design to capture its portion of the solar bounty.
This, I thought, is not a homeless landscape. This landscape is a home, a home to this strange and wonderful community of plants that seems to know just what to do when given the chance. The Dickcissel was perched on the branch of a serviceberry shrub. It sang (That’s what got my attention.) and then flitted from one giant Prairie Dock leaf to another, across a field thick with them. The leaf—an outrageous design that seems to descend straight from the Jurassic, the kind of plant appropriate for herbivorous dinosaurs—supported the bird like a porch swing, rocking in the wind glowing with a soft, translucent green from the sunlight passing through it.
Where had this bird been all my life? This charming, yellow-brown bird, where had it been hiding all these years as I crisscrossed mid-America, dreaming of Passenger Pigeons whenever I saw starlings flocking on a November field or on a highway telephone wire? What generous refuge had kept it, what cunning stratagem had preserved it until the day this field was retired, and slowly began to return to its senses?
This incidental bird, I thought, represents a redemption of the earth beneath it, a fulfilment of the promise that I had always sensed lay suffocated under the quiet row crops running countless mile after mile. There is a home here, underneath it all, a home for the Dickcissel and many other things, and if there is a home left for the patient Dickcissel then there is the possibility of a home for the rest of us, though we may not yet know what it looks like. It was never completely extinguished, this home, and when you glimpse it, like the Dickcissel flourishing on its Prairie Dock, you wonder how anyone could live without it, how anyone could have destroyed it in the first place, and what are the first things you must do, today, to bring it back.