Birds Beyond Birding

In my New Jersey hometown, herons and kingfishers inhabit the wetlands of a Superfund site irremediably contaminated by chemical dyes and pesticides released by my father’s employer for decades. Even if this degraded habitat will never be restored to a pristine original state, these birds show me another truth: Finding ways to live with—rather than try to escape or neglect—the messes we’ve inherited is a necessary and hopeful mode of care and repair. In my birding group in Canada, elder birdwatchers comment upon changes in birds’ migratory patterns and ranges in their lifetimes in southern Ontario; these changes are tangible manifestations of climate change, which motivate them to participate in citizen science projects and wetland conservation initiatives.

Birding is future oriented. The practice of looking at birds cultivates our ability to notice connections, to imagine better worlds, and to build new solidarities across differences, including across species. It sparks a curiosity about the places we bird in, attuning us to our own place in local histories, politics, and futures. And birding reveals the imperfect and fraught social and political worlds we share with birds, stoking our dreams of multispecies freedom.

Amid a crowded field of memoirs and creative nonfiction about birds and birding, it is refreshing to come across books by other bird enthusiasts that push beyond the conventional genre of finding oneself or personal transformation through birding. Instead, these three very different bird-centric books foreground how birding attunes us to the imperfect social and political worlds we inhabit and encourage us to embrace the small joys—whether spotting a rare warbler, hearing cicadas on a hot summer day, or drinking tea in a community garden with friends—we stumble across in a broken world and amid an overwhelming sense of disaster. Foregrounding the deep ambivalences and insights that emerge from being “rare” birders (as Indigenous and Black birders, respectively), Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian and J. Drew Lanham’s Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves insist on locating birds and birding within the fraught social and political landscapes from which birding, nonetheless, also provides temporary reprieve. Engaging in a kind of reverse birding, Vinciane Despret’s Living as a Bird gazes not on birds themselves but on the ornithologists who have classified, debated, and authoritatively represented birds for over a century. She considers how their scientific models and economic concepts might prevent them from seeing or knowing birds.

Taken together, Despret, Gannon, and Lanham, writing from different perspectives, collectively question the field guide of birding itself. And in so doing, they chart other ways of encountering, building intimacies with, and learning from and with birds. They offer glimpses into how birding can be a critical and embodied practice that attunes us to the fraught social, political, and ecological worlds we share with birds.

Birding can take many forms but often entails strolling slowly along a trail in the woods looking for birds. Yet even the most casual of strolls can kindle curiosity sparked by a cacophony of sounds—the call of a hermit thrush, pine needles underfoot, or cars roaring by on a nearby highway—and creatures one encounters. In activating one’s sensorium, birding prompts us to ask questions about and better understand the places we traverse. Seasonal changes are marked by distinctive sounds, whether the call of a red winged blackbird or a chorus of spring peepers. Birds follow tempos that provide regularity in a changing world, singing at sunrise and migrating yearly, often returning to the same lake or forest; yet shifts in predictable migratory patterns reflect the effects of changing climate. Birds are harbingers of seasons, storms, predators nearby, and global warming. Coming to understand how a bird species fits into its broader habitat heightens one’s appreciation of the intricacies and entanglements that constitute a place and prompts reflections on how human desires and practices, whether clear cutting patches of wetland or building a high-speed train line through grasslands, impact birds and their multispecies support systems.

Slowing down, strolling, helps us see anew the familiar places we call home. Looking up into a stand of hemlock trees—some hundreds of years old—to get a glimpse at black-throated green warblers frolicking in their branches, one might spot cotton-like sacs on the branches’ undersides. Generations of bird species that call these trees home have borne witness to the decline of the hemlock population at the hands of humans whose mobility and habits carried invasive insects to infest their branches. Whenever I see a towering hemlock, I find myself reflecting on how these sentinel trees have seen firsthand the land use changes and capitalist settler designs that now threaten their survival (and that of the flitting warblers).

In short, the slow-paced strolling that is common to the practice of birding helps attune us to the resilience and vulnerabilities that characterize survival in the wake of capitalism. Birding can spark multispecies intimacies and solidarities that invite future worlds that center care, slowing down, and repair rather than accumulation, extraction, and capture.

---

I only picked up birding in my late 30s, when I moved from the US to Canada. I wanted to explore the landscapes of my new home in southern Ontario, and also to escape the screens that commandeered my line of sight as a professor teaching classes on Zoom from 2020 to 2022. I didn’t get into birdwatching for the birds themselves (though I am now bird obsessed), but I enthusiastically researched my new hobby and secured the tools of the trade I would need to become a “birder”: binoculars and a field guide.

Such accoutrements might seem minimal and lightweight. Yet they had an outsize influence on how I initially learned to think about looking at birds. My tattered secondhand field guide (National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America), for instance, suggested I should attend not to the birds themselves, necessarily, but rather to “field marks”: like the white eye ring of the ruby-crowned kinglet, the dark line that runs through the white-throated sparrow’s eye, or the orange legs of a blackpoll warbler that distinguish it from other famously difficult-to-identify warblers. The field guide emphasized such minor characteristics and fetishized mastery and correct identification.

This is how I was initiated into birding culture, leaving me excited to learn new things but also frustrated. In my binocularized tunnel vision search for these small details, I was often missing the birds altogether.

Birding in this conventional style places a threefold premium on performances of bird expertise, a commitment to dropping everything to bird as much as possible during spring migration, and on chasing rare species. Upon encountering a species for the first time, many birders add it to their “life-list,” a list of all the bird species a person has seen in their lifetime. As I grew more disillusioned with the field guide’s confining logics of classification, identification, and accumulation, I found that I fit a bit awkwardly into birding culture, which can be saturated with mansplaining and hierarchies of expertise that alienated me as a novice queer and introverted birder.

Birding is often associated with whiteness and maleness; in “The Whiteness of Birds” (2022), Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that ornithology more broadly is a “white way of seeing.” Field guides present birds in heteronormative and reductionist ways. “Drab” females, for instance, become pawns in the reproductive game of more colorful, vocal, and agentive male birds. Many birds are named after colonists or other white men notorious for their role in genocide or other forms of violence against humans, a practice challenged by the “Bird Names for Birds” campaign.¹

Despite the racial colonial capitalist baggage that birding carries, it is a hobby I enthusiastically embrace.² It is a practice I have made my own by throwing away my field guide. Doing so has facilitated my attention to capacities, relations, and connections that are often overlooked as we rush through the world. Throwing away my field guide has also let me throw out the ways that field guides limit how we see and come to know birds. In this, I am inspired by others who embrace modes of birding that engage birds (and ourselves) more capaciously, and who recognize the critical and political potentials that becoming a birder might activate.

So, not long after my initiation into the world of birds and birding, I found myself trying to encounter birds otherwise, outside the parameters of the confining vision and disciplining force of the field guide. I began to imagine the many modes of queer affiliation and collaboration that birds engage in. In addition to the many examples of same-sex birds forming long-term bonds with each other (and even engaging in the same courtship behaviors as opposite-sex pairs), I conjured birds singing or showing off their colorful feathers just for the joy of it rather than to attract a mate to reproduce with. Such nonutilitarian possibilities are rendered implausible, even impossible, by the field guide’s gendered assumptions and capitalist logics of collection, classification, and quantification.

Lewis and Clark not only dined on meadowlarks (!) but also set fire to the prairies to let the Sioux—with whom they were in tense relation— know they were there. Settler smoke signals threatened not only people, but also prairie birds’ nests. Birds, Thomas C. Gannon reminds us in Birding While Indian, tell the history of human colonialism: the brown-headed cowbird was called the buffalo bird in the 1800s and a century later, in the wake of the decimation of the buffalo by “Buffalo Bill and his murderous ilk,” it took on its current name. A Lakota birding enthusiast, literary scholar, and lifelong resident of the Great Plains, Gannon notes that some of his favorite birding spots on the Great Plains are also some of its “worst closet-racist tourist-trap examples of Christo-Custer colonialism” in name and hauntings (e.g., Indian Cave State Park, Crazy Horse Memorial, 7th Cavalry Café, Custer State Park). These layered places should remind birders that the fields, trails, and wetlands we traverse, binoculars in hand, are not neutral, natural lands, but sites of massacre and violence that devastated not only members of the human species but also birds.

Birding While Indian is organized into a series of dated and place-based entries about birds Gannon has seen, dating back to a childhood encounter with a huge Great Horned Owl in 1965. The structure mimics a birder’s “life list,” but each bird becomes a touchstone for stories and extended political or personal reflections rather than a specimen to be counted. The final entry, for instance, reflects on a visit to Little Bighorn Battlefield, where he went looking for a red-tailed hawk. He didn’t see one, but what he found instead were hordes of tourists traversing the “rolling grasslands of bloody history,” where official signage continues to erase the crimes of colonial aggression and land theft that the “officers and soldiers” honored in the park’s main cemetery enacted upon the so-called “hostile Indians.”

Back in 2009, Gannon visited Little Bighorn, where birds took his mind off “the dismal human political baggage of the place.” Among “native” birds like the Eastern Kingbirds, he spotted European starlings and Eurasian collared doves: avian signifiers that the colonizers won. Typically, such birds would be termed by naturalists as “invasive species”; but Gannon terms the bird species who have been brought to North America as “colonials.” “Not unlike the Native American,” he writes, “Native bird species have also had their ranges and populations radically altered by the incursions of Christo-Custer colonialism.”

Such connections between “native” birds and Native Americans foreground Gannon’s interest in how humans and other animals have encountered similar representational and literal violences in the course of a US history driven by capitalist and settler colonial and ideologies of control and capture. Challenging centuries of bird lore, field guide representations, and memoirs that romanticize birds and nature, Gannon is resolute that “it is impossible to write about birds and nature without being political.”

For Gannon, there is “danger … in applying human attributes and emotions to other species, a colonialism not unrelated to the racialized primitivist discourse about Native Americans.” However, one thing I appreciate about Gannon and his wry and irreverent style is his refusal of purity. Well aware of the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing birds or overlaying cultural constructs onto them or their songs, he nonetheless sees himself in an American dipper: an odd songbird that behaves like a seabird, a fellow “border creature” analog to his own liminal identity as a “part white, part Indian, a fucked-up and anxious young fellow of both rock and air.”

Birding While Indian is a refreshing lens onto a storied pastime. It attends to some of the very real challenges of racism and suspicion Gannon sometimes faces when out birding as a “rare” birder, yet its greatest power lies in its ability to speak to all of us who find joy in practices (birding or otherwise) that make us complicit with noxious formations, whether white supremacy, colonial legacies, or corporate capitalism. Rather than dwell for too long on such questions, he finds himself up early, heading out to be with the birds, identifying enthusiastically with a pastime with a vexed history. Birding, he tells us, “has kept [him] from checking out of a world of fucked-up humans that includes [himself].” In his humorous and insightful “list,” readers are inspired to attune themselves to birds who, much more than the specimens they appear to be in field guides, are storytellers, symptoms of layered histories and landscapes, and creatures that encourage their human counterparts to notice the ongoing violences and joys that bind species together.

Taken together, [these books] celebrate the uncanny ability of birds to defy, escape, and elude our human calculations and classifications.

A blackbird was singing outside Vinciane Despret’s open window, leading her to ask a series of questions: Why, for whom, and for what does the bird sing? In Living as a Bird, Despret, a philosopher of science and animal studies scholar, encourages us birders and nonbirders alike to become more attuned to birds and their world as they see it.

For starters, Living as a Bird bids us to let go of the idea of birds as specimens, and to consider how song, colors, territory, other birds, and the observer cannot be easily parsed. “When a bird inhabits a territory,” explains Despret, “he or she is completely inhabited by that territory … it has adapted its existence to the new dimensions offered by the territory … it is the territory which makes the bird sing, just as it is also the territory which makes it fly to and fro, dance, display its colors.”

“Territory,” Despret argues, is not an “innocent term”; instead, it reflects the interests, cultural baggage, and perspectives of the scientists who have employed it to explain birds and their behaviors. Economic theories were applied by scientists to a wide range of questions about birds, “mathematizing” individual stories even as they produced ignorance about birds’ broader milieux and relations by focusing solely on food supply. Throughout Living as a Bird, Despret reveals how knowing birds in and through economic models flattens the many, complex, difficult-to-measure relations like neighbors, wanderers, and intruders, or render these other actors as “factors contributing to the cost of defending a territory.”

Territory has historically been seen purely in terms of resources. But in establishing a territory, a bird creates a space “which it fills to the brim with attractions” for others: a space that blends self and non-self and looks outward to build relations as much or more than it retreats inward or defensively ousts others to keep its kin and community safe. Such a capacious understanding of territory might be missed, as Despret points out, because a lot of research takes place in labs or confined spaces that induce aggression in birds as a coping mechanism in a manufactured environment. Moreover, scientists bring their own cultural preconceptions to such experiments: the “very existence of the theory of population control … informs and shapes how scientists engage with their subject of investigation.”

Such cultural constructs—not unlike the cultural baggage through which we see birds as discussed by Gannon—obscure how territories are malleable containers of complex social activities. Many of these activities, moreover, do not aim to keep distance between rivals or see others as threats, but allow birds to attune to one another: finding ways to exist alongside one another, even to “play” with one another via puffed feathers or mock attacks that rarely result in dramatic consequences. Birds accommodate themselves to other birds, not least by attuning themselves to others’ songs. All these behaviors may be misrecognized as aggression by scientists predisposed to see the world through a framework that reproduces human capitalism and colonialism in nonhumans.

In Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, J. Drew Lanham, naturalist, activist, and writer, likewise frames birding as a kind of slowing down and as a fruitful site for reflecting on how to find beauty in a deeply fucked-up world. For many of us in these times, “the hours fall by as joyless days.” Joy, he suggests, is the “justice we must give ourselves.” For him, birding and birds are not a means of “checking out” or ignoring the horrors all around us, nor is nature simply a refuge from the storm; instead, time to bird is a gift he gives himself, allowing space for withdrawal, righteous anger, and renewal of his spirit—a “break from the monotonous must-do necessaries.”

A compendium of poetry and prose, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is, at its heart, about time and how we mark it, pass it, honor it, measure it, and slow it down. It is about how the small window of an hour passed in an airplane, blissfully detached from our devices and absorbed in a book, can be stolen upon landing (“wheels down and more school children are dead”). Yet, somewhere in just one minute of that one hour, a hummingbird measures time in sweetness (“a nectary nip”) hard won amid “aerial combat” with his fellows; celebrating “victories [that] last mere seconds.” In “How we spend our days,” Lanham reflects on how he fills his time: “who, what, where, and when brings peace to my life and who, what, where, and when shreds my life to pieces.”

Lanham admits to desiring to withdraw from the horror of it all to “wildness and birds.” Yet this is not a book that frames nature as a separate, walled-off enclave detached from the wider world; “when there is something in the wind, the wild things know first.” Instead, birds and how we see them and talk about them—and the violences we enact upon them and their habitats—become points of reflection on very human issues, such as anti-Black racism (“hooded warblers are lucky. They can wear hoodies and no one asks questions or feels threatened,” and crows are “large corvid[s] ‘guilty’ of being black and smart.”)

Where Gannon sees sparrows and starlings as “colonials,” Lanham considers the racial purity politics in discussions of invasive and native species. For example, after he delivered a Zoom talk, someone asked, “What can I do about the house sparrows? They are pushing my poor bluebirds out!”; the question reflects many backyard birders’ anxieties over aggressive or invasive birds that take over habitats or monopolize food sources (such as bird feeders), “pushing out” more loveable or cute native birds (such as bluebirds). Despite his sharp critiques of villainizing sparrows, Lanham answers diplomatically, noting that the house cats roaming the speaker’s neighborhood are much more to blame for the bluebirds’ troubles. The predatory prowling of outdoor house cats (one study suggests they kill 60 million birds a year in Canada alone), by virtue of their taxonomic status as “pets,” goes unremarked. Lanham admonishes: “Don’t blame beings / who never asked to be here / for their presence.”

Throughout, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves celebrates the “wildness” of birds, reclaiming “wildness” from its colonial and racial juxtaposition to “civilized,” which meant that wildness carried connotations of savagery or poor decorum. In “Wish thrush” (my favorite of the book), Lanham conjures a fantastical bird, “a thicket-dwelling gray-winged wishwelker” that would not be found on “a field guide page.” In his imagined encounter with this bird, it eludes identification (“it didn’t utter a single identifying call”). He imagines submitting this whimsical creature to “ME-Bird”—a play on the popular listing app eBird—but anticipates that the “powers that be” would accuse his sighting of being “contrived.” He relishes the not-knowing, not-naming, and not-counting that accompany this imagined encounter: “If it looks like what you think it might be, then maybe it could be not.” The wish thrush sighting offers a fantasy of how birding might be unsettled with uncertainty and playfulness in ways that disrupt the capitalist and colonial frameworks that are foundational to the field guide as a genre.

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves reminds us that birds—despite the ever-altering world and human-induced threats to ourselves and other species—are a constant. Their migrations, movements, presences and absences are a metronome against which the shifting traumas and horrors of a world descending into fascism transpire: “Joy is the return, / the wandering warbler / landed in the backyard again / from who knows where, / to rest, / to uplift lagging spirit.” “Joy” is defined by Lanham as the “blessed assurance that wild birds (or butterflies, or beats, or unfettered breathing) will continue to be, in spite of what has been, is, or is yet to come.”

---

Taken together, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Living as a Bird, and Birding While Indian celebrate the uncanny ability of birds to defy, escape, and elude our human calculations and classifications. Even amid the dense taxonomic traps that field guides weave, birds are much more than the names we give them, the lists we use to count them, and the field marks we use to classify them. Encounters with birds, not as specimens but as the lively interlocutors these authors portray them to be, can inspire new lines of flight and modes of surviving and thriving in the broken world we share with them.