It’s spring here in the Pacific Northwest, which means the sweet smell of flowering trees and mornings filled with birdsong.
It’s the best time of year to enjoy birding: to listen to the witchety-witchety of the Common Yellowthroats, the bossiness of the Marsh Wren, the constant trilling from the Goldfinches and House Finches.
But it’s also when birders are at their worst. What is it that makes some birders so damned uptight? Sara and I were out walking at the Slough when we spotted two ladies broadcasting a recorded call of an American Bittern out to the wetlands. We said hello and I started to describe where we had seen a Bittern before—but their body language and terse reply made it clear they wanted nothing to do with conversation. I thought they acted like Canada Geese: hissing at us when we got close and ruffling with satisfaction when we walked on. Some birders act like they’re on a sacred mission and they must guard themselves against philistines, as if by locking themselves inside their birding bubble they can commune with the object of their attention.
Running into these oddballs prompted me to go back and revise this story I wrote over a year ago. It touches on some of the things that fascinate me: surveillance, technology, the way people get committed to ideas and objectives, and the ways we pressures each other. This is ripped right out of my experience, but it’s all made up. I hope you enjoy it.
He was the sweet guy from marketing: Benjamin—not Ben, please—earnest and conscientious. When he introduced himself to new people, he’d say, “Let me share with you that my pronouns are he/him and that I live on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people.”
“Dude, you’re wearing your wokeness like a crown of thorns,” I’d tell him.
And he’d say in return: “I’m just trying to be a good person Tom.”
I tried not to let it bug me. He wasn’t the guy you’d ask to help you bust up a concrete slab in your backyard, but you could trust him. I scorned his softness, but I could see he had a good heart.
Naturally, Benjamin was a birder.
Most mornings when I pulled into the parking lot at work I’d see Benjamin walking slowly on the raised levees behind our office park, scanning the trees, peering into the wetland, making soft “psh, psh, psh” sounds to coax the birds into coming closer. There he was, in his safari vest and hat, camera and binoculars slung around his neck, the very epitome of the bird nerd.
Benjamin let it be known that he’d be happy to have company on his morning ritual, and occasionally I’d see someone join him: the quiet editor from the content team, the earnest older guy from the Boeing team. They’d come back in, smiling and chatting about what they’d seen. It looked like a nice way to start a day.
I’d always been a birding skeptic. The people I knew who were into just rubbed me wrong: they were so damned precious about their “lifers” and habitat protection. But I liked Benjamin, almost in spite of myself. My own effort to “be a better person” meant I was working on trying to understand different views, to open myself to people who thought differently than me, so I figured what the heck. One morning, I joined him.
I’ll admit, it was kind of interesting, slowing down, “birding.” I had walked these trails many times, usually in intense work talk with a colleague. I never dreamed of all the life that swirled around me, how many birds were flitting around in the trees and wetlands: juncoes, sparrows, goldfinches, yellowthroats, herons, ducks galore, occasionally a raptor, a bald eagle or red-tailed hawk. All I had to do was slow down and look, release my mind from the incessant problem-solving, and suddenly I was in a different world.
Before long, I found myself joining in the exchange of bird sightings over coffee. “I think I saw a Golden-crowned Sparrow,” someone would say, and Benjamin would ask, “Are you sure it was a Golden-crowned? They’re very unlikely right now, you know.” The hard part of me thought he was being a prig, but I tried to reframe that, to be more charitable. Maybe he just really wanted to help people get it right?
It must have been some combination of “Benjamin is such a sweet guy” and people’s legitimate and growing fascination with birds that helped draw a crowd the day Benjamin offered a “lunch-and-learn” talk on birding. 40 people joined the talk. 40!! That’s pretty amazing in a company of 60. We listened as Benjamin gushed over four common species we could see nearby. He offered, again, to take anybody out on a bird walk.
Slowly, he was building up a team of bird lovers.
I got to work a little late the day after his bird talk and I walked alone. Up ahead, where the trail ducked under a canopy of trees, I spied Benjamin talking to a guy I didn’t recognize, a big guy, big enough that his safari vest puckered at his waist. They stood facing each other, just on the edge of the shadows, and the man tomahawked his right hand into his left palm, once, twice: whack, whack. I couldn’t see his face, but his body language—his imposing lean, the violent whacks—looked almost threatening. I felt protective of Benjamin, but also curious.
Later that day Benjamin popped his head into my office.
“I saw you out walking today,” he said, smiling gently. “See any new birds?”
I felt protective earlier, but now I was annoyed. There was something about the tone in his voice that sounded like he deserved the credit for me walking, as if he had drawn out this virtuous behavior in me.
“Just the usual,” I said. “There was one tiny bird off in the bushes, but I couldn’t really see him well.” I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction … nor did I say anything about the guy I’d seen him talking to. Benjamin could look after himself.
“You really need some bins,” Benjamin said, and when I looked quizzical, he added “Binoculars. They really take your birding to the next level.”
“Oh, cool,” I said, which he rightly took as my way of saying “whatever.”
But he persisted. “Seriously, bins just bring you closer to the birds, and they’re not that expensive. I’ll send you a link for a pair I like.”
“What, do you get a commission on these?” I joked.
“No, of course not! I just thought I’d make it easier for you,” he seemed slightly stung. That was Benjamin: helpful, sensitive, wounded. Then he left.
He sent me the link and I ending up buying the “bins” he recommended, and I had to admit they were fun: you really could see the details on the birds, the small things that let you tell one sparrow or one kinglet from another. I liked them, dammit, and I had to laugh at myself. After all these years of mocking birders, I was becoming one.
I had my bins with me a week later when I saw Benjamin off in the distance walking alongside that same big guy. They weren’t on the levee trails, but off on a sidewalk—which itself was odd for Benjamin. He liked to say that he preferred walking on dirt to cement, because dirt was more “natural.”
Watching through my bins I could see that this was no casual conversation: the big guy waved his arms out to the side, stopped and turned to Benjamin. Even from this distance, I could see Benjamin try to resist, then acquiesce, in the face of the big guy’s vehemence. Benjamin nodded, as if accepting some hard truth. And then he turned, walking back toward the levee as the big guy stomped away. I put down my bins quickly so he couldn’t tell I’d been watching them. I couldn’t shake this weird sense that Benjamin was being bullied by this guy. I didn’t like that.
I crossed paths with Benjamin soon after, and reversed direction to walk with him. “Looks like you ran into a friend,” I observed.
“What do you mean, a friend?” said Benjamin. He seemed a little cross.
“Just that guy I saw you walking with,” I explained. “You know, I’ve got these powerful bins now, I can see everything.” I smiled, trying to overcome his defensiveness.
“Oh, that was just some guy asking if there was a Starbucks nearby.” He paused to look at me, to see if I bought it. I didn’t. I knew there was more going on there, but what was I going to say?
“Gotcha,” I replied.
“Hey,” said Benjamin, changing the subject, “did you download that app I told you about?”
“Oh jeez, I meant to … but I only seem to remember it when I’m talking to you. What’s the name again?”
“Seriously?” asked Benjamin. I could see he tried to ask it lightly, but it came off peeved.
“Oh wait, it’s ‘Bird Perv,’ isn’t it?” I poked him. “Bird Perv” was what I called people who were obsessive about birding. It wasn’t a compliment.
“Merlin! Merlin!,” he insisted, a forced smile masking his frustration. Then he shifted gears: “You’ll love it—you can identify birds in the field and add to your life list, and there’s a new feature where you can actually have your phone ‘listen’ to a bird’s sounds and identify the bird.”
I’d read about that part in Wired; the technology was pretty cool. I think Benjamin pumped the tech because he knew I’d go for that.
“I read a thing about it,” I admitted. “Maybe I’ll give it a look.”
“Let me show you how it works …” he said, and the tension dissipated and we were just two co-workers sharing an interest in birds. That was nice, and Merlin pegged the Common Yellowthroat’s song right away. I said it sounded like “witchety-witchety-witch.” I could tell that Benjamin disagreed with me, but he let it go.
So I downloaded the app and even started using it a little bit. I shared some of my sightings with Benjamin: he seemed pleased and, oddly, just a little relieved.
That’s the way it went for a while: I’d try out a new birding thing—recording a checklist on this other app he recommended, eBird, say, or finding a “birding hot spot” on the AllAboutBirds.org website—and I’d share that with Benjamin and sure enough, he’d suggest something else. Had I considered a better camera? A longer lens? How about a tripod or a spotting scope? He could send me a link, he said.
I could see Benjamin had a genuine enthusiasm for this stuff ... but I kept feeling this strange edge to it too, like it wasn’t enough just to like birding, he had to compel others to like it too.
One day he was going on about the importance of making bird checklists, and I pushed back.
“Benjamin, I don’t think I’m a checklist guy. I just like to notice birds, not make detailed lists.”
“Well gosh Tom, how do you expect us to be able to track species if people can’t even take the time to report what they see?”
For a moment I thought he was joking, but when I looked in his eyes I could see that he was wounded that despite his best efforts, I still didn’t get it. He wasn’t done trying, though. Nearly every time we walked together he’d start up a checklist and gently play up how great it was, as if his enthusiasm and commitment would somehow rub off on me.
I tried doing the checklists a couple times on my own, even posting them up to the website so that others could see them, and afterward he’d text me: “Hey, I saw that you posted a checklist. Good job!” But I could never invest myself fully in it.
Then one day we had this exchange of texts:
Benjamin: “Hey, I saw you reported a Red-throated Loon out at the Slough”
Tom: “Oh yeah, I wasn’t positive about it, but it seemed like the right call”
B: “Well, I doubt it was a Red-throated Loon—they’re just not in that environment”
T: “I don’t know, it looked like it was possible on the maps”
B: “You’ve got to read the detailed location notes if you’re going to report a rare bird Tom, you can’t just look at the maps!”
T: “Dude, I was on a walk, not doing research”
B: “Well there’s no point in reporting incorrectly. Why don’t you just go correct it?”
T: “That assumes it’s wrong”
B: “Well it sounds like a false report”
T: “It’s not a false report, it’s just I’m not 100% sure”
B: “What’s the point of reporting if you’re not going to take it seriously?”
T: “Dude, lighten up! It’s just a stupid bird list”
B: “It means a lot Tom”
I didn’t reply. I got Benjamin being “fastidious” about his bird IDs—he was generally a bit obsessed with being right about things after all—but I didn’t like being corrected by the birding police.
It didn’t end there. The next time I was out at the Slough I fired up my checklist—you pressed a button in the eBird app to start it—and was walking along the trail when, off in the distance, I saw a car pull up alongside the road that bordered the Slough: it was Benjamin’s C-Max Hybrid. He was the only person I knew who owned this car, in this color. Nobody got out of the car, so I lifted my bins to take a look. From this distance, I could see two people in the car—one of them was big, filling the passenger seat. He whacked the dashboard, whack, whack. I recognized the move, like a Pileated Woodpecker whacking at a tree. Then they drove away.
Later, I got a text:
“That was a good checklist you filed today.”
I didn’t recognize who it was from.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Carl, I’m a local birder. You may have seen my name in eBird.”
Oh, I’d seen his name all right! He filed checklists nearly every day, at all different times. Benjamin sometimes showed me Carl’s checklists with a kind of reverence.
I didn’t reply.
He wrote again:
“I wonder, though, how sure you are about that American Bittern you reported. Those are really rare.”
I didn’t reply. Instead I called Benjamin.
“What the hell man?” I said when he answered. “Did you report me to the birding police?”
“Tom, no, what are you talking about?” His voice was a little panicky.
“Some random guy accused me of misidentifying an American Bittern, for fuck’s sake. I thought maybe you put him up to it.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t say anything. Did the person say who they were?” he asked.
“Carl,” I replied.
“Oh,” Benjamin stammered, “um, Carl, oh yeah, he’s uh, he’s really serious about this stuff. You didn’t argue with him did you?” He sounded worried. Worse than that, he sounded scared.
“No, I ignored him!” I said.
“Tom, American Bitterns are really rare, you know. Maybe he’s just worried you misreported.”
“Here we are with this again!,” I said, “I just don’t care enough to put up with this shit. I think that’s my last checklist.”
“Tom, please, please, just correct the list.”
“Who said it was incorrect? I’m pretty damned sure I saw a Bittern, and I heard it too, it’s pretty distinctive.”
“Tom, just correct it. Carl won’t let this go.”
“Screw Carl! I’ll tell you what—I’ll just delete the whole checklist.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Why?”
“It’s just really important, I mean, it would mean a lot to me if you would keep reporting …” I wish I could have seen his face. I sensed he was tearing up, but I also sensed something else: was it desperation?
“It kind of makes me want to give up birding,” I sighed.
“Oh please,” his voice cracked, “please don’t give up birding.”
“I think I’ll just take a break,” I said. And I did.
I stopped making checklists and mostly stopped taking my bins on my walks down to the Slough and to the other birding areas. I didn’t stop looking for birds: after all, they were pretty interesting and it was fun to watch their behavior change with the seasons. I had come to enjoy birding, of all things, but I didn’t need this pressure. I told myself I wasn’t a bird watcher, I was a bird noticer.
It was easier to back off the birding because Benjamin and I didn’t work together anymore. Our company was sold: he stayed, I didn’t. I wasn’t angry with him: we’d had a good relationship for a long time, it just kind of got weird there around the birding, and Carl.
But just the other day, I started playing this game, Wordle, and I thought he’d like it, so I sent it to him. He liked it too, and soon enough we were sharing scores, engaging in the light, pleasant banter we used to enjoy together. It felt good.
Until one day he texted:
“You know, you should try playing BRDL …”
Great story! I really loved this one.
It was a joy to read this again/anew. 🐦🦆🦅💛 🦃