On the Wing

When I met my husband’s parents in 1984, they picked us up at LaGuardia, then headed south to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn to take us birdwatching. Perhaps they thought that the effort involved in trying to distinguish different types of shorebirds would diffuse any tension inherent in the encounter, or maybe they didn’t want to waste a long drive without going somewhere more interesting than the airport. Whatever the reason, I was immediately hooked.

I was already a lover of long walks and an admirer of avian fauna, but it had never occurred to me to unite these pleasures by bringing along a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America and a pair of binoculars. Whereas golf is held by many to be “a good walk spoiled” (an observation usually attributed to Mark Twain), birdwatching transforms aimless strolling into purposeful activity, thereby making a good walk even better.

Until we had children some eight years later, my husband and I birdwatched in landscapes as diverse as the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, the Atlantic seashore of the Maritimes and New England, and the cloud forests of Mexico. On the east coast, our favourite sightings were a golden eagle in Maine and eider ducks in Nova Scotia; in rural Quebec, they were a least bittern and a snowy owl. Although I desperately wanted to spot a resplendent quetzal in the Yucatán, I never did. However, we were rewarded with the sight of a blue-crowned motmot and a purple gallinule — with extravagant plumage and brilliant colours, resembling Dr. Seuss doodles.

Oddly enough, we also spotted a purple gallinule in our neighbours’ backyard in Toronto. Knowing we loved birds, they asked us to identify the weird specimen cowering among their day lilies. It was immediately obvious who the alien was, given its moiré purple and green body, its blue, red, and yellow beak, and its enormous yellow tootsies that made it seem the love child of a chicken and a spider (those clown feet distribute its weight so lightly that it can walk across water lilies without sinking). How it ended up so far from its range in the southern United States remains a mystery. But that is the thing about birds: while they generally follow the earth’s magnetic field on their migrations (how, we don’t really understand, though Ed Yong does his valiant best to explain it in An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us), they sometimes make inexplicable detours.

As do we all. Like me, for example, who intended to spend my life in solitary travel, making art and writing books, but somehow found myself stuck in southern Ontario, mother to two children. I never tired of seeing ruby-throated hummingbirds, downy woodpeckers, and goldfinches at our feeders, but serious birdwatching was out of the question with kids in tow. Encumbered with strollers and diaper bags or, later, chattering toddlers, I had little opportunity for silent and still observation. So we stopped updating our life lists and reverted to casual spotting of whatever was big and sedentary enough to draw our offspring’s unpredictable attention. Generally this meant waterfowl or raptors.

But kids grow up, and recent years have seen us return to occasional birdwatching, older and less energetic in our pursuit of rare species but just happy to celebrate the wonder that is birds. Humans haven’t shared an ancestor with them for more than 300 million years and may therefore feel a less visceral connection than we do with dogs or horses. Nonetheless bird brains, with their complex neurology, have a lot in common with those of primates. Maybe this is why their songs appeal to us so profoundly and their flight haunts our dreams.

It’s not news that our once eccentric hobby has become increasingly popular; a lot of people discovered birdwatching when the COVID‑19 pandemic clipped their wings and confined them to local geography. During that time of constraint, when the future seemed dim, birds embodied beauty and freedom — as they have always done, of course, but with a special poignancy. They represented the possibility that nature might recover from our assault on it; that the punishment being delivered to heedless humanity for devouring everything in sight might be temporary; that the universe might eventually forgive us.

At Humber Bay, where we had gone for years to observe a huge variety of local and migratory ducks, we were astonished to see crowds of new aficionados with expensive binoculars standing the requisite two metres apart. Once, a small boy directed me to where I might observe a rare American coot (a feathered one, that is; not my husband). He was adorably intense, with that aptitude for memorizing names and statistics many kids have at that age but usually devote to their favourite sports or to cars or to dinosaurs. Perhaps he was destined to discover birds anyway, but I am inclined to think that his parents’ desperate need to get out of the house brought them — and him — to the shore of Lake Ontario.

Amateur birders like that boy contributed to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird checklist in impressive numbers in 2020. On May 9, the Global Big Day of birdwatching involved 50,000 participants who recorded 6,479 species, “shattering the previous single-day checklist total” by 30 percent, according to Cornell’s website. The numbers have continued to rise, which suggests that many pandemic birdwatchers have carried on “twitching” (British slang for birdwatching), along with other folks who have since joined them. This past May, for instance, more than 72,000 people identified 7,992 different species, including 397 here in Canada (admittedly well behind Colombia’s 1,564).

Ironically, bird counts are going up even as bird populations continue to decline. Or perhaps this is not ironic at all; maybe growing awareness of avian precarity is driving people to be more proactive about conservation. The organization BirdLife International started documenting the status of birds 100 years ago, so we have more information about threats to them than about dangers for any other creature. Its State of the World’s Birds, from 2022, “summarises what birds, as barometers for planetary health, can tell us about the state of nature, the pressures upon it, and the solutions in place and needed.” What we see is “a deeply concerning picture — nearly half of all bird species are in decline, with more than one in eight at risk of extinction.”

However, despite the gravity and multiplicity of these problems, the scientists who wrote the report remind us that “birds provide reasons for hope and show us that conservation action works. There are many examples of species being saved from extinction, populations recovering, threats being effectively managed and ecosystems being restored.” As Emily Dickinson put it:

Birdwatching is by its very nature a hopeful practice. You go out in the damp and chilly May dawn before trees are in full leaf, praying to see migrating warblers. If your patience is rewarded, it feels like a blessing. If it isn’t, you just return the next day. And the next. There may be fewer birds this year than last, but there are still enough, for now, to make your heart sing and your spirit soar.