I Am Extending My Awareness Outward To Contain These Beasts

Notes on sun walks and bird songs

One of the crows I used to feed on my daily walks in Seattle.

Since January, my wife, my dog, and I have been starting our mornings by taking our coffee outside and just milling around the backyard for ten or so minutes before we do anything else. Well, my wife and I have coffee. The dog doesn’t get any. She does happily chase a ball or a stick around, most days, as we hold our breath hoping she doesn’t skid out into the tulips, and that seems to wake her up just fine.

We call this ritual our “Sun Walk,” although the sun has been hard to come by on many mornings. We’ve had snow walks and rain walks aplenty in the last four months, and even when there’s nothing coming down the day is often still gray and shapeless at that hour.

But we soldier on. It really does make a difference, this morning ritual. Especially on the days when the sun is already shining by the time we get outside. We tend not to bring our phones, which is reason enough to do something at this point, and whatever kind of fresh air is on our faces tends to make a pleasant start of things. A simple joy to hold onto even as the day grows full and frenetic.

With this time spent outdoors comes an opportunity to do some noticing, both generally and specifically. The pistil and anthers within a tulip carrying out what appears to be some ancient and arcane ritual, the bursting open of the shockingly pink crabapple blossoms and their subsequent brilliant rain into the yard, the creep of the lilacs from bud to bloom, yes. And the concrete joy of getting to know the birds of the neighborhood. They are a different set from what I’m used to, having moved from the land of crows and hummingbirds to a place without much of either but plenty of others to investigate.

In our new neck of the woods there is no shortage of starlings and cardinals, pigeons and doves, catbirds and sparrows. At this point I am competent at identifying them all by sight, but there are so many leafy places and thick branches for them to hide away in that more often than not I hear them long before I see them. As such I have made it my new mission to learn their songs and calls, so that I know who’s out and about no matter what.

The starling is an easy one, unless it’s pretending to be something else, which can be confusing. (Steller’s jays are still the best mimics I’ve ever heard out in the wild, but the starling is a close second.) The cardinal is likewise so unique in its song that I’ve got that one down pat. But the rest can be a tangled and confused soundscape, and while it’s always pleasant to hear, it can make learning difficult.

Accordingly I just downloaded the Merlin app, made by the Cornell Ornithology Lab, which can identify a species by listening to its song. Like Shazam for birds. I remain torn about this choice because it does require me to have my phone out in the yard, but it is undeniably useful for my little project. The app pulls all the different bird calls out of the noise and lets you know who’s around, as you can see from my recent trip out to the Rouge Park native prairie:

From chaos, order, or something like it. Having primarily concerned myself for the last six or seven years with corvids, excepting the occasional stunner like an osprey, it has felt good to use this tool to broaden my horizons and so become more a part of the vast birding community. My friend Lizzy shared this comic with me recently, and I enjoyed the artist’s commentary about it (with a content warning for a form of Internet-speak that has mostly gone the way of the dodo):

Birds can be a hobby, and when it is, it’s the bare minimum elaboration “birding.” It’s a word made for and by people who have no time to name their hobby in a cool way, and the reason is obvious: there are birds to hear and look at, and the time to do it is right now. I am extending my awareness outward to contain these beasts, and there are some I have come to know. Pursuing this activity is dirt fucking cheap - all you need to be is weird enough to want to do it, which might create problems elsewhere in your life, but these fuckin’ birds don't care. They love you...Or maybe they don’t! Such ambiguities rest at the very core of the pastime.

I don’t think the birds I encounter love me: at best, they get comfortable with my presence and grace me with their presence in exchange for various snacks and sundries. Although even this feels untrue, or at least incomplete, as I write it. For the rest of my life I will remember an incident last January in which the breeding pair of crows I always fed kibble to on the first leg of my dog walks followed me past their usual invisible boundary, making a racket unlike any I’ve ever heard, to warn me about a coyote padding along on silent paws right toward us. I corraled my dog and let the trickster speed past without incident. But who knows what might have happened without the intervention of my crow friends, an act that defies a simple utilitarian explanation.

Anthropomorphization is often a grave error. But so is its opposite, the assumption that birds and beasts feel nothing for us or others. See this lovely taxi crow, for starters. Whether they can love us or not remains an open question. But the animals of the world are certainly aware of us, and plenty have folded us into the acceptable landscape of their lives in ways that I get choked up just thinking about. In fact they are far more generous in allowing us into their world than we are in allowing them into ours. And even when we do try to let them in, we fall short. Nature and the human-built world are not one and the same, and with our singular perspective and consciousness we can neither replicate it nor master it. The best we can try for is, I think, to notice it where we can and seek to fit ourselves into it rather than the other way around.

As my friend Marianela writes,

…the problem with making architecture that looks like a canyon, Grand or otherwise, is that a canyon was made by forces so incredibly large that they are unfathomable. Canyons look the way they do not because nature is after a certain aesthetic outcome but because it simply cannot help itself. Canyons inspire wonder because when we look at them, we are confronted with the immense power of forces outside of our control. We are faced with the fact that air and water, elements through which we move with ease every day, can give a thousand-foot-tall monolith of stone a whole new face if given billions of years to do their work. The Gilder Center was not made by air and water over the course of billions of years. It was made by people in less than ten.

Or as an old hunter tells Billy Parham in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing:

The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

Human reason will never conquer nature—though it can certainly corrupt and despoil it—for the simple reason that human reason is a product of nature, inseparable from and impossible to situate outside of it. But it is also only a small fraction of what nature has ever had to say and we often delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.

Well, for the umpteenth time I have written a lengthy missive when all I really mean to say is this: that I love the world, and am happy to be a part of it, and am learning to pay closer attention to what it has to tell me. That’s not everything, but most days that’s enough.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

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