In the summer of 1984 I had just graduated from high
school and was working at a bookstore in Anchorage, Alaska. I remember the day a ragged-looking fellow
came sloping up to the counter and asked for a copy of a book by an author I
had never heard of, something about the bird-life of the Pacific
Northwest. I was still fairly new on the
job, but I was pretty sure that we didn’t have it.
“Well look and make sure, man.” His tone was a bit sharp.
After I’d double-checked the shelves to confirm a
negative, I went to backup plans two and three: calling the central office to
see whether any other branches in town had the book (nope), and trying to special
order it for him. He waited impatiently
while I leafed through our phonebook-sized latest edition of Books in Print. There was absolutely nothing under any
variation of the author or title he gave me; apparently no way to request it.
Having reached this brick wall dead end, I told him,
“Look, I don’t see any way to get this book, but we do have field guides
here. Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds does have good coverage of birds
in the Pacific Northwest – ”
He cut me off.
I was coming to the realization that I’d now been cast as the
representative of the faceless uncaring System.
“I don’t want that one. I’m interested in this particular book that I
asked you for.” Waspishly he added, “I want to get his spectral view, man.”
And he walked out in a huff. Yay for me - chalk up one dissatisfied
customer.
Which was ironic, because in fact he could not
possibly have found a clerk who better understood his interest. From the age of nine I had been toting about
binoculars and roving the greenbelts and marshes and mountainsides around
Anchorage in pursuit of birds. I vividly
remember trudging through deep midwinter snow on the ski trail along Chester
Creek and suddenly seeing a plump little gray bird swimming in a riffle of
unfrozen water, perching and bobbing on a rock midstream, diving beneath the
frigid surface and popping up in a rushing eddy on the other side. It was the first time I had seen the American
Dipper, the water ouzel, the only songbird that swims. In the following years my parents had taken
me on field trips with the Audubon Society, and I had spent long hours peering
through binoculars, stalking birds amid brush and cattail, listening to their
songs and calls, and learning by laborious trial and error to put the right
names to each feathered mystery. I still
have the well-worn copy of the blue Peterson field guide that I pored over page
by page, with the notes and checkmarks that I scribbled in my wobbly childish
handwriting. The fascination with wild
birds has been a continuing presence in my life for the past forty years.
I never did find the book that difficult customer
was looking for. But I do get exactly what
he was after with his spectral view. Over
the years I have amassed a pretty good collection of bird books, not to mention
plenty of my own experiences with birds.
And I am constantly reminded that birds are quirky, individually
particular instances of the natural world, concretely tossed up into the
present moment in fabulous diversity of living form and pattern by the
processes of millions of years of evolution.
Much can be known of their world, but no person’s mind is able to
encompass the whole. And so every work
that examines birds – whether the lively paintings of Audubon, observations on
natural history from a Victorian garden, the latest genetic analyses of avian
taxonomy, or the detailed portraiture of David Allen Sibley – is inherently limited. What they show us of birds is filtered
through the author’s own experience, history, talents, and personality, indeed
like a sunbeam through a prism. And no
doubt either sheds light upon the other.
There is now a double irony to that incident, in
that after growing up in Alaska I have now lived in the Pacific Northwest for
some twenty years, moving through landscapes both wild and settled, encountering
birds every day in greater or lesser degree.
My own spectral view of birds has developed from those experiences,
informed by the associations and habits of thought I’ve brought to them. My forte is not the image – I have little
skill as an artist to draw nature through to the page, and I rarely carry a
camera or phone. But every day I watch,
and I listen, and there is plenty to tell about these feathered critters
(simultaneously icons of free flight and lineal descendants of the Mesozoic
dinosaurs) that share our world.
Sometimes it’s tempting, when trying to coax a wren
or sparrow or thrush out from the undergrowth to be seen, to just lump them all
as LBB’s – little brown birds. Yet each
species does have its own character:
its own distinguishing features of plumage and behavior, its peculiar habits
and relations with the flora and fauna of a place, its particular heritage in
the history of life. Certain aspects of
this individuality are indeed portrayed well by field guides; others are
irreducibly unknowable by the human nervous system. (What is the perceived experience of a two-month-old
warbler, hatched in the Canadian boreal forest, when after days of unceasing
migration across open ocean it drops from the sky to light for the first time
on a dripping twig in the South American rainforest?) And some insights into depths of character
unfold over time with attention and shared experience, much as they may with
human friends and acquaintances.
There is much to be learned. One might say that every expansion of
knowledge increases the perimeter of our ignorance. Yet there does remain a satisfaction in partaking
in curiosity, in engaging with the incompleteness of another observer’s
spectral view. Or in sharing one’s own.
