The Spectral View

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.