Why pay attention to birds? As with most fields of interest, you may hear a variety of responses to this question, depending on whom you ask. The most enthusiastic birders might display a rather strange intensity and competitiveness in their bird watching — I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you consult a gold medal swimmer to learn about the simple, relaxing pleasures of splashing about in the water. Earnest environmentalist types might point out how watching birds can help teach you about ecology or inspire you to become a more enthusiastic conservationist. That probably has some truth, but doesn’t really get at the central question.
I have a simpler answer: I recommend paying attention to birds because I think that doing so adds to human happiness.
I don’t mind admitting those claims of the serious birders and the conservationists. Birding — seeing many species, developing the knowledge that helps you find them and the skills that help you identify them — is fun. Humans like making lists, and accumulating bird sightings is probably more benign than many manifestations of our acquisitive instincts. Both birders and conservationists who point out the many biological and ecological lessons that can be learnt through birds also make a good point. I think it would be an excellent development if the textbook biology taught in schools was largely supplanted by natural history education that could be seen and heard in the students’ real lives.
Evolution and ecology should not be abstract subjects. They are feeding, singing and flying right outside our windows.
The underlying reason why one’s local birds are more effective teachers than textbooks are, however, is that interacting with that real world of living beings is a great deal more pleasurable and satisfying than the merely theoretical acquisition of knowledge. This pleasure extends far beyond the focus on novelty and variety that is central for many of the most dedicated birders. (Many birders do derive great pleasure from birds beyond mere variety, but I think it is fair to characterize them as a group as being more enthusiastic about difficult identifications, species lists and rarity than the average human being.)
I derive the most enjoyment from the birds that are the least novel. I think the most familiar birds add the most to our daily happiness.
Consider a simple walk around the neighborhood, or even a few moments passed in your own backyard or standing in front of your home. To a habitual ignorer of birds, the world might seem rather mundane. But when you pay attention to birds, every minute spent outside is full of unique and vivid characters, all going about their diverse and interesting business. They are all dramatically different from one another, in some ways far more immediately different than individual humans. Some are blue! Some are yellow! Some are red!
Their ways of life and hidden capabilities are similarly diverse. There goes a troop of bushtits — social, adorable little ping-pong balls of birds that laboriously construct the most remarkable nests. There goes a towhee couple — resolute romantics that sing duets together all through the year and all through their lives. On the rooftop, a so-called lesser goldfinch is singing, pouring out a breakneck melody that interjects imitations of half a dozen other birds of the neighborhood. On the edge of a garden bed a scrub-jay is hammering home an acorn, planting an oak as another jay did 100 years before to plant the tree that now reaches over the street to hold aloft a constantly evolving panoply of singing birds — titmice in January, spotted towhees in February, juncos in March, finches in April and mockingbirds in May.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell noted a now long-running trend: we educate for competition, not for happiness.
“Some American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the borders of their campus,” he writes. “It was filled with exquisite wildflowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.”
Knowing the names of birds — and more importantly becoming aware of their presence, and their distinctive sounds and actions — does not add to our incomes. But it does increase the wealth of our lives.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of “The Private Lives of Public Birds.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.
