The Delightful Horror of Family Birding. Eli J. Knapp
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For all I knew, this scoter could sleep like this until nightfall. I couldn’t take it anymore. My code of conduct now in shreds, I climbed out of my truck. I slammed my hands on the roof and then, like the scoter, lost my own head. With primeval, hairsplitting yells, I shouted at the scoter and began a series of angry, wild-eyed jumping jacks.
In the midst of my Neanderthal-like madness, I didn’t see the blue sedan until it pulled right up behind me.
Mortified, I tried to transform my witless histrionics into a well-calculated yoga stretch. But nobody in his right mind shouts while doing meditative yoga in a wastewater treatment plant. I had to patch out. I dove into my truck, slammed the door one final time out of spite, and sped away, too embarrassed to glance in my rearview mirror. I drove home skunked by the skunk-headed coot. And try as I have to forget it, my scoter humiliation has resurfaced time and again whenever I’ve found myself chomping at nature’s bit.
I downright drowned in this memory, for example, when I recently uncovered a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Adopt the pace of nature,” Emerson penned nearly two centuries ago. “Her secret is patience.” It’s a palpable irony that makes me grimace. Why? Because patience, I’ve found in my hectic life as a perpetually behind college professor, routinely proves the most elusive of virtues. But I know Emerson had the magic word. Whenever and wherever I’ve been truly patient in nature, I’ve been rewarded.
Of all the nature partakers out there, perhaps hunters understand it best. Especially the ones who sit out in a blind each autumn. If you ever take the time to ask a hunter what they saw during their dawn-to-dusk vigils they often spend in the woods, you’ll recognize a recurrent theme. Long bouts of stillness interrupted with wondrous spectacles. Chickadees that land on gun barrels. Cooper’s hawks that capture flickers in split-second flights. Porcupines that nibble shoelaces. I even had one hunter (not known for hyperbole) tell me how a red fox sat on his hand for a few seconds and, after realizing its error, vanished like a wraith. Nature moves in punctuated equilibrium. Unlike nature documentaries that compress years of footage into a half-hour, real nature observation has long intermissions between dramatic acts. If you’re lucky enough—and patient enough—to witness a dramatic act in real time, it will sear the memory like a hot iron.
At my stage of life, I have to cultivate patience with intentionality. It’s far easier not to, of course. I found an opportunity when the most observant member of my family, Willow, then ten months old, discovered—and naturally tried to eat—a gorgeous green luna moth that she found in a dusty corner by the sink.
All three of my kids gathered around the recently deceased moth. Other than a slight bird nibble out of one wing, it was intact. Whatever funeral we gave it, this beauty deserved an open casket. The trashcan seemed far too undignified. No, we would scatter the moth to the winds, knowing any number of scavengers would soon delight in this well-preserved, dense package of protein. But first, to fix the spectacle into our own memories, we would paint pictures of it. If any act slows us down and cultivates patience, it is the production of art.
On a little plastic table under a maple tree out front, we ceremoniously spread our supplies around the moth. No masterpiece was going to be produced under these conditions, however. Ezra “accidentally” sprayed us with the hose. Indigo kept bumping the table. And Willow kept trying to eat the paint tubes. But for a few precious moments, we studied the moth and painted our own pictures. And in so doing, we felt the breeze, heard an indigo bunting, and failed to find a shade of green that truly matched the luna’s natural patina.
I’d be lying to say we adopted the pace of nature. But I do believe our corporate compass pointed that way. I’m realistic enough to know that even the cultivation of patience requires patience. Due to our vigil under the maple, maybe my kids will remember the day we found a luna in the house. And what a luna looks like as it blows around an art table.
At the very least, I’m hoping that if any of my kids ever find themselves trying to identify a headless scoter, they’ll be dignified about it. And that they’ll each maintain a well-developed and respectful code of conduct with the natural world. One in which they’ll appreciate seeing a scoter, regardless of what species it is. Nature’s secret, as Emerson wrote, is patience. It rarely rewards those who rush. Paradoxically, adopting the pace of nature is the only way to get ahead. And it’s definitely the only way to get a head you desperately need for proper identification.
Andean cock-of-the-rock
Rupicola peruvianus
7 • THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.
—Katharine Hepburn
Every kid learns about sex in their own way. I am a case in point. As is true for many kids growing up in the country, a cow pasture formed the border of my backyard. When my friends and I weren’t daring each other to pee on the electric fence, we tended to ignore the bucolic behemoths that placidly ignored us in kind.
But one spring morning, I could not ignore my lazy, lifelong neighbors. Glancing out the window, I noticed a large bull that seemed to be pushing a smaller, wide-eyed cow across the field like a wheelbarrow. The bull completed several lascivious laps around the pasture with his concubine before falling off with an exasperated bellow.
Like lots of coming-of-age kids, I was both curious and confused. The tryst did not seem consensual. But each time the female outran her amorous assailant, she’d stop and wait for him to remount. Not knowing what would happen next, I remained where I was, transfixed by this unexpected cattle concupiscence. I never heard my father behind me until he spoke.
“They’re having sex,” he remarked dryly. As the bull remounted and the wheelbarrow routine resumed, my dad couldn’t resist adding a few more titillating aphorisms, bespeaking his rural Tennessee roots. Mercifully, he left for work before I could respond and reveal any further embarrassment. This episode, which felt more like a low-budget beer commercial, was my first lesson about sex. And I obviously never forgot it.
Now with young children of my own, I jealously applaud my father’s straightforward, opportunistic approach to sex education. I share his style, I’ve learned, but lack his gumption. And since I also lack a pasture out back, I’ve harbored a cattle-less conundrum about the best way to proceed with my own off-spring.
Figuring that water is purest at its source, I turned first to the sex doctor himself, Sigmund Freud. But of all Freud’s writings on sex, it was an unrelated quote that struck me the deepest: “When inspiration fails to come to me,” Freud wrote, “I go halfway to meet it.”
My halfway ended up being pretty far: the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador. But as Freud predicted, inspiration did indeed meet me, arriving five minutes after I settled down with a dozen of my bleary-eyed college students at a well-known lek, a place where male birds regularly display for females in hopes of landing a mate. We were after one particular bird—the cock-of-the-rock—that has drawn birders from time immemorial. One Andean cock-of-the-rock would have sufficed. We found a half-dozen. The fantastical, blaze-orange birds bobbed their heads and riotously sang as if their lives depended on it. Because that’s just it, we slowly realized: their lives did depend on it.
Everything about the cock-of-the-rock, as with the cattle I’d observed decades before, was predicated on procreation. Pseudo-scholar or not, Freud rightly theorized that sex drives life. Charles Darwin coined the term sexual selection, a force dictating survival as powerfully as his more famous concept, natural selection. At its simplest, sexual selection is nothing more than discerning females choosing the most beautiful—or the fittest—males. Victorian culture wasn’t ready for Darwin’s ideas. Sexual selection gave too much power to women, so Darwin—and his 898-page monograph on the subject—was politely ignored.
But culture changed and as it did, a slew of other scientists put Darwin’s cockamamie theory to the test. They hacked tails