The Delightful Horror of Family Birding. Eli J. Knapp
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lies behind the stories that follow.
I used to think I’d wait to write a nature book until my kids had grown up and left. But then I entered the forest with Linda, my kids, and later my college students. Everything changed. With Ezra, Indigo, and Willow at my side, I saw nature through young, impressionable lenses. Wonder deepened—the same wonder I’d felt watching the hornbill in the featureless thorn scrub. The richest book I could create, I realized, would be one that captures this wonder in the mixed-up, rarely planned moments that make up life.
I am an odd duck: a hybrid anthropologist-ecologist by trade who happens to have a special love of birds and nature. While I haven’t forced these interests on my kids, I have immersed them in it. A feeder is visible from every window of our house, and bird paraphernalia—carvings, feathers, and field guides—line every shelf. I even named one daughter Indigo after one of my favorite birds, the indigo bunting (I may or may not have known that another group of birds, the indigobirds, are renowned for their ability to parasitize other birds). A second daughter, Willow, is bird-friendly nomenclature as well. More than occasionally, however, I overdo it.
“No more birds, Dad!” Ezra occasionally shouts from the back seat after I’ve pulled over to get a better look at an overflying raptor. But in between his back seat directives, I’ve caught him craning his neck, too.
A few years ago, while enjoying a family dinner around the table, Ezra, then six years old, couldn’t conceal his mushrooming bird knowledge. “We’re going to go around in a circle and everybody is going to tell us what their day’s highlight was,” I had instructed, attempting to rein in the raucous dinner cacophony, focus the kids’ attention on mealtime, and teach them to take turns speaking.
“I’ll go first,” Ezra said, waving a macaroni noodle around on his fork like a baton. “I saw an indigo bunting while on the bus today! It was by the big bend in the road,” he added, as if more detail would verify his claim. His blue eyes held mine, waiting for my reaction. While he loved to get a rise out of me, this time at least, he wasn’t ruffling my feathers.
I have no idea if any of my kids—or my students—will one day enjoy nature as much as I do. But at the very least, they’ll be familiar with it. Since enjoyment is contingent upon understanding, familiarity seems like a step in the right direction.
This collection of essays spans a five-year period of my life as a fledgling father. They’re arranged thematically, not sequentially. As a result, the ages of my children fluctuate forward and backward, which may be disconcerting to the careful reader. Rest assured, I haven’t sired any Benjamin Buttons. While ages change, the mutual learning we all undergo doesn’t. Nor does our discovery of knowledge in unexpected places, or our collective familial decision to let nature lead.
One of the unexpected places popping up often in these pages is Africa. The continent has shaped my family mightily over the years, luring us back in spite of our best attempts to put down deeper roots in the States. Africa first called us as students and now as professors. Linda and I teach, yes. But we still learn far more, annually treated to profound lessons from wise and generous people who live far closer to the land than we do.
All the stories emerge from my experiences as a husband, father, professor, and lifelong lover of birds and nature. Some of these experiences have been delightful, some horrible, and most a combination thereof. This book, like life, isn’t about a destination. Rather, it’s about process, false starts, and learning from mistakes. It’s a book that shows that the youngest among us may appreciate nature best, and that life is at its richest when we go outdoors together and keep our eyes open. Lastly, it’s a book about coddiwompling. Like the ivory-billed woodpecker, this word doesn’t seem to exist regardless of how badly I want it to. Its definition: traveling in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination. This book examines the intersection of our lives with birds. Hopefully it begets a relationship. Where that relationship ends up is anybody’s guess. Perhaps to greater knowledge, deeper introspection, or a more satisfying view of nature. A little ambiguity is good; I’m convinced that the best paths take us to places we didn’t know we wanted to go.
Dr. Elliott Coues, a wild-eyed birder from a former century who did his share of coddiwompling, once wrote: “For myself, the time is past, happily or not, when every bird was an agreeable surprise, for dewdrops do not last all day; but I have never walked in the woods without learning something that I did not know before … how can you, with so much before you, keep out of the woods another minute?”
Like Coues, I can’t keep out of the woods another minute. So I may as well take my kids, my students, everyone. Nature has so much to teach us. To learn, we may have to give up control and let nature lead. Maybe, like the birds, we all just need to wing it.
Part I
THROUGH A CHILD’S EYES
Steller’s jay
Cyanocitta stelleri
1 • THE ONLY THINGS TO FEAR
Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast!
—John James Audubon
“Kestrels! They’re attacking!” my brother Andrew yelled from his sleeping bag. Three birds had landed on the railing above him, shattering the pre-dawn silence with cacophonous calls.
Andrew and I had spent the night sleeping out on the small deck of my red, ramshackle cabin. Now he was determined to get back inside. Unwilling to shed the pseudo-shield his sleeping bag provided Andrew chose to roll over me in my own sleeping bag, crawl to the door, and lurch inside like a clumsy, overgrown caterpillar. As the door slammed, I heard him collapse on the floor.
I lay still on the deck, watching the birds as a mischievous, Grinchian smile spread across my face. The alleged kestrels were not kestrels at all. They were Steller’s jays. This particular trio had been visiting my cabin’s deck for several months now. Before marriage and grad school, I took a one-year job as an outdoor educator in central California. At night I slept in a closet-sized cabin with a slightly more spacious deck, just big enough for two sleeping bags to lie parallel. Impossibly tall redwood trees amid a carpet of ferns lent a fairytale feel to the forest enveloping the cabin. In my mind, it was a perfect setting for a band of clever, cobalt-colored birds.
But not in Andrew’s mind. It was just after six a.m. The jays had come down with their typical homicidal cries, proclaiming their right to the meager peanut offering I always put out the night before. To Andrew, who lacked prior exposure, it appeared an outright avian assault: dark-crested villains swooping down through the gloaming, hell-bent on snatching souls. Since he’d arrived only the day before, I had forgotten to mention the routine, early morning visit of the obstreperous jays. Together, we’d decided to sleep out on the deck. Serendipitously, he chose a position right by the railing. It was too good a prank to be premeditated. Stellar indeed.
My delight then, as now, spawned from the competitive nature my brothers and I share. Our competitiveness is so intense it spills over into sibling schadenfreude, or pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. Despite being four years younger than me, Andrew is far more academically gifted. He processes information faster, his memory is better, and in most areas where I struggle, he excels effortlessly. So whenever I discover a chink in his impressive armor, I exploit it. The misidentification of a bird accompanied by a hysterical, panic-stricken reaction was a gaping chink, the height of schadenfreude. As the last jay lifted off my railing and the avian apocalypse ended, I knew I had sweet fodder to turn him red-faced for years.
I gained something else from my brother’s misfortune: insight. Though the incident seemed trivial at the time, I learned that Andrew had fears I lacked. I spent the bulk of my youth in the woods. Andrew didn’t; he was an indoors kid. To me, birds were familiar, and I sought them out. Not so for him. He coexisted with them. To him, birds were backdrop, noticed only when they hit the windshield or woke him up.
Andrew