The Delightful Horror of Family Birding. Eli J. Knapp
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me into the fields and forests throughout my childhood. Obviously, kestrels don’t attack sleeping men in redwood forests. But Andrew’s lack of experience, punctuated by an unexpected blitzkrieg of birds, translated into misapprehension and fear.
Now, as a professor, I routinely hear echoes of my brother’s experience in the lives of students enrolled in my ornithology course. Often hesitantly, and without much eye contact, a student admits to having a fear of birds. The first few times this happened, I had to force a deadpan response. Cheerful robins and beautiful bluebirds leapt to mind. How could anyone be scared of these colorful feathered friends that fill the air with joyous melody? “Can you elaborate?” I’d ask, clenching my jaw to prevent a smile. Most of their explanations were vague and ambiguous. But finally, this past spring, I confirmed the suspicion I had gained way back in the redwood forest.
“I’m here because I need to get some science credits and …” Emily said, her voice trailing off.
“And what?” I asked, curious.
“Well, because … I’m scared of birds.” She stared at her desk as her face turned the color of a cardinal. Here we go again, I thought, gripping my podium to squelch any potential flippant reply. The class giggled, and several students smirked at one another.
“So I’m here to get over my fear,” Emily finished. This wasn’t the time for a cross-examination. She had been brave, and I wasn’t going to add any further public humiliation. I moved on to the next student but made a mental note to follow up with her if an opportunity presented itself later on in the course.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorably proclaimed back in 1933. Catchy as his words were, Roosevelt could have used a fact-checker. In 1960, for example, researchers Gibson and Walk discovered that humans innately fear falling. Several decades later, another researcher, William Falls, determined that even as babies, we startle at loud noises. Culture has nothing to do with these innate fears, and they’re exceedingly difficult to undo. We learn all our other fears along life’s path, picking them up like odd-shaped pebbles. While lots of people fear snakes, we’re not born that way; we acquire it from our culture and our environment, taking most of our cues from our parents. My wife, Linda, for example, grew up in West Africa. There, many snakes were venomous. She was taught that the only good snake was a dead snake. The opposite was true for me in the friendly snake world of the northeastern United States.
An inveterate collector of flora and fauna, I have shown my son, Ezra, dozens of snakes and bugs ever since his diaper days. And when Linda wasn’t looking, I gave him many to play with. So it came as no surprise one day to find him chasing Linda through the yard as she yelled at him to stop. Confusion was on his face then, while a little green snake dangled from his hands. Why was his mother scared, if his father wasn’t? Even more unsurprisingly, and to Linda’s great consternation, Ezra’s early confusion soon morphed into devilishness as that initial chase evolved into an episodic—and highly cherished—game. Needless to say, I bring home far fewer snakes than I used to. Not that I need to. Now he collects them himself.
Fear can be learned, and it can also be paralyzing. In the 1920s, Walter Bradford Cannon coined “fight or flight” to describe key behaviors that may occur in the context of perceived threat. Although oversimplified, I like the way neuroscientist Seth Norrholm described it. Fear, he wrote, can cause us to take the “low road or the high road.” If the brain’s sensory system detects something to fear, adrenaline kicks in, our hearts beat faster, and we get the classic fight or flight response. Once we journey down this low road, our fight or flight may malfunction, causing us to freeze like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
Recent research suggests, however, that freezing may be adaptive, not a malfunction at all. When fleeing or aggressive responses are likely to be ineffective, freezing may be the best option. Like possums that play dead, we freezers experience “tonic immobility,” which instantly derails our motor and vocal abilities. Judging from the number of times I’ve turned to stone as my two-year-old daughter momentarily chokes on a piece of food, I’m a bona fide freezer. Even though it may be an adaptive response for the possum, it hasn’t seemed so for me, especially as a father with young kids. In the language of Norrholm, I’ve lived on the low road.
If my wife hears our little girl even faintly sputter, however, she will grab the baby, pat her back, and save the day with nary a quickened pulse. My wife may be afraid of snakes, but with choking and innumerable other injuries and accidents, she takes the high road every time. We all take the high road, Norrholm suggests, when our sensory system signals a higher cortical center in the brain. I’ve seen this before, our brains think, so there’s no reason to panic. Studies show that through repeated exposure, we can overcome our fears and act more reasonably, even in frightening situations.
A problem, of course, is that new things—things we can’t prepare for—happen to us all the time. This past summer, for example, nine-year-old Ezra and I went for a jog on an old railroad bed in Big Pocono State Park, in Pennsylvania. A quarter mile into our journey, we met up with a panic-stricken man and his wife. “We just saw a bear!” the man said, glancing over his shoulder as if the bruin were stalking him.
“It was big!” His wife spread her arms wide.
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Just now.” The man glanced at his watch as if to verify his claim. “It crossed the path and went down a hill. You can keep going if you want to,” he added, “but we’re getting out of here!” With that, the couple power walked on down the trail.
I was torn. The couple’s fear was palpable. Unsurprisingly, culture had saturated me with a fear of bears that bordered on paranoia. At the same time, I’d encountered bears before and knew that while attacks do happen, they’re exceedingly rare. If we kept going down the trail, yes, I was taking a risk. But if I turned tail and fled, I would be sending a message to my son. It would tell him that woods with bears were scary woods. Since bears have repopulated so many rural areas, this could put him on edge the rest of his life. I know many people who are too scared to enter the woods. Nature—the dark and scary forest—so rarely gets a fair shake in fairy tales and children’s books. I didn’t want to perpetuate such misplaced fear in real life.
But I knew that fear, whether innate or learned, is a good adaptive behavior. Without it, the human race likely wouldn’t exist, as fear helped us survive predators and identify threats in the landscape. Had the infamous dodo bird on Mauritius been more timorous, the hospitable species might have been able to avoid the avarice of the Dutch sailors who, legend has it, clubbed the amiable birds with the same cooking pots they tossed them into. Through no fault of its own, the dodo never learned to fear bipedal brutes with wide eyes and empty stomachs.
American culture, in contrast, overplays the unusual. As a result, we’ve been brainwashed to fear many things in nature and all things ursine. A car accident rarely merits a news story. A bear attack, which stirs the imagination of our inner Neanderthal, demands the front page. I have a friend who, right or wrong, once grabbed his four-year-old daughter and ran upon hearing rustling noises in a blackberry patch. Today, his daughter wants nothing to do with trails and hiking. Yes, it could have been a bear. But I’ve also heard many “bears” myself that turned out to be one-and-a-half-ounce eastern towhees foraging in the leaf litter.
“What do you say, Ez?” I asked, looking down at him. “Should we keep going?”
“Let’s do it!” he said without hesitating. As he had with the snakes I’d given him years earlier, he lived on the high road.
“Okay, but be ready to shoot up a tree if I say so!” I instructed. Slowly, we continued down the railroad bed. Sure enough, two hundred yards later, we spied a large black bear sunning on a fallen log quite a distance down the hill. It was a magnificent sight, the bear utterly at peace in its leafy green world. For a while, we watched side by side, saying little. Seeing a bear from the confines of a moving car is one thing. On foot, however, there are whispers of instruction, buzzing insects, and heightened senses of being alive. Like lifting all the cages at a zoo. Sharing the moment made it that much better.
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