I picked up a copy of Mark Cocker's book Birders: Tales of a Tribe. I enjoy good stories about birding adventures, such as those Roger Tory Peterson and John Kieran wrote years ago and the more recent writings of people such as Pete Dunne; I loved his book The Feather Quest, for instance. Cocker is British and is writing about the "tribe" of British birders. I've only been able to do bits of casual birding in London, so I thought I'd enjoy stories of what British birders do as they roam the rest of the country. But I haven't really enjoyed this book, and it raises some interesting questions that I'd like to raise with tweeters. The fundamental question is about why we bird. I have my own reasons, and I find them expressed very well by an article written by Jack Conner years ago, which I'll attach as an appendix to this note. (I like to hand out copies of it to new birders.)

Cocker begins his book by telling how he became fascinated by birds at age 8 when he was startled by pigeons nesting in his attic and then found their nests, and about how his fascination grew in his teens. That seemed to me like a kind of classic story about getting interested in birds, and I'm sure many of us would tell similar stories. I would tell about the Cardinals and the Brown Thrashers that nested in the grape vine along one side of our back yard in Minneapolis, about being startled as my first Great Blue Heron exploded out of the reeds along Bassett Creek just a few yards away from me. But I find most of Cocker's book filled with stories about twitching, the British term (now commonly used in America) for chasing rarities. It is mostly about half-crazed teens and young men hitchhiking and racing about to get to a rare bird, often at the near cost of life and limb, merely to add another bird to their British lists. His measure of birding greatness seems to be the length of one's list; the talking points are about being able to say, honestly, that you saw the Uist Steller's Eider or the 1977 Franklin's Gull. The most despised, the exiles from the tribe, are those so driven by its mores that they have tried to enhance their tribal status by lying about seeing some rarity or by making bad identifications just to claim another rarity.

There are few words in Cocker's book about the pleasures of quietly observing beautiful and interesting birds, little or nothing about escaping from our fast-paced, frenetic world by sitting quietly in a natural setting, watching and listening and letting the endorphins flow and the blood pressure fall. Cocker is contemptuous of the term "bird-watcher," since birding for him apparently is not about watching birds at all--merely about finding the rare ones, looking at them for a minute or two to make sure of their identity, and then rushing off to see another rarity. There are hardly even any words in his book about the challenge of making difficult identifications, which for me is one of the most important aspects of birding and what I myself consider one of the most important criteria for being an expert to be admired.

Now, I have done my share of twitching, though I've largely given it up. My life list (the only list I keep seriously) shows that on 19 and 20 January 1993 I rushed off to Bellingham to find the Brambling and then crossed the border to find the Dusky Thrush. In 1996, I saw the Great Gray Owl in Burlington. Those were fun adventures. It was fun to find the Redwing on the west side of Olympia this winter. However, I found Dusky Thrushes far more fascinating when I went to Japan and saw dozens of them in their natural habitat and observed that they behave just like American Robins here and seem to replace Robins ecologically there.

Still, Cocker's book again raises the question for me of just why any of us go birding, in whatever form. When someone recently asked this question on Birdchat, several people responded with stories about being fascinated by birds as children and about the joys of identifying, observing, and experiencing the variety of birds. The stories were largely about aesthetic values, and even had what I might call a spiritual quality. (I admit that quality in my own birding life.) People used words like "exhilaration" and "passion." They mentioned the camaraderie of fellow birders. But they were not stories about how wonderful it was to see some rarity after driving all night, or about how truly important having a long life list is to the quality of their lives.

I would like to read some more about why any of you go birding. I'm sure there are many reasons, and they are all valid and important for us as individuals. I also want to acknowledge that a couple of months ago I got into trouble with some Tweeters by misunderstanding the term "speed birding," so I had to issue a blanket apology; I want to emphasize specifically that I am not troubled by adventures such as Big Days or Birdathons. But I am troubled if birding is becoming primarily what Cocker emphasizes in his book.
Burt Guttman

The Evergreen State College

Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503
Eight Reasons Why We Bird

1. It sharpens your sight. Before you know it, you learn to see the ruby-crowned kinglet, to identify the ever-so-slight upswing in the bill of the greater yellowlegs, and to spot the half-inch wide band on the breast of the bank swallow as he twirls past you at 40 miles per hour.

2. It encourages you to explore the world. You ride out on chartered fishing boats with fishermen who are wondering why anyone would spend 30 bucks not to fish but to look for something called "shearwaters," which, when finally found after nine solid hours of looking, turn out to be only some long-winged dark birds that skim across the waves and disappear in a minute.

3. It gives you something to write about: "Dear Mom, How are you? It snowed here the other day, but we still have two kingfishers down on the pond. Against the white they seem especially beautiful..."

4. It makes you an authority in the neighborhood. People you have never met will bring you robins and orioles their cat caught and ask, "What's the wingspan of an eagle?"

5. It helps you to treasure a moment--that June evening, for example, when you find on the branch of a fallen tree, his plumage dark and golden, one eye closed and one eye watching you back, your first Chuck-will's-widow.

6. It provides you with opportunities to meet someone like my friend John Henry Hintermister--who keeps his life list locked in a steel box in case of fire; who every spring, in the second week of March, hikes the route Frank M. Chapman hiked in 1890 in search of the now-possibly extinct Bachman's warbler. He comes home exhausted, ticks in his hair, and says, "I'm only going to chase that !# at & bird for 15 more years. If I don't see one by then, I'll give it up."

7. It will make you politically active. You will write intricately argued, adrenalin-fueled letters to your congressman demanding that something be done so people will stop littering, riding jeeps on beaches, throwing rocks at gulls, building condominiums, driving airboats in the Everglades, spraying insecticides, and sawing down trees.

8. Finally, it can save your life. One day you will be walking home from work, depressed. Your kid has the flu; the car's clutch needs to be fixed; and you are thinking tomorrow is your birthday. Another year has passed, and once again you have not triumphed at anything, really. Then you glance at the sky in despair, and right there, right over your head, blessing that particular air space on your street forever, is the world's most beautiful bird! With pearly white head, black and white wings, long forked tail, it circles slowly, a hundred feet up, eating dragonflies, tearing off the wings and letting them flutter down--while you toss your briefcase in a bush, grab the first person to come along, and shout, "A swallow-tailed kite! A swallow-tailed kite!" until he, too, looks up and blinks at the sight and knows suddenly that he must buy some binoculars and become a bird watcher himself.

(Jack Conner, Bird Watcher's Digest, July/August 1984)