Before I get to today’s post, I want to share that I’ve opened up paid subscriptions to Bird History on Substack. If this writing has taught you something new, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the research that goes into my work. Subscriptions start at $6 a month — but the posts will always be free to read. At the bottom, I’ll share why I’m making this decision now and what I’ll do to make a subscription worth your while.
Walking home from work six or seven years back, I noticed a group of small birds waddling around in the grass in front of an apartment building. Their black and brown feathers flashed with iridescence in the afternoon sun as they chattered to each other in metallic tinkles and chirps. I realized that I’d seen these birds before, maybe dozens or hundreds of times, but on that day it occurred to me that I didn’t know their name.
For some providential reason, these creatures stopped me in my tracks. They were fascinating to watch, but they also suddenly confronted me with my ignorance and dislocation from the natural world. I felt a great impoverishment when I realized that every time I’d seen these birds my eyes had skipped over them like they were pebbles or twigs. I’d never actually bothered to look. In generations past, I imagined, such a common bird would be commonly known. But no one had thought to pass this information down to me.
It only took a minute of googling to figure out that these birds were European Starlings. Later, I’d learn that they were not as original to the land as I’d once supposed, only having been introduced in the 1870’s. I’d learn that there were intense debates about the moral and economic value of these birds, debates that continue to this day. And for their sins, I’d learn that these birds are still culled by the hundreds of thousands.
I’d also learn that birders have a name for the experience I’d just had. European Starlings were my spark bird. They started something that’s gradually come to consume more and more of my life, kindling a drive within me to watch and name and learn about birds everywhere I go.
With birds, as with everything, the closer you look, the more you see. Every step outside became an opportunity for the world to unfold its secrets. Where once I watched generic streets and empty landscapes, I now saw mockingbirds and cormorants, grackles and flickers, thrashers and kingbirds. The earth seemed new.
Thanks for reading Bird History! If you made it this far, please consider subscribing for free to my Substack to receive my new posts by email and support my work.
Birders like to think that they have an exclusive relationship with birds. Who else would notice, much less be able to name a Clay-colored Sparrow or Blackburnian Warbler? But serious birders have always been a small minority of bird lovers, and an even smaller share of all people who have ever interacted with birds, appreciated them without knowing their names, benefitted from their ecosystem services, or used them for a meal or for profit.
The truth is, birds pervade our lives. They’re an immutable presence in our culture and economy. They’re also a powerful lens for understanding America’s history and identities. The ugliest, most fundamental conflicts in American society — over race and class, between region, gender, and country of origin — have been fought over birds. As Jonathan Rosen put it in his book The Life of the Skies, America is a “republic of feathers.”
America is the market hunters that drove passenger pigeons extinct, and the children who mourned their passing. America is the wealthy white northerners who fought to protect birds, and the immigrants and southern Blacks who they persecuted for using them as sustenance. America is the land, and all the beings who live on it. It’s the geese and crows and robins, and it’s the gaping void where five billion passenger pigeons once lived. It’s the foreign starlings and sparrows who made America their own, who have been reviled and slaughtered ever since. America is the migrating warblers that make a mockery of national boundaries. It’s the wetlands that ducks call home, and the wetlands dredged to make room for suburbs and soybeans. These are many histories — billions of histories — but they’re also one history. And that’s the one I’m trying to tell.
American colonizers and their descendants have had many relationships with the country’s birds over the last four hundred years. Indigenous Americans have explored different relationships with birds for thousands of years longer. Right now we’re tasked with imagining models of coexistence that allow bird populations to thrive alongside prosperous, just, and healthy human populations. Fortunately, we don’t have to pull these models from the ether. Many of these models have been explored before, and battles to make them reality have been fought and won. Over the centuries there’s so much we have learned, but there’s also so much we’ve forgotten. Studying history is about revealing possibilities — not just uncovering past worlds but opening our eyes to worlds that could exist again.
The challenges birds face today have parallels in the past. In 1900 bird numbers were declining rapidly, and caring people took action. A grassroots campaign mobilized schoolchildren, hunters, conservationists, women’s clubs, and politicians and saved the country’s birds. They achieved a radical paradigm shift marking an inflection point in our relationship with the natural world: birds were not resources to be exploited, but rather wards of the state needing protection. Entire supply chains, markets, and clothing accessories were outlawed along the way. It wasn’t easy. It took decades. But it was effective.
The threats birds face today are just as great, and maybe greater. There are dozens of overlapping causes driving the disappearance of three billion birds since 1970, not a single culprit. Climate change. Pesticide use. Habitat destruction. Cats. Windows. Many dedicated people are working to fight these threats, and with them dedicated organizations. But to reverse these declines, to ensure that not another bird goes extinct, we’ll need the same sort of movement that preserved birds a hundred years ago. We need to teach about birds in the schools. We need farmers and politicians to understand the economic importance of birds. We need bird-lovers in congress and activist bird-lovers in every town in the country.
Which birds will remain on our planet, and which will be cut off? That’s a decision we are making every day, whether we’re aware of it or not. Lopping off a branch from the tree of life leaves a scar, and the wounds from losing the passenger pigeon and ivory-billed woodpecker have not yet healed over. That’s a legacy our ancestors left, one of greed and destruction and shortsightedness. These million-year bloodlines will leave no descendants. They’re evolutionary pathways that will never be explored. Our momentary lives are not long enough to see evolution craft replacements to fill these vacant ecological niches, but they’re long enough to cause irreparable destruction.
The late philosopher David Graeber wrote that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” And for better or for worse, the decisions we make about land use, conservation, and consumption are part of making that world. We decided we want to live in a world with California Condors, and so we have saved them. We are also in the process of deciding that we could take or leave pinyon jays, evening grosbeaks, and golden-winged warblers. We’ll have to decide to live differently in our world if that is to change.
Several years ago, I left the religion I was raised with, along with its comforting assertions about the immortality of my soul. Around that time, I moved to a new town and a new apartment, which overlooked a slender and wild lake. Every morning, I picked my way along the lakeshore’s overgrown path under the supervision of a wary osprey that was usually guarding its fishy breakfast. But the planet was tilting, the seasons were changing, and by late fall the osprey left me to walk alone.
After a few months’ absence, green came back to the lakeshore, and with it came the osprey. This may have been my first time witnessing the cycle of migration, but I realized the osprey, and its osprey elders before it, had completed this dance across the continents hundreds, thousands, millions of times, as regular as the rising of the sun, as regular as breath. It was just the latest link of an unbroken chain stretching back into eternity.
Returning to its perch across the lake once again, the osprey was extending the chain, link by link, year by year. And so was I, I suppose, in my own way. Knowing that I form part of that chain is immortality enough.
I’d like to close on a personal note. A few weeks back, I left my day job in Washington, D.C., and in a few weeks more I’ll be moving to New York City to be closer to my wife’s family. If you’re in the area, please say hi! I can’t wait to connect with other bird lovers in New York.
This move is launching a transitional period in my life. For the next several months, I’m going to be taking some time to focus on writing. While I don’t harbor any (well, many) delusions about making a living this way, the better this whole writing venture goes, the longer I’ll be able to justify taking time away from a nine-to-five and the longer you’ll be able to enjoy an increased frequency and quality of posts. With that in mind, I’m going to open up the option for paid subscriptions while I’m in this in-between period.
While I intend to keep all of my posts free to read, I’ll be offering some enticements that I hope will make it worth your while to start up a paid subscription (and a BIG THANK YOU to everyone who has already made a pledge of their support). I’m an amateur linocut printmaker, and for now, I’d like to offer an edition of any of my prints to anyone who purchases a paid subscription. If you sign up — subscriptions start at $6 per month — let me know your address and which print you’d like, and I’ll send it your way.
Last, thank you for reading! Researching and writing about America’s birds has been a more fulfilling and fascinating venture than I could have imagined, and I’m deeply grateful to have you along for the ride.
