Existential Birdwatching

COURTESY SHAWN
Yesterday I was inspecting my old truck, which was about to be towed away (the frame is rusted out), when I noticed another flurry of activity overhead. It was a small migratory flight of warblers and other songbirds, feeding furiously, as usual. I could easily identify a black-and-white warbler. It does not lose its bold striping in the fall, and this one was singing snatches of its si-si song as it foraged. I recalled the migrating warblers I saw last week that I could not identify; they too were singing in a distracted manner. But they had remained at the very top of the canopy, an unlikely place for black-and-white warblers.

NH Bird Forum is filled with reports of migrating nighthawks, including a flock of 1,473 over Concord on August 24. There are also posts about shorebirds and raptors. These migration-themed observations will now multiply day by day right into October. Migration is a phenomenon in the natural world that is pervasive, large in scale, and lasts for months. It thereby has the ability to lift us out of our anthropocentricity and see ourselves as part of a greater whole that is far older than our own species and which carries on regardless of and, frankly, in spite of our presence.

In October 2016, I began a migration of sorts. Looking for a better-paying job in journalism I moved from the Finger Lakes region of New York to Martha’s Vineyard. In September 2017, unhappy with the job and unable to find permanent housing on that rarefied island, I moved to the Saranac Lake region in the Adirondacks. In May 2018, unable to find full-time work in the North Country, I accepted a managing editor position in Claremont, N.H. In July 2019, fed up with the long hours of journalism, I switched careers at age 59 and became a government employee with a pension plan.

This was a period of my life during which my own existence seemed somewhat desperately unsettled. Many people experience these periods in their lives or the opposite: seemingly unending intervals during which nothing changes, and their own lives begin to bore them.

My own safety valve, as it were, through all of this and through most of life, has been the natural world. It is always there, swirling around us; we need only lift our attention from our own travail to notice it. This was brought home to me somewhat dramatically in 1986 while I worked in midtown Manhattan. My job was to call real estate developers, collect data, and add it to a spreadsheet I was making with Lotus 1,2,3. I was starting graduate school in biology at NYU and just needed a job to pay the rent. It introduced me to

working with computers, for which I am thankful, but was otherwise a cul-de-sac on my life’s journey.

The office was about 10 or 12 stories up and the view consisted of the masonry walls of the surrounding buildings and the gulf of air between them. One day, early on in this sojourn, I looked up from the quavering, glowing green letters and numerals on my dark screen to see a hawk streak by. I soon realized that there were at least two species out there: sharp-shinned (or Cooper’s) and red-tailed hawks. The accipiter was chasing pigeons, and I presumed the red-tails were hunting rats in the alleys far below.

When I pointed out the existence of this enveloping ecosystem to a coworker, she was startled and even a little disturbed. Like me, she had ended up in real estate information by accident and her true interest was fashion. (She designed and made all her own clothes; I was told in awed tones by the office secretary.) But she didn’t seem to find any solace in the fact that our office was also an observatory that faced out on the vibrancy of the natural world. In fact, its presence seemed to make her nervous. My balm was her vague menace.

Thirty-six years later I am still sitting in front of a computer, but it is in a quite different setting. Our town office is a former one-room schoolhouse built in 1850. It sits next to the village green that once looked out over a mill pond, which long ago became an alder swamp. As such, it serves as a wildlife corridor and refuge. Instead of hawks and pigeons, we hear and see myriad songbirds, and everyone once in a while a bobcat or a bear walks by. It is easier to feel that I am amid the natural world in Wilmot versus Manhattan, but I know I have always been surrounded by events that go on inexorably and repeatedly that have nothing to do with the intentions and ambitions of my own species.

“If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Interestingly, in the 1910 textbook where this question first appeared, it read “no animal” not “no one.” That is, the physicist authors did not put a person at the center of their philosophical question, which is actually about the uncertainty of observation in the context of quantum physics.

I long mistakenly thought—because I only saw the “no one” version—that this query was about our relationship with the natural world; does it have its own independent existence aside from our perception of it? My answer was always a grouchy “Of course, there’s a sound. If a bird sings in the forest and only another bird hears it, then the proof of that hearing is that the bird successfully defends its territory and raises a brood.” We don’t need to hear the birds; it is enough that they hear each other. But I certainly enjoy listening in.

Through my skylight I hear the call of the local broad-winged hawk; they haven’t left yet.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot. A collection of these essays is available through amazon.com.