"Complex Questions of Existence...Quietly Dressed in Feathers and Flight"

Snowy Egret -- Great Marsh, Rowley, MA      Copyright: Lynn Schweikart 2011

Birding is one of my favorite peaceful activities. Whether it's an early May morning at Mount Auburn cemetery or just about anytime in the vicinity of Plum Island, I can't think of anything more relaxing and rejuvenating than wandering about with binoculars and bird book in hand.  Best of all, birding is something you can do anywhere -- in my garden on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay, I've seen chickadees, robins, cardinals, goldfinches, warblers, thrushes, even a red-tailed hawk. 

So it was with great pleasure that I started reading Laura Jacobs' wonderful article, "Knowing a Hawk From a Handsaw" on the online version of The Wall Street Journal. Jacobs provides a valuable service in reviewing the pros and cons of the six primary field guides to North American birds, including the venerable  "A Field Guide to the Birds" published in 1934 by Roger Tory Peterson, which she likens to Emily Post's "Etiquette" and Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," in that all three "opened the door to a rarefied world of patterns and facts, inviting the ignorant and the ambitious alike to take part in something that had previously seemed impenetrable or academic—or the province of a leisured class."

But more than just a guide to the guides, Jacobs has written a homage to birding itself. and provided some powerful insights as to why this has become such a popular pastime: "the cyclical nature of birding, its concentration on the horizon and the sky, its unanswered questions about migration, speak to unknowns, to the unthinkables in life: time and loss and life span. Birds bring us these complex questions of existence, but quietly, dressed in feathers and flight." 

I found myself nodding in agreement with her conclusion: "Deep beneath the social, competitive, aesthetic and poetic attractions of birding is a longing, not for Eden, where nothing was yet named and knowledge was unnecessary, but for a role in nature's mystery play, where to tell a hawk from a handsaw is a matter of life and death."