In northern British Columbia, where I live, early spring is signalled not by sprouting greens (as I write I am looking out the window at 3 feet of snow off the back deck), but by increasingly frequent birdsong and bird sightings. Robins sing in the mornings. When the fields in my neighbourhood start melting, sandhill cranes will stop by on their way to the Arctic. Migrant swans are flocking to nearby northern lakes that are still partially frozen.
For most of the winter, I’ve watched downy woodpeckers and their larger, pileated woodpecker cousins come to feast on suet from a feeder I hung on a backyard birch tree. A few years ago, I neither knew nor cared about the difference between these birds. But I had just moved back to the place where I was born, and learning to identify local birds felt like a new and deeper way to know my home place. I needed to find a different way to care about it again.
When we name things, we call a place into being, and fine-tune our perception of its composite parts. Instead of looking for simply “birds” around Prince George, I now watch for chickadees, dark-eyed juncos, pine grosbeaks, northern flickers, western tanagers, downy and pileated woodpeckers, goldeneye and merganser ducks. When I hear what sounds like a jackhammer in the forest, I look up to search the treetops for the red hood of a pileated woodpecker and I listen for its whooping jungle cry.
To watch anything in the natural world is to participate in a mystery. We don’t know what will appear, and that heightens our awareness. “That which cannot be understood ... demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing, a wonderful book that encouraged me to start paying more attention to birds. Birdwatching grounds us in the reality of our body living in a space. It gives us “something to point to after all of this and say, This is really real,” writes Odell. What we pay attention to shapes our sense of reality: this is a simple but radical notion in today’s world, as we scroll on social platforms designed to addictively grab our attention. “Observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online,” Odell writes. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.” One can build “a new map of attention based on the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing.” If you want to feel awake and alive, look for the birds.
Bird-watching can also relieve us of existential angst by reminding us of vast, non-human scales of time, the subject of Jenny Odell’s latest book Saving Time, which I’ve just begun reading. Seasonal bird migration was going on long before we got here, and will hopefully continue long after we are gone. The lives of these animals do not change much; here is a botanical illustration from 1888 that could be a scene from my backyard.
Other sweet things:
A further bird-related book:
In March’s newsletter I wrote that I was enjoying “short, poetic personal essays and memoirs that are ostensibly about ‘nature’ but actually about everything else.” I am still in this reading era and can now recommend Kyo Maclear’s short and sweet Birds Art Life. Maclear structures the book around a calendar year of urban bird-watching. The bird encounters provide a scaffolding for her tender reflections on childhood, regret, death, friendships, anxiety, art-making, parenthood, and marriage.
When old photos make you want to jump on a plane:
At this time six years ago, I was on a very impromptu trip to Japan, wandering around Kyoto alone during the peak of the cherry and plum blossom spring blooms. This remains one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I was crawling out of a deep depression, and looking at those trees bursting with colour was the first step in waking back up.
Self portrait as a pile of books:
In March I finished a new self portrait, my first attempt in four years:
I wrote more about the imagery I worked with in this post. Painting this was a joy. I got to think about all the ways I form my sense of self beyond my physical body - how books, artistic influences, clothes, and places shape who I am. I particularly loved thinking about how the books we read (or aspire to read) are a kind of self portrait on their own, a record of our inner life. What would your self portrait as a pile of books look like?
Spring songs:
I made a sprawling playlist for the season: songs about birds, songs with birdsong layered into the track, songs about gardening, songs that remind me of springs past, songs to dance to while spring cleaning, songs for driving with the windows down, songs with propulsive spring energy. Listen to it here. (Sorry Spotify pals, I’m an Apple Music nerd)
Thank you for reading! I hope you are finding ways to let the light in:
Lovely post, Emily!
I think I'll check out some of those readings you cited!