reductions, Botox … We’re so steeped in sexual selection we’ve almost ceased to see it. For our species, it’s less clear who’s dressing up for whom, and who’s doing the choosing. Nuances aside, the many multi-billion dollar industries that result from Darwin’s simple theory are testament to its unparalleled presence and power.
Despite clichés that warn me against it, I continue to—at least initially—judge books by their covers. But watching tanagers and trainbearers has exposed me to double standards I didn’t know I had. Although I like to think otherwise, I’m just as susceptible to preening and prancing. So I’ve resolved to change. Not cataclysmically, of course. Enough to make me opt for spending thirty minutes on a walk instead of the weight room, veering away from these many-mirrored rooms devoted to vanity. More importantly, I’ve learned that lots of human nature is as brainless as the backyard cows I once watched.
No, I don’t have the luxury of a pasture out back to educate my son about sex. But I’ve got a creek, a forest, a whole ecosystem. For learning about the birds and the bees, we’ll have to forgo cows. And I think we’ll leave the bees alone, too. I’m not worried. As I learned in Ecuador, the birds will more than suffice.
Great gray owl
Strix nebulosa
8 • SEARCHING FOR A LANDSCAPE IDENTITY
Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.
—José Ortega y Gasset
“Great gray owl!” my son, Ezra, shouted from the backseat. I hit the brakes and pulled over, Ezra and I craning our necks out the side windows.
“Nope.” I lowered my binoculars. “Barred owl.”
“Gimme your bins, Dad!” Ezra demanded, his absence of manners almost as troubling as his incredulity. I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Here was a scientist—a born skeptic—squeezed into a nine-year-old body. “Guess you’re right,” he conceded, handing back my binoculars.
We were slightly deflated. Granted, any owl was cool. But we were after a great gray, undisputed Zeus of the owl pantheon. Although exceedingly rare, we had expected a great gray here in this nondescript meadow in the mountains of southern Oregon. Why? For a simple reason: I had seen one here before.
Other birders have confessed they share in my suffering. It’s a common, yet chronic, disease. The symptoms are straightforward but the cure, if there is one, isn’t. It goes like this: If you see something cool, the next time out—perhaps even years later—you expect to see it where you did that first time. My particular manifestation of this odd, nature-lover affliction is even worse. I often expect to see what I’ve seen before not only in the same tree, but perched on the very same limb.
Species themselves are partly to blame. Some exhibit, in the lingo of behaviorists, strong site fidelity, otherwise known as philopatry. Derived from the Greek, meaning “home-loving,” philopatric critters are loyal to localities. Some megapodes, or ground-laying birds, in Australia, for example, will reuse the same mound for a nest every year, only abandoning it when calamity strikes or it literally falls down around them. That’s breeding-site philopatry. Another form, natal philopatry, is living out your years where you were raised. This coming-back-to-our-roots is the form most of us can relate to. It also explains my particular fondness for a pair of phoebes that faithfully chooses the same eave under my porch year after year after year. When this pair passes on, I’m confident their kids or grandkids will take over. They’re attached and so am I.
But nature is varied. Many other species refuse to don such straitjackets. When they’re not manacled to a nest or frantically feeding fledglings, they’re prone to wander widely. Others are more nomadic, dyed-in-the-wool vagabonds—the human equivalent of our wanderlust friends that head west in their vintage Volkswagen camper vans. I understand all this. Even so, each day I drive home from work, I scan the same snag or ditch or fencepost, hoping for the same owl or hawk or meadowlark that I saw once before. Rain or snow, if my friends aren’t where they’re supposed to be, I’m let down. But hope springs eternal, and tomorrow I’ll scan the exact same places again.
Part of the problem is that the roots of this see-it-once-expect-to-see-it-again condition are buried in a spot that’s only accessible to a brain surgeon: the medial temporal lobe of the hippocampus. This vast neuronal network is the wardrobe in which our mental maps and memories are hung. When we revisit a place where we experienced something memorable—say, saw a great gray owl—the place cells in the hippocampus fire anew. As Jennifer Ackerman writes in The Genius of Birds, our memory of a thought is married to the place where it first happened.
This is why, I’m guessing, many birders I know are as philopatric as some of the species they search for. We birders pay attention. Consciously or not, we’re perpetually scanning: tree limbs, rooflines, hilltops. We study contours, scrutinize specks, and look for irregularity. Usually we find nothing. Occasionally, lightning strikes. And when it does, and that irregularity turns into a great gray owl, it’s satisfying in the same way that finding your lost car keys is, provided they’re in a spot you’ve already looked twelve times, of course. Over time, our well of memorable sightings deepens and our connection to place—our place—grows stronger. Certainly the lure of watching bountiful birds in exotic locales is ever enticing. But my circle of birder friends agree with Dorothy: there’s no place like home.
These feelings form, in the words of psychologist Ferdinando Fornara and his Italian research team, a landscape identity. For Fornara, this identity includes “a set of memories, conceptions, interpretations, and feelings related to a specific physical setting.” It goes like this: The more time we spend in an area, the stronger the bond. Everybody who lives in a place for a while develops some sort of landscape identity. Seems pretty obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is my guess that birders—and surely botanists, lepidopterists, and all stripes of nature lovers—form stronger landscape identities than others. Why? Because it’s not only the birds we grow fond of. The habitats that house the birds—the swamps, brush piles, and power lines—become just as wonderful. Because of this, birders and other nature-lovers can find beauty in places others can’t.
This is why I wasn’t too surprised when I saw a house advertised recently on an online birding listserv. It was near, but not on, Lake Ontario. Rather than lakefront with expansive views, this house was across the street, its view obstructed by other houses, fences, and hedges. “Great house and migratory stopover site,” the ad read. “Rarities not uncommon.” Despite the oxymoronic last line, the house undoubtedly lived up to its billing. Every spring and fall, songbirds, intimidated or exhausted by the Great Lake, probably dropped by in droves. The birds didn’t need waterfront and limitless views. They wanted brushy tangles, hedges, and swampy areas—places with food. The advertised house was one refined aesthetes with deep wallets would scoff at. Quite literally, it was a house for the birds. And since it was, the savvy house lister went after birders.
System administrators promptly removed the listing, which didn’t surprise me either. It was a site for listing birds, not houses. Regrettably, I wasn’t able to read the fine print before the ad was pulled. Perhaps it was an opportunistic birder who needed to sell the house quickly. I can’t help but hope on a deeper level that the house seller and I are the same species, one with a stronger-than-usual landscape identity, made even stronger by the great birds that we can’t keep ourselves from searching for.
Just around the bend from where I spent my childhood summers in Pennsylvania lies a bucolic township of rolling fields called Brooklyn. This Brooklyn, with less than 1,000 people, couldn’t be more different from
