lessons were hardly profound. But they matter greatly. Now, as a parent and a college professor, it seems I relearn them weekly. The essays in this book chronicle this journey. At times, it’s been difficult and disorienting. But it’s been delightful, too.
Life has afforded me new eyes to see nature. In that roller-coaster year before we wed, Linda called me excitedly from work in Santa Barbara.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, unused to her calling midday.
“There’s a beautiful yellow-orange bird outside my window! It has a black bib,” she added.
“Is it a goldfinch or a house finch?” I asked, naming the first birds to come to mind.
“The bill is too slender,” she replied confidently. Not yet keen to the West Coast birds, I couldn’t come up with any alternatives.
“Can you draw it?” I asked. She came from a family of artists—I was confident she could.
“I’ll try.”
Later that night, Linda produced a sketch she’d done on a piece of scrap paper. Just a few simple but well-placed lines. Quick, yes. But obvious field marks and expert proportions. No doubt a hooded oriole. I was smitten, both with the bird and the artist. This was—and is—who she is. Linda overflows with curiosity about the natural world. While I’m obsessed with the creatures around us, Linda’s more balanced, thank heavens. While she’ll crane her neck out a window to see a cool bird, I’ll careen down a ravine. Our mutual interest is expressed differently but unites us nonetheless. I held onto the sketch for years. Fortunately, I’ve held onto Linda even longer. Her influence on my journey and that of our children lies behind the stories that follow.
I used to think I’d wait to write a nature book until my kids had grown up and left. But then I entered the forest with Linda, my kids, and later my college students. Everything changed. With Ezra, Indigo, and Willow at my side, I saw nature through young, impressionable lenses. Wonder deepened—the same wonder I’d felt watching the hornbill in the featureless thorn scrub. The richest book I could create, I realized, would be one that captures this wonder in the mixed-up, rarely planned moments that make up life.
I am an odd duck: a hybrid anthropologist-ecologist by trade who happens to have a special love of birds and nature. While I haven’t forced these interests on my kids, I have immersed them in it. A feeder is visible from every window of our house, and bird paraphernalia—carvings, feathers, and field guides—line every shelf. I even named one daughter Indigo after one of my favorite birds, the indigo bunting (I may or may not have known that another group of birds, the indigobirds, are renowned for their ability to parasitize other birds). A second daughter, Willow, is bird-friendly nomenclature as well. More than occasionally, however, I overdo it.
“No more birds, Dad!” Ezra occasionally shouts from the back seat after I’ve pulled over to get a better look at an overflying raptor. But in between his back seat directives, I’ve caught him craning his neck, too.
A few years ago, while enjoying a family dinner around the table, Ezra, then six years old, couldn’t conceal his mushrooming bird knowledge. “We’re going to go around in a circle and everybody is going to tell us what their day’s highlight was,” I had instructed, attempting to rein in the raucous dinner cacophony, focus the kids’ attention on mealtime, and teach them to take turns speaking.
“I’ll go first,” Ezra said, waving a macaroni noodle around on his fork like a baton. “I saw an indigo bunting while on the bus today! It was by the big bend in the road,” he added, as if more detail would verify his claim. His blue eyes held mine, waiting for my reaction. While he loved to get a rise out of me, this time at least, he wasn’t ruffling my feathers.
I have no idea if any of my kids—or my students—will one day enjoy nature as much as I do. But at the very least, they’ll be familiar with it. Since enjoyment is contingent upon understanding, familiarity seems like a step in the right direction.
This collection of essays spans a five-year period of my life as a fledgling father. They’re arranged thematically, not sequentially. As a result, the ages of my children fluctuate forward and backward, which may be disconcerting to the careful reader. Rest assured, I haven’t sired any Benjamin Buttons. While ages change, the mutual learning we all undergo doesn’t. Nor does our discovery of knowledge in unexpected places, or our collective familial decision to let nature lead.
One of the unexpected places popping up often in these pages is Africa. The continent has shaped my family mightily over the years, luring us back in spite of our best attempts to put down deeper roots in the States. Africa first called us as students and now as professors. Linda and I teach, yes. But we still learn far more, annually treated to profound lessons from wise and generous people who live far closer to the land than we do.
All the stories emerge from my experiences as a husband, father, professor, and lifelong lover of birds and nature. Some of these experiences have been delightful, some horrible, and most a combination thereof. This book, like life, isn’t about a destination. Rather, it’s about process, false starts, and learning from mistakes. It’s a book that shows that the youngest among us may appreciate nature best, and that life is at its richest when we go outdoors together and keep our eyes open. Lastly, it’s a book about coddiwompling. Like the ivory-billed woodpecker, this word doesn’t seem to exist regardless of how badly I want it to. Its definition: traveling in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination. This book examines the intersection of our lives with birds. Hopefully it begets a relationship. Where that relationship ends up is anybody’s guess. Perhaps to greater knowledge, deeper introspection, or a more satisfying view of nature. A little ambiguity is good; I’m convinced that the best paths take us to places we didn’t know we wanted to go.
Dr. Elliott Coues, a wild-eyed birder from a former century who did his share of coddiwompling, once wrote: “For myself, the time is past, happily or not, when every bird was an agreeable surprise, for dewdrops do not last all day; but I have never walked in the woods without learning something that I did not know before … how can you, with so much before you, keep out of the woods another minute?”
Like Coues, I can’t keep out of the woods another minute. So I may as well take my kids, my students, everyone. Nature has so much to teach us. To learn, we may have to give up control and let nature lead. Maybe, like the birds, we all just need to wing it.
Part I
THROUGH A CHILD’S EYES
Steller’s jay
Cyanocitta stelleri
1 • THE ONLY THINGS TO FEAR
Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast!
—John James Audubon
“Kestrels! They’re attacking!” my brother Andrew yelled from his sleeping bag. Three birds had landed on the railing above him, shattering the pre-dawn silence with cacophonous calls.
Andrew and I had spent the night sleeping out on the small deck of my red, ramshackle cabin. Now he was determined to get back inside. Unwilling to shed the pseudo-shield his sleeping bag provided Andrew chose to roll over me in my own sleeping bag, crawl to the door, and lurch inside like a clumsy, overgrown caterpillar.
