The Delightful Horror of Family Birding by Eli J. Knapp

Author:Eli J. Knapp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Scarlet tanager

Piranga olivacea

17 • THE DEONTOLOGICAL BIRDER

Reality is unforgivingly complex.

—Anne Lamott

I like to teach ornithology. I crave it, actually. Fundamental concepts like synchronous hatching and brood parasitism are balm to my soul. If I spy any literature on birds, from a soiled brochure to a multi-volume encyclopedia, I devour it with alacrity. I have a birdbrain: my occipital lobe records our feathered friends at the expense of everything else, my temporal lobe ferrets out avian-related facts, and my hippocampus caches it all away like a scrub jay does acorns. Teaching ornithology feels effortless, like a hawk riding thermals. So, naturally, I welcome questions and look forward to the earnestly raised hand.

“What bird was that?” Mason asked, flagging me with a raised pen as my class stood around me in a clearing in the woods.

“A scarlet tanager,” I replied, wishing the ravishing red bird with jet-black wings would give us one more flyover. Mason scribbled the name into his journal and looked back at me, making no effort to conceal ongoing puzzlement.

“Come to think of it, what is a tanager?” He glanced around at the eleven other much less curious students. I smiled. This was a moment I loved: an earnest student, a sunny May morning, and an easy, softball question. Unlike the other courses I taught, in this one I was confidently full of answers.

“A tanager is any member of the Thraupidae family.” I tried to conceal the poignant pleasure I felt displaying my arcane knowledge. I had hardly worked to memorize the 234 bird families the world boasts; I just read them a few times and they stuck. Finally, knowledge that was so profoundly useless in every other aspect of life seemed meaningful and pertinent. I couldn’t resist continuing. “We have four tanagers in the US: the hepatic, the summer, the western, and the one you just saw—the scarlet—who lives here in the Northeast. They’ve divvied up the continent like a bunch of colonial imperialists. The summer claims the Southeast, the hepatic the Southwest, and the western, well, that’s obvious.” I paused, wondering if I’d overwhelmed my students. Half were madly scribbling while the rest—the Type Bs—were staring dreamily into the canopy.

Except for Mason. He did neither, opting instead to stare at me with a furrowed brow. Obviously he wasn’t downloading my barrage of tanager data. “Did I confuse you?” I asked, wondering why we weren’t connecting.

“What I mean is,” Mason said, pulling the end of his pen out of his mouth, “what is a tanager?” He drew out the “is,” emphasizing it with a higher pitch.

“Well, like I said, it’s any songbird in the Thraupidae family.” Maybe Mason simply needed more info. “If you travel south to the New World tropics, you’ll encounter hordes—over two hundred—of different tanager species. But … it’s a problematic family. Some experts want them reclassified due to new molecular evidence. A few species may be moved into the Fringillidae, the finches, while others, like the scarlet we just saw, may get put into the cardinal family.

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