Journal
Life of the Skies
Since discovering birds 14 years ago, an urbane New York novelist has taken an unexpected journey and found his place in the world.
By Jonathan Rosen

Excerpted from The Life of the Skies, published in February by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Rosen. All rights reserved.

CAUTION: Users are warned that the Work appearing herein is protected under copyright laws and reproduction of the text, in any form for distribution is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the Work via any medium must be secured with the copyright owner.

Everyone is a birdwatcher, but there are two kinds of birdwatchers: those who know what they are and those who haven’t yet realized it. In the United States, a lot of people have realized it—47.7 million Americans, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—and yet my passion is constantly greeted with surprise. You? Perhaps it is because I live in a city and lead an urban life. But why should people wonder that I watch birds? It’s like being surprised that someone has sex or goes to the bathroom. The surprise reveals ignorance not so much about birds—their beauty, their abundance, their wild allure—as about human nature. We need, as the great biologist Edward O. Wilson has argued, to affiliate with nature in order to be happy. He calls this phenomenon “biophilia.”

The urge to watch birds is all but instinctive, dating, no doubt, from a time when knowing the natural world—what could be eaten and what could eat us, what would heal us and what would bring death—was essential. It is fed by our urge to know, as strong as our urge to eat. Could you imagine a lion stalking prey not out of hunger but out of curiosity? We name things, we classify them. In the Bible, Adam gives names to the natural world, imposing a human order on a chaos of life, a kind of second Creation.

Birdwatching is as human an activity as there can be. We have one foot in the animal kingdom—where, biologically, we belong—but one foot in a kingdom of our own devising. As Walt Whitman said of himself, we are “both in and out of the game/and watching and wondering at it.”

As it turns out, living in a city and watching birds is hardly a contradiction. Modern birdwatching is virtually an urban invention. Institutions of higher learning where bird skins were available, not to mention collection curators who brought their indoor learning outdoors, were virtual prerequisites as birdwatching came of age.

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, said Dr. Johnson. I live in New York City, a metropolis greater than Johnson’s London, and I feel the same way about my city—but I feel this way partly because it was in New York City that I discovered birds. More and more I realize that to be bored with birds is to be bored with life. I say birds rather than some generic “nature,” because birds are what remain to us. Yes, deer and coyotes show up in the suburbs, you can see grizzlies in Yellowstone Park, and certainly there are bugs galore. But in Central Park, two blocks from my apartment, hundreds of species of birds pass through by the thousands every spring and fall, following ancient migratory routes as old as the Ice Age.

If herds of buffalo or caribou moved seasonally through the park, I’d no doubt go out to see them. But the only remaining wild animals in abundance that carry on in spite of human development are birds. The tropical forest is far away, but these birds, who often winter there, bring it with them. Here is the nature my biophiliac soul needs to affiliate with.

Emerson said that if the stars appeared in the night sky only once every thousand years, we would “preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God.” But the stars come out every night, and as it is, many of us scarcely look up; if we do, we find a sky so crowded with artificial light that we hardly notice what else is up there.

The stars suddenly came out for me 14 years ago. I was at lunch in Manhattan in late March when I overheard a man say, with great excitement, “The warblers will be coming through Central Park soon.” Somehow, for reasons I still can’t explain, I knew right then and there that even though I wasn’t sure what warblers were, I was going to go and find them.

With uncharacteristic follow-through I signed up for an introduction to birdwatching at the local branch of the Audubon Society in the West Twenties in Manhattan (who even knew such a place existed in New York City?). There were two classes and two field trips. In the classes we were shown slides of birds and then asked, after the image vanished, to draw what we had been shown.

I was appalled to discover how bad I was at remembering—that a wood duck has a helmet of feathers almost like a Greek warrior; that a cedar waxwing has a band of yellow at the base of its tail and a tiny splotch of red on its wing, like sealing wax, from which it gets its name. Even the obvious cardinal—a bird I’d seen my whole life—surprised me; I had never noticed it has not merely a red body but a red bill, and that its face is masked in black.

“Try to be one of the people,” said Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost.” As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

It wasn’t my eyes, of course, but some larger quality of vision, a capacity for noticing that was like an unused muscle. As a boy I’d loved Sherlock Holmes stories, and my favorite moment was always when Holmes dazzles Watson by telling him that the murderer must have been a tall man with a limp and unclipped fingernails who smoked a cigar (brand always specified). Of course, Sherlock Holmes also explains to his disbelieving friend that he makes a point of not knowing many things—for example, that the earth revolves around the sun. According to Holmes, the attic of the mind can’t be too cluttered with extraneous information and ideas if you are going to fill it with important things like details.

Sitting in the classroom, I already felt the furniture in my head getting re-arranged, a great emptying out and a great filling up—of names and pictures. Is there anything more pleasant than looking? Birdwatching is sanctioned voyeurism. Heading for the subway afterward, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see one of the men in the class dart into a topless bar across the street.

Birds are the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs—a shocking fact. Who would have believed that those little feathered beauties have so much in common with the hulking skeletons in the American Museum of Natural History that so enthralled me when I was a child? Perhaps birding is the adult fulfillment of a childhood fascination. Except that most birds aren’t extinct (though many species teeter on the brink). They’re as close to a velociraptor as I’ll come. The more you look at birds, the more you feel remnants of their cold-blooded reptile past; the pitiless round eye and mechanical beak somehow tell you that if you were the size of an ant, they’d peck you up in a second.

None of these thoughts was in my head as I began birding. On the two birding field trips that came with my introduction to birding class—one to Central Park, the other to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens—it was simply the pleasure of looking that hooked me, even as I discovered that the birds that had seemed so exotic in class were frequently referred to in the guidebook as “common.”

At Jamaica Bay—accessible from my apartment by subway—I saw ibises and egrets and snow geese flying against the Manhattan skyline as airplanes from nearby John F. Kennedy Airport took off and landed. I loved that I could see birds against the silhouette of the World Trade Center, incorrectly perceiving this as a poetic juxtaposition of the permanent towers and the evanescent birds. Discovering that you yourself, and the civilization from which you peer out, are as fragile as the birds you are watching is also part of the story—though this was something else I did not realize at the time.

Gradually the strange contradictory elements of birding seeped into me and deepened its rich appeal. Birdwatching, like all great human activities, is full of paradox. You need to be out in nature to do it, but you are dependent on technology—binoculars—and also on the guidebook in your back pocket, which tells you what you’re seeing. The challenge of birding has to do with keeping the bird and the book in balance.

The book you bring with you draws the birds you see into the library world—a system of names dating from the 18th century, when scientists ordered the plant and animal world and labeled them so that anyone in any country would know he was referring to the same bird. But at the same time that you are casting your scientific net over the wild world, the birds are luring you deeper into the woods or the meadow or the swamp. The library world and the wild, nonverbal world meet in the middle when you are birdwatching. We need both sides of this experience to feel whole, being half wild ourselves. Birdwatching is all about the balance.

Darwin began by simply looking, accumulating beetles, birds, eggs as a schoolboy. Sailing around the world on the Beagle as an energetic 22-year-old, he gathered anything he could drop in alcohol, shoot, or press between pages. It was only after his five-year collecting trip was over that this acquisitiveness gave way to deep thought, and to the great melancholy theory we all still grapple with today. But things, even when you don’t think about their meaning, still hint at meaning.

The first thing we’re told Sherlock Holmes has banished from his brain is Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. Who needs such gloomy knowledge weighing down your thoughts?—though as a homicide detective Holmes is everywhere presented with evidence of our imperfect nature and doesn’t really need to know that our planet is not the center of the universe. In the same way, birding, an exhilarating diversion, is nevertheless freighted with the burden of natural history. Tennyson’s 1850 poem “In Memoriam” saw “Nature, red in tooth and claw” nine years before the publication of The Origin of Species, with its grim definition of evolution as an endless bloody struggle for survival. Tennyson got there simply by longing for a dead friend and looking at the world around him.

But the lessons we divine looking at nature aren’t always gloomy ones. Looking at birds, I feel, for lack of a better word, whole. I had grown up believing that if you could not articulate something, it did not really exist. This law was contradicted for me by birding. There was something wonderful about seeing birds going dumbly about their business, without reflection or articulation. They did not seem diminished because of this, they did not seem like lesser animals. They seemed fully alive and complete in themselves. And some of this feeling of completeness rubbed off on me, in the same way that having children later on altered my way of being in the world. Having children is, partly, a biological delight—those moments when you are all lying on the big bed, maybe you are talking or singing and maybe you are quiet, but there is a kind of lounging, monkey-troop delight that always makes me think of those moments in a nature film when the chimps are grooming each other, chasing each other around a tree, fishing calmly for termites. They seem to possess something that transcends happiness or sadness—they simply are. Birding gives me a little of that, a glimpse of rightness that may not be something I can articulate but that I know is there and that reduces the sting of my intellectual anxi-eties about evolution.

D.H. Lawrence, in his poetry collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, declares that “birds are the life of the skies, and when they fly, they reveal the thoughts of the skies.” For many years I used to quote that line incorrectly—I thought it was “when they sing, they reveal the thoughts of the sky.” I was very happy when I realized I was wrong. Birds can’t articulate meaning with their voices, much as we may love their songs. It is their bodies that speak the truth. Nerdy, wordy birding isn’t an intellectual activity. The bird is either there or it isn’t.

In his poem “Of Mere Being,” Wallace Stevens describes a “palm at the end of the mind.” This tree grows “beyond the last thought”—maybe death, and maybe something beyond even death. In that tree, of course, there is a bird:

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

The fact that the bird is not singing for the benefit of the human listener is oddly not disheartening; it’s proof that something new and strange is there. The yearning hero of Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift attempts a spiritual exercise in which you remind yourself, whenever you hear a dog bark, that the bark is not for you. It is a sound coming out of a creature separate from you, with its own mysterious life. This exercise is intended to break the solipsistic manner in which we often go through the world. To let real outside otherness penetrate our bubble of self-absorption. This is how I felt when I went birdwatching those first few times. The strange fact that the birds were there brought home the strange fact that I was there.

What Stevens captures so well in his weird poem is the essence of the title, the sense “of mere being”:

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The bird is simply there—alien, but the fact that it is alien is oddly a sign of hope, because even though it is in our minds, it is not of our minds. It is something else. It is reality—though maybe a very unfamiliar reality. It is not “the reason” that makes us happy or sad. Being happy or sad is separate from this reality.

Stevens conjures, in a very cerebral poem, the opposite of thought. Just as he creates, despite the weird chilliness of the poem, a kind of comfort. The sort of comfort that comes from encountering reality—even harsh reality, even death.

Spinoza said it is necessary to love God without in any way expecting God to love you back. This was the sort of thing that helped get Spinoza excommunicated in 17th-century Amsterdam, but for me it is a perfectly understandable and oddly consoling assertion. Just as I love watching birds, knowing full well they couldn’t care less about me. Their existence is still bound up with mine, we share a secret, though I am hard pressed to tell you what it is.

In Consilience, a stirring book suggesting that all knowledge is governed by a handful of laws, Edward O. Wilson writes: “Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science.” Wilson seems to anticipate grand new godless sagas spun out of evolutionary knowledge that will perhaps replace works like the Bible, whose relevance has waned in a rationalist world. I am too wedded to my own inherited saga to go along with him—birds may not have been created on the fifth day, as the Bible tells us, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t, like us, in some sense descended from a divine act of creation. Nevertheless, I am deeply inspired by a great deal of Wilson’s writing, and I see in birding a fulfillment of some of his observations.

Birds shuttle between what is urban in us and what is wild. They knit these things together in our soul. Birding surrounds us with our evolutionary history, but it also connects us to that word, “soul,” which—however much it seems an embarrassment in contemporary culture—nevertheless is as hard to kill off as our animal heritage. I can’t think of any activity that more fully captures what it means to be human in the modern world than watching birds.

Wilson writes: “Interpretation will be the more powerful when braided together from history, biography, personal confession—and science.” Birding for me is a kind of intermediate term, a place where poets and naturalists, scientific seekers and religious seekers, converge.

Can religion and science meet somewhere in the middle? And what about science and art? Can we stitch earth and sky together again, in a single fabric of meaning? Birdwatching is intimately connected to the journey we all make to find a place for ourselves in a post-Darwinian world. It is a journey that began for me, quite simply, by looking up.

Jonathan Rosen is the author of the nonfiction work The Talmud and the Internet as well as the novels Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning. This essay is adapted from his newly published book, The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature, available in February from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Back to Top