More’s the Pity

By Keith Michael

Birding is a terrible hobby. Don’t start. (I began noticing birds 25 years ago and haven’t been able to shake it.)

You see a bird — and then it flies away. What’s the point? (Maybe if I’m patient, it will come back.) 

You wait and wait and wait for the bird you’re hoping to see — and then it never shows up. (If I had only waited a little longer, I bet that I would have seen it.)

You DO see a new bird that you’ve never seen before — and then you just want to see ANOTHER new bird. (Incredibly, in the past month, I’ve added three new birds to my West Village List. The recent nor’easter stalled many migrating birds from continuing along their way. These three all took a layover on the Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park. The first, my West Village Bird #127, was a Tennessee Warbler. An already elusive bird to me, this one was particularly confusing in its fall olive-yellow, grayish-capped drabs.)

You start making lists that you never knew you needed. (The second new bird, my WVB #128, a perky, white-wing-barred Pine Warbler showed up, and you THINK it’s a new bird, but then you get home and realize you have photos of a Pine Warbler in the West Village from 2021, so it’s NOT a new bird, but you never added it to your numbered list, so it’s Schrodinger’s Bird: it both IS and ISN’T a new bird.)

While you’re LOOKING at a bird, a part of your brain is thinking about what OTHER bird you might be missing because you’re spending too much time looking at THIS bird, or what birds you might have seen if you’d gone THERE rather than stayed HERE. (While you’re pondering all of this, that third new bird flashes by the corner of your eye, my WVB #129, a classy, long-tailed russet Brown Thrasher. But it disappears into the brush. So, you SHOULD have stayed here rather than going to the other place. What if you just looked for birds HERE every day rather than galivanting all over the city? Might you just see more and more? Oh, the Brown Thrasher flashed by again. Now it’s behind me. Or if I just stay HERE longer today, what else might be around?)

 You want to go birding by yourself for the uninterrupted peacefulness — but then you see a bird that’s really cool, like that Brown Thrasher, and you wish there was someone there with you to see it too. (On the way home, you pass a fellow birder and tell them about it.)

You want to go birding with friends, so you make friends with other birders — but then you have to plan how and when to get together, and where you want to go, and THEN, when you’re there, you get talking about everything except the birds that you’re looking at. That all makes you wish that you had just gone out birding by yourself.

Bird watching gets expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people say, “Birding is the easiest thing. You can do it wherever you go. You just go outside and look for birds.” (I say that. I TELL people that.) But then, you want to see the birds a little bit BETTER, and you buy a pair of binoculars. Then you see someone with a camera and think that it might be fun to photograph birds, so you buy a camera. Then you want to see the birds even BETTER so you buy better (i.e. more expensive) binoculars or even a telescope. You want to take better photographs, so you invest in a fancier camera, and a longer lens. Next, you want to travel a little further to see different birds. You get the itch to travel even further to see REALLY different birds. You’ll start organizing trips around seeing birds. Every day begins to be planned for seeing birds.

One day, the birds aren’t showing up and a butterfly stops in front of you. Oh, I wonder what kind of butterfly that is? I wonder what the name of the wildflower is that it landed on? There’s an acorn on the ground beside the wildflower. What kind of oak tree did that fall from? The tiny mushroom beside the acorn opens up another rabbit hole. Rabbits? Do rabbits live here? Flying squirrels? Some places you can only go to at low tide, so you start checking the tide schedules, and the tides are affected by the cycle of the moon and offshore weather. Offshore? There are whales and dolphins and birds that you can only see from a boat far out on the ocean. During that nor’easter, the full moon high tide came over the seawall and left behind Moon Jellyfish on the promenade. Are they in the river all the time or is it seasonal? Beware. You’ll just get sucked in.

The problems of looking for birds are endless. Again, don’t start. The light will be bad. The birds will be too high in the trees. The birds will be too far away. The birds will never stay still. All those little brown birds are too confusing. There are too many different kinds of birds to remember. It’s cold. It’s hot. It’s raining. It’s windy. It’s buggy. It’s too early. It’s too far.

And then, if you get hooked by the iridescent, transient beauty of birds, frankly, you’re done for. There’ll be no turning back. I’m so sorry for you. Try not to even think about birds.

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PS: One evening, I DID stake out on the Upper West Side at sunset to see the latest NYC avian celebrities: the Barn Owl family that took up residence in a derelict water tower. The crowd of rubberneckers grew to dozens. The owls did make an appearance, albeit after dark, when you could only “see” them with a long camera exposure. By all means, DON’T get obsessed with owls.