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OUT-OF-TOWNER The parks, and the city around them, may be made by men and women, but the wildlife that flashes through is no less real.
ON a cold morning late last month, I took a subway to Union Square Park to see a bird I had never seen. The bird, a Scott’s oriole, had been noted intermittently behind the statue of Mohandas Gandhi since December, though it took birders several weeks to figure out that it was not in fact an orchard oriole — which would have been unusual enough for winter in Manhattan. Scott’s oriole is a bird of the Southwest and has never been recorded in New York. It should be no farther east than Texas, which is why, despite my sluggardly winter ways, I decided it was worth a trip down from the Upper West Side, where I live.
Alongside my excitement, I felt a qualm of embarrassment as I exited the busy subway with my binoculars. It was like taking a taxi to hunt big game: “Let me off near the wildebeest, driver.” In Central Park, I can at least conjure the illusion of wildness if I focus on the trees. But when your marker is a metal statue of a man in a loincloth, standing on what is essentially a traffic island, you cannot pretend you are in the middle of nature.
Then again, that’s the point of bird-watching. “Nature” isn’t necessarily elsewhere. It is the person holding the binoculars, as much as the bird in the tree, and it is the intersection of these two creatures, with technology bringing us closer than we have ever been to the very thing technology has driven from our midst. And, anyway, there are still wild elements in the center of a city. The morning I arrived, the bird had made itself scarce, perhaps because a red-tailed hawk, a Cooper’s hawk and a kestrel were all patrolling the park.
I was not the only birder there. Everyone had read the same birding e-mail messages I had, and we were all staking out the southwest corner of the park, scanning the same stunted holly trees and viburnum.
Oranges and banana slices had been scattered on the ground, like votive offerings. The first report I read of the bird had it eating a kaiser roll. Several people had been there for hours, and two men showed me pictures of the bird that they had taken on their digital cameras that very day. They were hoping for a last look and braving the cold in the knowledge that by noon, sunlight would again fall on the building-shadowed corner of the park and entice the lemon-yellow, black-headed bird back into view.
Vagrant though the bird was, it seemed to me that there was also a rightness to its having landed in Union Square. This was not simply because of the statue of Gandhi, suggesting the need for simplicity and putting me to shame in his cotton dhoti and sandals as I shivered in my down jacket. My feelings also had to do with the park itself, named originally for the union of Broadway (then called Bloomingdale Road) and the Bowery.
Bird-watching is all about the coming together of disparate things, not merely earth and sky but the union of technology and a hunger for the wild world. “Imaginary gardens with real toads” is how Marianne Moore described poetry. Birding in city parks evokes much the same sensation. The parks, and the cities around them, may be human-made, but the wildlife that flashes through is no less real.
On the building across from where I stood, high up on the brick wall, there was a metal box that from time to time emitted the cry of a peregrine falcon. It was just a recording, but it roused the pigeons on the windowsills into a sort of lazy panic, getting them to rise and fly a few circles in the air before resettling. Even real peregrine falcons have a hint of the artificial about them, having been brought back from the brink by falconers expert in the ways of an ancient art that involved borrowing a bird from the wild and then turning it loose again.
Like the greenmarket in Union Square that brings apples and vegetables from outside the city, the token bird in the park is a reminder of an older way of life we are still intimately connected to and vitally in need of.
And like birders with their binoculars, we are not necessarily doomed by our modernity to exclusion from wildness. Bird-watching was born in cities — combining technology, urban institutions of higher learning, an awareness of the vanishing wild places of the earth and a desire to welcome what is left of the wild back into our world.
The name Union Square accumulated layers of later meaning, from the great rally held there in 1861 for the Union troops, and the Labor Day marches that took place later that century. In its own way, Scott’s oriole belongs with Union Square’s famous 19th-century monuments, most especially the 1868 statue of Abraham Lincoln.
THE bird was named by Darius Nash Couch, a Union general who was also a naturalist. (There were a lot of army men in the 19th century who used their postings as a way to record bird life.) Couch named the bird in honor of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was known as “Old fuss and feathers,” though I feel sure that is not the reason he got a bird named after him; one of the great soldiers in American history, Scott began his career with the War of 1812 and ended it with the Civil War.
The bird is a monument to 19th-century ornithology, but it had defied its label and was doing what creatures with wings do: flying out of range and surprising us with life. It is never enough to know the name of a bird when you are birding. It is the mysterious unknowable animal that lives alongside the named and classified creature that draws us out to look.
By noon on that cold January day, about 20 birders had gathered, craning with increasing urgency into the bushes as the little patch of grass behind Gandhi grew brighter. And suddenly the bird was there. Someone pointed, and then we all saw it. It came down to the ground and, without ceremony, pecked at a piece of banana.
Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook. His book about bird-watching, “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature,” is being published this month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
BOOK REVIEW
'The Life of the Skies' by Jonathan Rosen
A meditation on birds and the history of American bird-watching as it bears on our relationships with nature.
By Richard Eder
February 17, 2008
The Life of the Skies
Jonathan Rosen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 326 pp., $24
In the mid-1990s, Jonathan Rosen took a bird-watching trip to New York's Jamaica Bay. Across the water, ibises and egrets and snow geese flew against the Manhattan skyline, their silhouettes flickering past the World Trade Center. This was a "poetic juxtaposition of the permanent towers and the evanescent birds," he reflected, a pirouettish thought that changed a few years later into the chill irony of prophecy reversed.
The birds are still here, and in all manner of variety. Rosen walks out regularly through Central Park from his nearby apartment to watch them. In cities, he notes, they are "the only remaining wild animals in abundance that carry on in spite of human development." They are what we have of nature.
That is only the start of "The Life of the Skies," a book of exuberant range, of insight and far sight, of trapezes swung for and caught, and now and then a trapeze too far. There are a great many birds in it, avidly watched, but to think of it as about bird-watching is to think of prayer as about steeples.
Rosen's is a restless mind with a lyrical and exploring bent. An essayist, novelist and former culture editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, he works on the principle that if you reach a long way and often, your grasp score will be pretty good. His reaches and grasps make connections of all kinds, most especially between the rival poles of science and religion.
These were seriously and playfully displayed in "The Talmud and the Internet," where Rosen argued that a particular kind of thinking -- in webs -- is common to both Jewish theology and digital computing. In his new book, still touching at length on science and faith, he strives to connect -- or find a middle ground between -- the human need to master nature and to be mastered by it. We are torn between the desire to be free to build, cut down, expand and develop "and the desire to live among free things that can survive only if we are less free."
Our technological encroachments threaten birds in so many places -- the rain forests, the wetlands -- yet to be human we need them to stand for what remains free of us. In contrast to our incessant articulation, birds simply are. ("What a grand shivaree / of nightingales singing / not one voice / belongs to me," wrote the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén.) They are both Rosen's subject and the glass through which a wider subject is seen. He writes about birds of all kinds; he quotes poets, Darwinists and anti-Darwinists on birds; he goes to Israel to watch them.
Rosen also makes two trips to the South to accompany ornithologists seeking the possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, which the marsh dwellers sometimes call the "Lord God bird" -- brilliantly scarlet, black and white, 20 inches long. They fail to spot it, but he puts the search in the context of a more universal need. His father has been stricken with dementia; the quest is a protest against the dying light -- the world's as well. "I did not want the bird to be erased from biological consciousness," he writes, "and extinction is a form of zoological memory loss."
Following Rosen's darting connections -- occasionally they can seem like disconnections -- is something of a bird watch itself. A flash of brilliant color, a disappearing hop, a reappearance two bushes away. He is a writer of intuitive flights, a counter-dogmatist and, with his mystical faith in nature, particularly counter to the environmental purists. The draining of Huleh Lake in Israel was a serious injury to the wildlife, yet the reclaimed land, an Israeli naturalist tells him, was essential to the imperiled young state in the 1950s. DDT is a scourge, but so too is malaria. Henry David Thoreau evoked a purity of solitude and self-reliance in the woods, yet he would sometimes go home to have supper with his mother.
Furthermore, Rosen writes, Thoreau's scorn for the materialist striving of farmers and tradesmen was a paradox. They were closer than he was to his revered birds, which, like them, spend their time fetching food, building nests and -- the avian equivalent of lawsuits over fences -- flapping and squawking to defend them.
We too are part of nature, he insists, and his "we" encompasses the full range of human needs and aspirations: health, security, comfort, pleasure. It is a balance he seeks, while, quite winningly, he can make balance feel like civil war.
An old carol has God placing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden "to dress and keep it well." For Rosen, to dress and keep our planet well means dressing and keeping ourselves well. And also, and perhaps more passionately and vividly, the other way around.
Richard Eder, a former Times book critic, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1987.
