Amanda Hagood
Every time I break for a flock of ibises – “Florida chickens” – crossing the road, I remember the words a friend always uses to describe the birdlife here in Florida: an embarrassment of riches. And while I’ve learned enough in my time here to distinguish a little blue heron from a tricolored, or tell you when a blue jay is calling for its posse, there’s a world of avian activity going on around me that I barely notice most of the time.
Nature and adventure writer Susan Fox Rogers was the same until an otherworldly bird call – “hollow and holy,” with a “texture like a silk accordion” – interrupted a conversation with her students and she, embarrassingly, could not identify it (it turned out to be a wood thrush). This story launches her forthcoming book “Learning the Birds: A Midlife Adventure” (Cornell University Press, 2022) and prompts her to begin a fascinating and funny adventure into the world of birdwatching.
Through a series of two dozen birding adventures, each told in wry and highly readable prose, she weaves stories of some important, if anticlimactic, midlife realizations about “the shape of my life – that there was not going to be a happily-ever-after story, that I would not write a best-selling book, and I would never be rich, or even the simple fact that my legs would always be too short.”
Along the way the book engages with the lives of work of extraordinary birders from Florence Merriam Bailey (who helped launch the Audubon Society movement) to Nathan Leopold (a notorious murderer). It also examines some of the foibles of serious birders, from “twitchers” who obsessively flock to places where rare birds alight, to fierce contests for best sightings documented on eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s public database. All of which Rogers finds herself, much to her surprise, actually doing.
Florida readers will particularly enjoy her jaunt through the Everglades, heart set on finding a flamingo. No luck there – but she does find some Shiny Cowbirds, a Roseate Spoonbill, some startling alligators, and some cool history about the plume trade in south Florida.
Rogers’s voice is distinct in its honest and self-effacing humor, but there’s an edge of urgency as she reports on the “dire statistics” around plummeting bird populations.
“I didn’t feel despair,” she writes, “rather dizzy with disbelief and overwhelmed with an urgency to see the birds. This urge was part selfish desire, but not entirely. Hooked into my sentiment was a sense that my witness of the birds could – would – keep them tethered to this earth.”
Fundamentally, “Learning the Birds” is a story of self-discovery in a phase of life that is unde-rexplored, and, like many of the “unremarkable” birds it documents, very much worth paying attention to.
