Essays about Birds & the People Who Watch Them
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The Lonesome Whip-Poor-Will
I’m writing a book about birds in American culture — specifically, the Eastern Whip-poor-will! Visit the lonesomewhippoorwill.com for more.
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What Robins Take With Them
I have had occasion—three times now—to watch a robin die. The first to causes unknown, three decades or so ago. I was a child, perhaps ten or twelve years old. I collected an ill or wounded bird from near my family’s home. My uncertainty about her condition says everything. The bird died, because she was dying and because all I had was a human’s stubborn belief in the life-giving force of a human’s stubborn belief.
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The Towhee's Lesson
Though their songs and calls are better known, birds fill the world with other sounds. It is for this reason, and also because many birds would sooner be heard than seen, that the artist and author Jenny Odell writes that bird-watching is a peculiar name for the activity she calls bird-noticing. After all, “half if not more of bird-watching is actually bird-listening,” Odell writes in How to Do Nothing.
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The Nighthawk's Trajectory
I’m an agnostic in all things but nighthawks, for with the bullbat I hold this belief: one cannot pursue the bird directly; rather, one can only seek a trajectory that may someday cross theirs.
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The Joys of Bird-watching
One of the first lessons new birdwatchers learn has nothing to do with birds and everything to do with the people who watch them. Those who are serious about watching birds call themselves “birders,” eschewing the more familiar “bird-watcher” label.
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The Thrill of "Discovering" New Denver Birds in the Century-Old Footsteps of a Pioneer
While looking for birds in Denver’s Cheesman Park, I found one of the city’s first birders, too: William H. Bergtold.
Read more in the October 2022 Lark Bunting (p. 16)
