Bird Noticing

I’m here to give you permission to do something without going all in, buying all the gear, and making it your whole “thing.” For me, that’s birds. I’m not a “birder.” I don’t keep a life list, I don’t have hard-core binoculars, and I seldom go out before dawn to find birds. I just enjoy birds when I notice them, and I notice them a lot.

I have a feeder on my balcony, visible from my kitchen window, where I’m regularly visited by downy and hairy woodpeckers (I’ve learned to tell the difference), catbirds, juncos, Carolina wrens (my favorites, for their beautiful songs and their jaunty tail twitches), cardinals, blue jays, house finches, and occasionally a red-bellied woodpecker. I’m often eating my breakfast when the starlings come to eat theirs. And when my breakfast is granola with lots of nuts and seeds, I imagine I’m sharing breakfast with the birds – mine with yogurt, theirs with suet.

Jenny Odell, artist and author of Saving Time and How To Do Nothing, is much more of a birdwatcher than me. She suggests that we should call this activity “bird noticing” rather than bird watching, because so often you hear birds before you see them, if you get to see them at all. I like to think of it as bird noticing, as well as bird appreciating. I don’t usually go out just in search of birds; I just like to notice them on my hikes or on my balcony. I’ve learned to recognize some bird calls, and I like to watch how birds behave. I’ve seen parent birds bring their fledglings to the feeder. Once my balcony was the site of a mourning dove date that went, ahem, pretty well. It is a special treat to see a nest, and I especially love discovering the nests of woodpeckers and owls (appropriated from woodpeckers) bored into the trunks of trees.

From the reference desk at the West Windsor branch, we have a wonderful view of a large lawn. In certain seasons, the lawn is filled with grazing Canada geese. Yesterday I watched a crow chase a hawk (maybe a red-tailed hawk?) toward the library, presumably away from the crow’s nest. On my lunch break today, I sat very still in the shade, and a red-bellied woodpecker alit on a trunk just a few feet from my head, only noticing me after a couple of minutes.

I lead a reading group at the West Windsor branch called “Rule of Three”: each month we read a short story, an essay, and a poem, all connected by a theme. In May, the theme was birds. The story was “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang, from the collection Exhalation, narrated by a parrot who considers why humans try so hard to contact aliens. The essay was “Nests” from the collection Vesper Songs by Helen Macdonald, author of the bestselling memoir H is for Hawk. And the poem was “Walking Like a Robin” by Bernadette Mayer, from her collection Works and Days. These bird pieces prompted us to discuss space exploration, parrots as pets, home, class, aging, politics, nature, and loneliness.

For more on birds, here are two of my favorite birdy books:

What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing – What Birds Are Doing, and Why by David Sibley – This beautifully illustrated, large-format book teaches us bird noticers about bird behavior by focusing on commonly observed birds in the United States. You can flip through to an entry for a bird that you just noticed, but the book is also very readable cover-to-cover.

What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman – This book is a group portrait of owls from all over the world, focused especially on recent scientific findings and observations. It is filled with delights. In addition to the print book in our collection, MCLS cardholders can also access an ebook and audiobook through the Libby app.

Are you a casual bird noticer, or are you a hard-core birder? What birds do you see near home and what are your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

• Corina, West Windsor Branch