What Birds Know: The Bird-Watcher as Sociologist

Personal Reflexive Statement

In April 2012, a few months after I’d defended my dissertation, I took up birding, the sport of birdwatching. A novice who did not yet know what was out there to find, I was helped along by Deena Peschke, an experienced birder and naturalist. Deena took me to the birdy spots near the University of New Hampshire's campus, where we both worked at the time, showing me birds I didn’t know existed (Green Heron! Eastern Phoebe!). I still bird today, finding the activity cathartic and calming. It takes me into the human-made wilds of Denver’s suburbs. It sends my attention beyond myself, draining me of deadlines, schedules, professional ambition, and productivity. It’s also taught me how to teach (O’Leary 2020 ).

Two years ago, I began teaching a weeklong, winter-break course on urban wildlife. Students and I study the human–wildlife relationships that underlie the construction of “problem” animals (Fine and Christoforides 1991; Jerolmack 2008). Among the many things we do together is to learn how to watch and identify birds. We wander into the field, much as a class of ethnographers might, and learn to see the world in new ways. Quickly, students learn that the familiar paths on campus are busy with chickadees and finches. Quickly, they learn that when they venture to an urban park, they can find all sorts of impossible things: the garish Hooded Merganser at the ponds in Wash Park or an American Dipper, the continent’s only truly aquatic songbird, wintering in the South Platte River in downtown Denver.

But what I’ve learned by becoming a birder is more deeply pedagogical than how to bird. In designing my urban wildlife course, I've found my way to a few key lessons learned that are altering how I teach.

Learning at the Intersection of the Visual and the Experiential

Many professors resist students’ facile, often unreflective claim to be “visual learners.” Our resistance is for good reason. Most people learn in multiple ways, depending on what they're learning (Willingham 2018). However, this resistance doesn’t always lead us to use multi-style pedagogies in ways that support universal design (Rose et al. 2006). Instead, many professors reject visual learning to reaffirm the primacy of whatever they’re already doing, which usually is teaching through texts, lectures, and occasional discussions dominated by professors themselves (Weimer 2013). ¹ As I planned my first urban wildlife class, I realized that I could not have learned to bird in these ways. ² Rather, I needed the visual—images of birds—to learn the names of these things with wings. ³

I also needed field experience observing real versions of the pictured things. In a sense, this suggests the application of my newly gained knowledge. This is a skill that we want our students to develop. It’s powerful. It allows students to bridge the gulf between our classrooms and the world around them. Often, though, application is a reflective, disembodied act. For instance, we might ask our students to discuss a current event through the lens of Marx, Martineau, or Du Bois. In birding, application means even more: to spend time among the birds of feather, flesh, and bone and to test one’s knowledge against the flow of experience.

Learning with Others: Pursuing Mastery and Flow in the Classroom

For many novice birders, the application of new knowledge, through the identification of birds in the field, happens during a period of informal apprenticeship. Experienced birders help novice ones learn to use knowledge, attention, bodies, and technologies (binoculars and field guides, mainly) to seek, find, and identify birds. Not surprisingly, identifying a bird without the aid of a mentor is a revelation. The twin possibilities of discovery and mastery reveal themselves, though the new birder is years, perhaps decades, away from genuine mastery.

Pursuing mastery, we also pursue what Csikszentmihalyi (2008) calls flow: the pursuit of deep, meaningful, focused experiences that test one’s skills and knowledge. These tests force us just beyond our competencies, but they do so in ways that remain achievable. Not all tests promote flow. Some quickly outstrip our abilities. Drop a novice birder from Colorado into a deciduous forest, east of the Mississippi River, in deep summer, when the leaves obscure the unfamiliar birds and humidity dulls attention, and you’ll find struggle (and mosquitoes to add injury to insult). Drop a novice social theorist into Weber’s writing on the Protestant Ethic and you’ll usually find the same.

Flow states allow us to extend our skills, stretch our mastery, and grow rather than retreat. Although a sense of independent mastery is important for flow states, these states may be easier to achieve through social interaction. For many of us, social interaction offers the effervescence of proximity and shared focus. The pursuit of a hidden bird and the thrill of discovery reverberate when they’re done with others.

For students in my last iteration of urban wilds, a Redhead, a type of diving duck, provided an opportunity for this. I know this conspicuous duck, as many intermediate birders do, well enough to identify at a glance. But the students didn’t want me to identify it for them. Explicitly rejecting the banking model of education (Freire 2018), several students sat around a pond at Denver’s City Park, moving between their observations of ducks and pictures in a field guide. Now and then, they’d ask me to confirm their tentative ID of the bird. This was the most literal embodiment of the “guide on the side” approach to teaching that I had yet encountered. I had lucked into it, too. I had not intentionally designed the moment to challenge students to work together toward a sense of mastery. But being in the field, amid what we wanted to see and with the right tools of inquiry in hand, students could choose the pursuit for themselves.

The Birder as Sociologist

But birding is one thing, sociology another. Can these experiences be extended to courses with more traditional content? I think they can, though perhaps only in analogous ways.

By birding, I’ve learned a more expansive notion of visual teaching and learning. It’s not simply about offering an image on a PowerPoint or a film clip to analyze (Thomas, Place, and Hillyard 2008). Rather, it means offering students opportunities to see and identify in society, with the professor as a guide, the social processes and structures about which they’re learning. It’s means, too, using tactile teaching materials—documents, cultural artifacts, and other materials that students can genuinely inspect and manipulate. Indeed, I suspect that most students who identify as “visual learners” mean they are something closer to embodied and tactile learners as, I also suspect, most of us are. These artifacts—even if only a poster from a campus wall or a book that can be held, explored, coded, then discussed—can be provided to students or found by them through exploration.

As for flow, I’ve found that small group work, with its attendant sociability, is particularly likely to lead toward moments of flow. I mean something different than small group discussion or debates, though these can sometimes contribute to flow states. Small group work that asks students to solve sociological puzzles, discover something relevant but hidden in data, or design a sociological product can have this effect. Students need to be challenged, but not overwhelmed, and they need an activity into which their full attention can flow. Low stakes work—group quizzes that don’t count, pedagogical games or escape rooms, or, to unite the visual with the social with the pursuit of flow, the creation of illustrations, storyboards, or collages—can inch groups of students toward flow states. ⁴

Postscript

I drafted this essay in the first week of March 2020, before we knew what we know now: COVID-19 would fundamentally alter everything and, as higher education is part of that everything, us and our work too. Rereading the essay now, I’m a bit embarrassed by its emphasis on interaction, social learning, and proximity. I believe in the pedagogical value of these. And yet they now seem inaccessible, teaching tools for a lost world.

But birding endures. In April and May 2020, you could hardly work your way through the day’s news without encountering an essay expressing the sentiment that We Are All Birders Now (Ackerman 2020; Cannariato 2020; Sibley 2020). Backyard and urban birding, we were told, was one of the ways we would survive self-isolation. We could reengage with the flow of a natural world unencumbered by the pandemic. We could displace our sense that humans and our unraveling societies are the purposes of this planet.

Can the lessons of birding be adapted for our new hybrid teaching and learning environments? Can we bring online these practices, which are embodied, social, and material? Like a wave of migratory warblers, downed in the trees of Central Park amid a storm, advice on teaching filled our inboxes with a sweet trill: We can indeed have active, social learning experiences in this new, unwanted world.

I suspect that many of us have struggled at this. The adaptations skulk in the dense brush of our learning management systems. Inexperienced as we are, moments of success arrive and depart too quickly for us to learn from without work, hard work, and frustration.

Novice birders have their guides. Novice educators do too. But we are all beginners at teaching and learning amid COVID-19. It cannot be otherwise. Like the beginning birder, we must accept that there is far more that we will miss than we will see. Our mistakes will be obvious and egregious. It is a humbling recognition, as used to the role of expert as we are. But again it is a lesson, for our students are usually beginners at our discipline; their mistakes are often obvious and egregious; they often sit “in fear and trembling over the littlest thing” (Goodwin 1987:19). Teach from this recognition. Reaching out with grace, our hands come back with grace, still. ⁵

And then, on Memorial Day, 2020, the belief that We Are All Birders Now revealed itself for what it always was: a too facile slogan, carrying white privilege and willful ignorance of that privilege with it (Lanham n.d., 2016). That day, Amy Cooper, a white woman, called 911 on Christian Cooper, a Black man and a regular birder in Central Park. Amy Cooper falsely reported that her life was threatened by an “African American man,” after Christian Cooper asked her to leash her off-leash dog in Central Park’s Ramble.

Only some birders—namely the white men (like the author) who dominate birding organizations and public discourse about birding—trust that they can aimlessly loiter, binoculars in hand, at the edges of campuses, parks, and other people’s neighborhoods. Still, they tell others, without qualification, warning, or self-awareness, to do the same (see Sibley 2020). ⁶ But wild though birds are, we encounter them in social settings structured by systems of inequality and domination. It is not such a simple thing to loaf beneath a tree, listening to a bird. These are sociological facts of the sort we try to teach in our courses. Many of our students will know this even before our offerings of Du Bois and Mills. With those who don’t, we aim to help them develop sociological imaginations that allow them to see the social in the everyday.

But social facts are only departure points. As Christian Cooper told The New York Times, “The birds belong to all of us” (Nir 2020). In this, he echoes the naturalist J. Drew Lanham (2016), who, in his 2016 essay “Birding While Black,” wrote, “The wild things and places belong to all of us.” These statements are several things at once. They are simultaneously descriptions of reality, for the birds indeed belong to all of us. ⁷ They are also descriptions of values, descriptions of a sort of political project. For implicit in these statements is an assertion of what ought to be: The birds should belong to all of us, but our society is not yet structured in a way that makes this so. This, then, is a destination, a vision for a possible world and for the work inherent in humanistic sociology and its teaching (Goodwin 1987; Standish 2019).