It is true that as you age your thoughts move outward: Instead of being concentrated solely on the nucleus of your own conscious self, they expand, they dissipate, as you slowly begin to regard and become more enmeshed in the external world. What I mean is that when you are very young, your thoughts and observations are entirely self-centered: My feet are cold. I want a cookie. In my opinion, “Anne of Green Gables” is superior to “Little House on the Prairie.” Isn’t it interesting that my left foot swings outward slightly with each step? (Not really. Life will eventually teach you that no one cares.) Will I be valedictorian? But then, as the decades pass, your observations become more external: My child wants a cookie. Why did the Highway Department add a stop sign at the corner of Sagaponack Road? Catmint doesn’t seem to care if it is choked for sunlight, but the roses do. What will become of the Haitian refugee who cared for my mother at Peconic Landing?
I feel we are all almost imperceptibly undergoing diffusion, an outward molecular motion in which our ego slowly, slowly, but slowly releases and expands, eventually to evaporate into the earth or be reabsorbed in the universe. One sign or symptom of this — sort of — dissipating that I have noticed is an increasing interest in the natural world around me. Familiar trees that I ignored as a teenager become dear companions on evening dog walks at the end of the long day of an empty-nester. The birdsong outside the window, when I awaken annoyingly before 5 a.m. becomes less an indistinguishable cacophony and my mind is now able to pay enough attention to pull apart the individual strands of melody, like picking strands of yarn from a knot.
I can identify only the most mundane and obvious birds by their song. I’m at a first-grade level: the blue jay, the cardinal, the crow, the robin, the osprey, the bobwhite (which I haven’t heard in decades but heard each night as a child), the whippoorwill, the mourning dove. We have an attention-seeking catbird who mews and caws in a boxwood shrub only inches from the kitchen window; sometimes our cat-cat, Maui, stretches himself out casually on the windowsill and follows the catbird’s motions with darting green eyes. A year or so ago, there was a great horned owl in my tulip tree. I had to turn to the Merlin Bird ID by Cornell app to identify his hoot.
My father, who died at 47 unfortunately, was one of those unusual people who have a seemingly inborn appreciation of birds and a lifelong interest in what they are doing up there in the trees and skies. During the years of “Silent Spring,” when the osprey (or fish hawk, our most beloved and emblematic native bird — to the air what hard clams are to our bays, symbolic) were killed off by DDT and completely disappeared from the South Fork, he built a tall platform atop a telephone pole for an osprey nest and planted it in front of our house on the beach in Promised Land, in hopes one might return. (I inherited his optimistic nature. The osprey never came.) When I was small, my dad frequently tried to engage me in observing birds: Did I see the great blue heron standing on his stalk legs over there among the reeds? Did I see the barn owl on the branch of a pitch pine by the railroad bridge on Cranberry Hole Road? No. No, I did not. Not only could I never pick the bird visitor out from the landscape, I couldn’t be bothered. Nothing that wasn’t human or of human interest — love, petty quarrels, gossip, fashions, Beatle boots, rock-and-roll, angsty poetry, Expressionist art, David Bowie, the theater of Bertolt Brecht — held any interest for me whatsoever before the age of 18. Nature was for the birds.
I was 18 years old when I took my first baby step toward being a nature observer, and I know this because I can actually remember the exact moment I realized a bird might be of some slight interest to me, after all, as an object of beauty.
We had been up all night walking from the campus of Columbia University downtown, my friend Alex Curzon Hale and me, wandering through Hell’s Kitchen and down past the West Side freight yards where the High Line is now, past the blown-out cars and boarded-up windows of the waterfront in the mid-1980s, when we stopped at a corner bodega that stood alone in a block of urban desolation. The sun had come up by now. I waited on the sidewalk while Alex went inside to buy a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English 800. There was a pigeon by the door of the bodega picking his way, jerkily, across the sidewalk cement (which sparked lightly with mica in the slanting morning light). With a sleepy head I noticed for the first time the magnificence of the iridescent colors of the feathers on the humble pigeon’s head and neck, the purple and the teal amid the gray. “If pigeons were uncommon, they’d be the pets of kings,” I thought, and then we walked onward toward Battery Park.
So, noticing a Meatpacking District pigeon was the first bellwether of a late-dawning interest in the natural world, but I remained stubbornly obtuse in my refusal to actually learn anything specific about birds until my 50s. I wouldn’t call my modest, middle-aged interest a hobby; I have no curiosity about avian taxonomy. But, in midlife, I find I’m much more curious about what is going on in the leafy canopy surrounding my house. The birds have personalities. They are up to their tricks, out there. Some of them are clumsy as Ethel Mertz; some of them fly like Nijinsky. Have you noticed how bright red the beak is of a dun-colored house finch?
Despite my recent, mild interest in birds, I remain an indefatigable mis-identifier of them. I’ve mentioned this before in this column, but I am indeed that nincompoop who throws her arm up to point at a silhouette carving figure eights in the sky and shouts, “Hawk! Hawk!” only to be informed by her fatigued children that it’s another seagull. This is not solely an eyesight problem; it is an optimism problem.
And, yes, I know it’s not “seagull,” but simply “gull” — says you. I don’t want any pedantic ripostes from the birdwatcher orthodoxy. If I’ve always called it a seagull, it’s a seagull to me, just as the black duck I knew as a coot growing up on Gardiner’s Bay will remain a “coot” and not whatever black sea duck or scoter a “Peterson Field Guide” says it is.
Faithful readers will remember my recent complaints about the state of my property here on Edwards Lane — a general dishevelment of hedge and garden, owing to a reduced budget for yard work. My old garden shed is subsumed by blackberry canes to the extent that you can no longer see the shed and wouldn’t know it’s there. There’s only a prickly, rustling hill-size lump — with birds darting in and out — beside the place where the clothesline used to be.
The silver lining to the neglect is that my lawn, due to infrequent mowings, has reverted to meadow form, to the pleasure of the bees and the birds. The grass hums with white clover blossoms and all manner of bees, yellow jackets, honeybees, wasps. . . . I couldn’t identify those, either, but none of us has ever been stung. My semi-rewilded single acre near Main Street has become a flyover stop for village birds migrating between Herrick Park and the Atlantic Double Dunes. So says I. The dawn chorus is loud. I don’t think the billionaires, with their immaculate lawns and clipped arborvitae, have a dawn chorus like that.