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Looking Up

BIRDING

WHEN I FIRST BEGAN BIRDING, my husband, Daryl, regarded the entire enterprise with a kind of perplexed, gentle bewilderment. In our fourteen years of marriage and preceding five years of friendship-that-blossomed-into-dating, I’d never once mentioned birds. I never really even noticed them. Then, near the end of my thirties, as sudden and unexpected as a flash of lightning on a cloudless night, the birding began. I imagine this could be annoying.

We’d be in the middle of a conversation, laying out ministry strategy or parenting logistics, sitting together with our coffee in the backyard, and I’d look up and gasp.

“What?”

“Oh my gosh, Daryl, it’s a kinglet. Ruby-crowned, I think. Just . . . hold that thought. I’m going to get my field guide.”

He bore with the hiking and the bird-identification apps, the growing stack of birding books, and all the feeders I hung in the backyard. He bought me binoculars for Christmas and put our three kids to bed by himself night after night during the annual spring migrations with nary a complaint. Still, I suspect a small part of him thought I might be using the hobby as a convenient escape from the daily grind of domestic life. Surely a person who’d previously shown absolutely no interest in them couldn’t get that into birds.

Then came a month of wildfires, the air near our Southern California home too choked with smoke for easy breathing, much less hikes into the hills. Our backyard birds sheltered, their songs clipped and short, their behavior agitated. My own mood darkened with the ominous orange sky that turned our neighborhood Martian, the fine ash that blanketed our cars. We plodded on together, air purifiers running on high in our bedrooms, outdoor activities canceled or moved inside. We did okay, Daryl and the kids and me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was less than whole.

“I see now that you need your birds,” Daryl told me. “I don’t understand why, but I see that you do.”

I don’t always understand why, either. I never needed birds before. But now I do.

Birding is a switch that flips. Amateurs and ornithologists alike can point to a particular bird that turned the light on for them. We call it a “spark bird,” the bird that changes everything forever. It may not end up being a person’s favorite bird, or even a very noteworthy or beautiful or rare one, but it is a watershed. There is a before and an after, and nothing is the same ever again.

“You have a phoebe!” my friend Michelle gestured to our backyard string lights, where a small black-and-white songbird perched, flicking its tail up and down. I studied the bird for a few moments, the tuft of black feathers atop its head, its bright black eyes and tiny black beak, its white front and quick, jerky movements. I didn’t yet know the words for most of what I was seeing—that the tuft of feathers was a crest, the bird itself a type of flycatcher. I didn’t know the importance of precision when describing a bird: the phoebe didn’t have a white front, it had a white belly. I didn’t know it was called a black phoebe, distinguishable in color and size from the eastern and Say’s varieties.

What I did know, in those very first moments, was that this little bird had unexpectedly captivated me. For a moment the volume turned down on my shouting to-do list and clamoring young children and creaky house projects and pinging work emails, and it was just me and this bird. A moment in time. A breath. Delight.

In that moment, I looked up.

Birds are invisible to us, until they aren’t. Or perhaps they aren’t invisible, not exactly. They are simply a background to the rest of life, the more immediate, louder bits. Perhaps we remember the gull that stole our cookie or the swans that paddled across a lake we frequented as children. Maybe we watched pigeons from our apartment window or fed leftover lunch crumbs to sparrows on our school playground. But mostly birds were not really a thing.

And then, one day, out of nowhere, the spark.

Perhaps you have a spark bird of your own, a Great Egret or Black Rail or Indigo Bunting, a tall, spindly flamingo or a tiny, buzzy hummingbird. Maybe you’re contemplating putting this book down because you were expecting to read about hope and grief and here I am, yammering on about birds, which is not what you signed up for. But here’s the thing: illumination is inscribed on every page of creation. “Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,” wrote the poet Robert Service, “The wind has a lesson to teach.”1

In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul writes that “we do not grieve” like those “who have no hope” for “we believe that Jesus died and rose again.”2 These holy reminders come to us through Scripture, but that is not their only place of speech. The natural world pulses with the heartbeat of God, and birds are a unique avenue into this understanding.

Look at the birds, Jesus tells the crowds up on the mountainside, and one by one, the people look up.3 And Jesus begins to show each soul its dignity and value and worth.

In the book of Exodus, Moses is hard at work herding his father-in-law Jethro’s sheep.4 Anyone who has worked for an in-law knows that the pressure is on to do the job well. As Moses and his sheep meander through the wilderness, Moses’ eyes are tuned, on the lookout for pitfalls and predators. He’s hoping to spot a lush patch of grass or two, when his attention is diverted by a strange sight.

There, over in the chaparral, is a bush aflame. Small fires are not unusual in this parched land of heat and scrub, but Moses is drawn closer by a realization: this bush is burning, yet it is not consumed. The fire does not spread, nor does it go out. It burns and burns and burns.

Take off your shoes, comes a voice, for the ground upon which you stand is holy.

There is a before and an after. There is a spark and a burning. In this moment, Moses is set upon a path from which he will never return, a journey that will have its end decades beyond and hundreds of miles away from this small patch of holy ground.

Rare are the moments in our lives where we can point to a before and an after. There are graduations and marriages and births, accidents and illnesses and deaths, but mostly there are long strings of ordinary days, one after the other after the other. We wake and sleep, we eat and work, we play and rest. Everything is pretty much the same, until it isn’t.

After the burning bush, Moses will face months of wrangling with the great Pharaoh of Egypt. There will be a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire and a miraculous crossing of the Red Sea. This will be followed by decades of wandering in the wilderness. A few transcendent moments will give way to forty years of slogging obedience.

Yet God will plant reminders of his presence along this arduous journey. Bread from heaven. Water from a stone. Quail to nourish the body. God will speak to Moses. God will appear to him. God will continue to guide. Even in the slog, there is hope.

Many years before Moses, God pulled Abraham from his tents in the dead of night and called him to the edge of his camp.5

Look up, God told Abraham. Look at the stars.

In the Gospels, Jesus sees the fear and anxiety of the crowds and points them heavenward, too.

Look at the birds, says Jesus. Are not you worth more than many sparrows?

Every year or so Daryl and the kids and I take a whale watching tour from a marina near our home. Inevitably, a tourist or two will get seasick, even in calm waters. Then the captain will tell them to keep their eyes on the horizon. It’s turned into a spiritual metaphor for me: the boat will go up and down, up and down, up and down our whole life long, but if we keep our eyes up, we can catch a glimpse of salvation.

I’m not a professional birder, or even an impressive amateur one. I feel the need to mention this at the outset because I’m no ornithologist or biologist or expert in the ways of the avian world. This will not be a field guide to the birds of Southern California or an extensive exploration of ecology or even a Big Year type chronicle of the species I’ve encountered. At least one chapter will describe a bird I’ve never even seen in person. My only qualifications for the birdy parts of this book are a deep fascination with all things avian and an even deeper love. I love birds.

Why? Because birds are amazing. Their biodiversity alone astonishes. There are hummingbirds that can perch on a strand of hair and pigeons the size of turkeys and cassowaries that could kill an adult man with a kick. Birds come in every color imaginable: black and white, pink and blue, iridescent greens and purples, translucent silver, spotted red. There are birds that can hear sound where we only recognize silence and birds whose songs are so complex they cannot be parsed by the human ear. There are birds that thrive in temperatures that...