Free as a Bird

Every full moon, I post an essay that digs for our cultural assumptions and holds them up for comparison with what I observe in the world around me. I got the lunar calendar wrong this month, so this post is a day late. Don't follow me for astrological advice. 😅

I’ve never NOT liked birds. I mean, who doesn’t like birds? That’s like saying you don’t like music or cake–are you even human?? Waking up to loud birdsong is a goal for my outdoor activities (along with waking up somewhere I can enjoy tea with a good view). But, as with a good view, I don’t need to know much about birds to appreciate passively. I used to let the beauty of their song and plumage wash over me and then went on my merry way. While I knew a few distinct common birds like robins, magpies, and ravens, I didn’t even know there was more than one kind of gull. (Spoiler: there are MANY species of gulls.) Then I went to the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival for the first time in 2023, and I was hooked. I hesitate to call myself a birder. Birders can be rather intense hobbyists. I’m more of a casual observer of birds than an expert. But I am learning to love them, and I know a lot more about them than I did a few years ago. Even the little bit of knowledge I've gained about birds is reshaping how I see the world in profound ways.

Free as a Bird

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Here are some things I didn’t know about birds that sort of make me laugh now:

• I did not realize birds migrate from all kinds of places to all kinds of places. No, really. I live in the northern hemisphere. I had this idea in my head of birds all flying to and from the same places, and I imagined those places being close to one another. I grew up in Ohio, so I just assumed that the birds I saw there in the summer all congregated in another state in the winter, just a few degrees latitude south, like maybe to Georgia. Or that the birds I saw in Alaska in summer wintered in Canada, again, just a few degrees south. All the same species, just in British Columbia. Now I know the combination of species I see here at home is unique to my time and place. Birds come to Alaska from as far away as South America and New Zealand or as close as Canada, all along flyways that are unique to their species, sometimes even to their flock or family group.

• I did not know WHY birds migrated. I assumed they just wanted to be a little warmer. Or maybe they were chasing certain kinds of food. I didn’t know that they migrated to have enough nutrients to feed their young. Because, even though many live in lush jungles in the non-breeding season, there is not enough there for all birds and their ravenous young. So some species take wing, flying thousands of miles to where there is enough.

• I did not know that most birds migrate at night. Or that their sense of direction may not be the raw, inexplicable “instinct” that we often dismiss with the wave of a hand, but using senses that humans are just now beginning to understand. That birds can perceive the earth’s magnetism, like a built-in compass.

• I did not know that some species’ diets vary drastically from season to season. Take the surfbird, for instance. We categorize it as a shorebird. When it’s not nesting, it does live along the coastline, snacking on invertebrates that live between low and high tide lines (the intertidal zone). But when they nest, the surfbirds’ habitat changes dramatically, from Pacific coastlines to arctic mountain summits far from the ocean, at altitudes as high as 6,000 feet above sea level. There, they lay their eggs in rocky crevices and subsist on whatever insects they can find crawling on the ground.

My bird ignorance seems funny to me because of how much I’ve learned in the two years I’ve followed birds more closely. But it became less funny and more unsettling when I learned that my naivete is not unique to me. Cultural blindness may account for as much of my ignorance as past lack of interest. Take bird migration, for example. While indigenous Pacific cultures have understood and followed bird migration for thousands of years, it was only in the 1800s the dominant culture of European legacy realized that birds don't just hide somewhere during winter.

In some ways, that seems like ancient history. A lot has happened in 200 or so years. But consider how much of that history has shaped the way we live today. I think of all the voyages of discovery and colonization, of my ancestors coming to North America, of the nations built and borders defined, all before our dominant culture realized that an entire class of animals migrate hundreds or even thousands of miles every year to find the resources they need.

Would it have changed anything: knowing birds, watching and learning from their patterns? Would we have drawn arbitrary lines all over the map to prohibit humans from crossing if we knew birds learned to live in relative harmony with the tens of thousands of other bird species on the planet? What if we had watched them take flight across thousands of miles to find food that isn’t already being eaten by other birds?

When I say arbitrary lines, I don’t mean only national borders. We draw boundaries by the foot. Every piece of land you can see has been surveyed and parceled. I think of humans fighting over the shoreline. That thin stretch of intertidal shoreline that holds the primary food source for non-breeding surfbirds and many other bird species is often the legal marker between “mine” and “ours” for humans. When an individual owns beach property, their private land often ends at the high tide mark, and what belongs to the community extends from there, through the intertidal zone into the ocean. With changes in ocean levels or erosion of the beach, that gets complicated. For humans, the intertidal zone is a legal battleground. For birds, the intertidal zone belongs to the birds who… eat intertidal invertebrates. If there’s a shortage, you go somewhere else, you find something else to eat, like the surfbird leaving the intertidal zone to nest at the top of an arctic mountain. 

If you think birds are operating on blind instinct, it is easy to dismiss the difference between their behavior and ours. “Oh, that’s just how birds are. They are just doing what comes naturally,” implying that humans are different and also doing what comes naturally to us. Or, if you believe in a higher power, you may think there is someone orchestrating the delicate, intricate mapping of birds to their sustenance so that there is enough to go around. Either way, it’s easy to dismiss this behavior as a force operating outside the will or behavior of birds.

However, the more I learn, the more I realize that the birds’ habits are not just blind instinct or divine orchestration. They are matters of tradition and choice. When birds migrate, they follow the paths of their ancestors, but they use their own senses of the earth’s magnetism to find the way. When those paths don’t work, they choose a different route. Wind farms and dry ponds don’t stop them; they adapt and remap their path. If they need to, they can make radical changes to their way of life. A surfbird can learn to eat insects on a mountain. A finch family can decide that, since so many finches in their ecosystem are already eating seeds, they will eat insects. Their beaks will change to suit their new eating habits, and eventually those families will be come two entirely different species living side by side, eating completely different foods.

I think of Jesus’ teaching about birds that I’ve heard for so much of my life: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" For many years, I believed this verse spoke of individual faith triumphing over material attachments. Now I read it and see larger questions in big, bold letters: Is it possible that birds do not sow or reap or store away in barns because they have learned to adjust their lives to have the least impact on the surrounding environment? Because they choose to eat what’s available, even if it means flying to the mountaintops? If birds can live that way, WHAT is preventing humans from doing the same? 

The answer is, I hope, unsettling: our way of life is not inevitable. If birds can choose, so can we. And we have chosen–since before we knew birds migrated, since before we knew they could change their own biology to fit their environment, since before we knew they could “see” the magnetic pull of the earth and follow it based on learned and inherited “maps”–we have chosen to draw boundaries and violently enforce them, to deprive people of the access to land and its nourishment that is their birthright as living beings. This is a heavy legacy. We, like birds, choose: ancestral paths or sustainable alternatives. I cannot prescribe what that would look like for us as humans. That is a flock decision, not something any one bird can figure out. I only know I would like our future together to look more like birds than it does now. I hope you do, too.

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I provided links to direct sources of information that you can read for yourself, but I wouldn’t have even looked for it without the organizers and presenters at the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival piquing my interest and stoking my imagination. Some facts are also from that conference, but since their presentations aren’t publicly available, I provide links to website sources and books that are.

There’s also more general information in this article that is hard to pin to any one source. I frequently draw on what I learned from these wonderful books:

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around us by Ed Yong