BY HARRY WEEKES
I turned 50 this past summer and decided it was time to get serious about birds. Or one kind of serious; I started a formal “life list.” Just as it sounds, a life list is a record of every bird species you see. Sort of.
From the start, I committed to definitive identification, meaning that I would not write down any bird I was not totally sure about. In other words, my list is birds I see and know. This has translated into the hundreds of times I see a bird, realize I don’t know what it is, and end up thinking, “bird.” If I’m feeling a bit rascally, I think, “birdy bird.”
An interesting magic emerges from focusing on something. There is some kind of weird alchemy invoked by simple observation and record keeping mixed with the best pattern recognition software on the planet. For me, it is as much about watching all of the things my mind does as it is about looking for birds.
For example, it has been just over 100 days since my birthday. In that time, I have recorded 54 birds, with my current bookends being the double-crested cormorant that opened the morning of my 50th bolting across the sky, and the ring-necked ducks that just returned to the Indian Creek Pond for the winter.
Amongst the many questions flitting through my mind are: “Which birds are most common? Which birds do I know the best? Are there any peculiar or rare birds I am likely to see?” There is also this: I started the list at a specific age, and now I find myself linking birds to various other age milestones from my life. For instance, I graduated high school when I was 17: the American goldfinch. I graduated college when I was 21: Canada goose. Then there was my age I met Hilary (26), Brewer’s blackbird; when we got married (30), the Western meadowlark; and my various ages when our kids were born (33, 35, and 38), linking Georgia, Penelope and Simon to the American crow, bald eagle, and American oystercatcher, respectively.
Beyond this, my life list book is divided into bird family groups, and I notice how delighted I am to just get one bird per page. As pleasing as this is, I immediately recognize that this organizational system will also direct me at some point in the future to outings designed to see as many birds in a family or on a page as possible, with a grebe vacation definitely in my future. And if there is any place where I can see albatross, petrels, shearwaters, puffins, and auklets? Here I come.
I am slowly titrating the idea of a Sandpiper-Curlew Festival and a Wood Warbler-Sparrowpalooza into my family’s mental consciousness.
As exciting as it is to imagine all of these, I find myself just as interested and intrigued by the marginalia of bird watching… the little bird that is always on the corner by the willows. Who is that? What was up with the chickadees last weekend when they were going berserk down by the stream? And where have the great horned owls been?
Needless to say, the list is turning into an ornithological gateway drug.
Ultimately, I am struck by how this smallest level of attention to something natural opens up the world and what it does to my thinking. It doesn’t take long to realize that the mind and nature grew up together.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 47th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with his wife Hilary and their three baby adults—Georgia, Penelope and Simon—a nice little flock.