Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on July 14, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(3):591-603; doi:10.1093/isle/isp051
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Birdwatcher
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The recent sighting of the great ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, a bird long considered extinct, set me thinking about the way I see and respond to birds. I'm not a birder, the going term these days. I'm more of an old-fashioned birdwatcher. Birding is far too technical for me. It takes too much equipment and planning. In this respect, it departs from birdwatching and drifts towards hunting, which doesn't appeal to me either. Even when hunting minimizes the violence and avoids casual waste of life, it is too practical for an old birdwatcher like me, too productive, whether it be for edible meat or survival skills. I have nothing against hunting and birding in principle; both have indirectly enriched my life over the years. But I want my birdwatching to be something easy and profoundly useless.
Birders and birdwatchers alike may qualify as bird nerds, to use my daughter's preferred