The Best of Times

And here is the Fox Sparrow, alternating between the two songs:

Would I have noticed any of this, had I merely heard the birds, had I not subsequently analyzed the recordings? Hang on to that thought for a moment because we still have another, more pressing matter to consider: that mystery sparrow, the one that I said sounded like an Eastern Towhee. Problem is, Eastern Towhees aren’t supposed to occur at the Carpenter Ranch. That, and I played a trick on you. That recording wasn’t the bird’s whole song. Here now is the entire song:

This is a Song Sparrow, who, for whatever reason, starts its song with a towhee-like element.

Not only that, it takes this towhee-like element, and plunks it down at other points within the “normal” Song Sparrow song. So the “towhee” element is functioning as a morpheme. Here’s a recording of the towhee-like morpheme right smack dab in the middle of the song:

Is the bird really borrowing from an Eastern Towhee? Short answer: I don’t know. Longer answer: I’m not totally prepared to rule out that possibility. Years ago at the Carpenter Ranch, Mark Alt and I heard an eerily Eastern-like towhee, and, more recently, I’ve recorded Eastern-like songs from birds that appear to be otherwise “normal” Spotted Towhees. “It’s complicated,” as the millennials say.

Complicated, yes, but no longer beyond reach. With free software and inexpensive gear, ordinary amateurs can easily and definitively identify “towhee” morphemes in the utterances of a Song Sparrow. Today we readily notice that Savannah Sparrows sing the same song over and over again, whereas Fox Sparrows mix it up; speaking for myself, I can say I wasn’t aware of such differences until I started making recordings. And in a recent issue of Birding, Lauryn Benedict and Karan Odom describe an ongoing effort by the birding community to document female birdsong—far more pervasive, we are discovering, than anyone knew.

All of the preceding is “ear birding,” but of a sort totally different from what Peterson and Leopold preached and practiced. This is the aural equivalent of “feather birding,” employing hardware, freeware, and crowdsourcing that simply didn’t exist until recently. But is it “virtuous”? I wonder what Aldo Leopold would think.

Leopold’s “elusive birds” no longer elude us. Neither do butterflies and other insects, notably absent from the pages of A Sand County Almanac. And you won’t read about Bobolink molts and plumages, I’m pretty sure, anywhere in Leopold’s vast oeuvre.

Leopold is a literary and scientific hero, of course, but there’s something about his worldview that bugs me. It’s the idea that “[t]here are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” as Leopold put it so memorably. He’s not just saying that that’s the way things are. He’s also saying, or so it seems to me, that that’s the way things ought to be. One senses in the pages of A Sand County Almanac and other writings a quasi-religious distinction between those who “get it” and those who do not, between those who are possessed of a certain “virtue” and those who are not.

Things are different now. With the proverbial click of the mouse, all the world’s biology and birding lore are available to anyone. A really nice digital camera costs but a fraction of the price of a pair of even mid-price binocs. Ditto for recording gear. Audacity and Xeno-Canto are free, eBird and iNaturalist available to all. Here at the ABA, we reach out through Facebook and Twitter, via blogs and podcasts, with our Birding News aggregator, and in other ways. If you are “bird curious” and have internet access, you will find your way to the ABA and thence to birding, pretty much guaranteed.

Yet there remain “some who live without wild things.” Why is that? If you’ll pardon my saying so, I think it’s partly because of us, those very ones who cannot live without wild things. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Kenn Kaufman, writing with his trademark mix of insight and disarming simplicity:

“[B]irders in general are incredibly welcoming and helpful to newcomers. But sometimes our best intentions misfire. We’ll take a group of beginners out, and we’ll be obsessed with showing them something “good,” when they’d be thrilled with a decent look at a flicker, or a jay, or a beautiful Red-winged Blackbird. We pass those by as unimportant and finally get the people zeroed in on a Clay-colored Sparrow or something, and they’re thinking ‘Huh?’ And then they don’t go on a second field trip.

“Sure, in that example, one person in the group will get turned on by that Clay-colored Sparrow, and that one person will go on to be come a serious birder, and we’ll be under the illusion that we’ve succeeded. But I’m more concerned about the others, the ones who don’t come back. It’s easy to fall into this pattern of thinking that a beginner is someone who isn’t an expert yet—y’know, Jon Dunn at the age of ten. But the vast majority of beginners will always be beginners. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We really don’t need any more people who can identify third-winter Thayer’s Gulls. We need a lot more people who have some appreciation of birdlife and who will act on it—by supporting habitat protection, buying shade-grown coffee, planting native plants, laying off the pesticides. We need millions of perpetual beginners who will do these things. If you drive a way a dozen such people by your efforts to create one ‘serious’ birder, you might as well be shooting hawks and cutting down old-growth forest.”

Kaufman penned those words in 2007, an eternity ago in the eyes of someone like my old friend Barbara. Facebook was in its infancy at the time, and eBird was just beginning to catch on. Digiscoping was all the rage, CDs and DVDs were still in wide use, and nobody had ever heard of an app or podcast.