Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis 4
Mourning Dove, Zenaida macroura 7
Number of Species: 13; Number of Individuals: 76; Time: 2 hrs., 10 mins.
Comments: Two students, Karl being one of them, are enviably skilled in recognizing birdsongs; now I at least begin to understand Cora’s attraction to him! None, however, can approach Prof. Kavanagh’s skill.
6 May—Where do I begin? Do you wonder why students take this class? Perhaps you’re aware of your reputation? “He recites poetry while you’re climbing the path up from Sunday Woods.” “If you make it past the second week, some days he’ll take you out in the woods and play his fiddle and lead a sing-along instead of lecturing!” “He’s also gorgeous!” (I imagine you’re aware that the girls speak this way about you, and of the reputation your class has among some jealous college boys.)
But much as I do look forward to poetry and Irish folk tunes, my reasons for being here are different.
I am in love with birds, and I don’t quite know what to do about it.
I’m afraid I’ve come to this love too late. According to all the stories you’ve been telling us, all the great lovers of birds—John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Roger Tory Peterson, and you—discovered their passion at an early age. Some important person handed them a pair of field glasses or a field guide or a stuffed dead bird and that was it; they were hooked.
But I’m twenty-one years old.
And do I need to mention that they were also always boys?
None of their experience applies to me. It feels sometimes like I never even saw a bird until last fall, when I went to England to study. What was I doing before that? I don’t know, reading poetry, going out, listening to music, staying up late talking to my roommates. Then one dreary day in early October, when I was to read a paper on Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in my tutorial, my tutor, Miss Smallwood, brought in her personal collection of three Audubon plates, including one of a nightingale—not the English one, of course, but the American hermit thrush.
“Let’s talk about these today instead,” she said. “Aren’t they marvelous?”
And they were. They were maybe the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
The following Saturday I joined Miss Smallwood and her “Oxbridge Birder” friends on a ramble in the Cotswolds. We had tea in a shop in Stratford-upon-Avon decorated with silhouettes of Shakespearean characters. I was the only one there under sixty-five. For the rest of the term Miss Smallwood and I read Audubon’s Journals instead of Romantic poetry. (Don’t tell anyone in the registrar’s office or the English Department—ha ha.)
On weekends I traveled all over Britain with the Birders’ Club. I have drawn since I was a child—nothing special, pictures of my family, the animals on my father’s farm, some friends in high school and here at Burnham. I never took it very seriously and never studied at all, beyond my high school art classes and Drawing I here at Burnham, when I was a freshman. There wasn’t room in my schedule for any more art classes (up until last semester, I planned to be an English teacher).
But I started carrying around a sketch pad when I went places with the Oxbridge Birders, and eventually Miss Smallwood introduced me to Clive Behrend (Do you know him? His illustrations are quite well-known in Great Britain), who let me sit and sketch with him in his hide in the woods outside Oxford and encouraged me to start painting. With no training! He just let me loose in his studio one day.
I knew by December that I had to take as many art classes as I could when I got back to Burnham. So I abandoned student teaching last semester and signed up for four.
My parents still don’t know this, exactly. I’ve told them I’m going to graduate and be an art teacher instead, and they believe me, poor souls.
Of course I’m going to graduate, instead, prepared to do nothing at all in the “real” world. A girl, no less. A girl who discovered birds, and painting, far too late, if you believe all the stories. A girl who’s going to graduate in a month and, probably, have to look for a job as a secretary in Scranton.
But do you know what? I don’t care. Because I’ve found something that matters to me, for the first time. And I’ll work as hard as I have to to get this right. I think I’m burning up with the same thing Audubon was burning with. I feel like him somehow, like some kind of out-of-place mongrel from Pennsylvania who almost faints when she’s near a living bird.
He achieved his first real success after a trip to England, you know.
That sounds vain, I realize. All I really mean to say is that I have to find a way to show what I see, and how I feel, when I look at a bird. It’s all I care about now.
Which is why I’m in this class. And which brings me to a problem. I need to find a way to have time with these birds. With the class there’s too much movement, too much hurrying on to the next bird, too much rushing to make a longer species list. There is no way for me to draw like this, and drawing, then painting, is the only way for me to get this out of my system, if you understand what I mean.
I’ve never had to share the experience with so many people. Even with Miss Smallwood and her group, I was never in a hurry to keep finding more. I’m concerned about whether this is going to work for me. (They shot and stuffed them for a reason, I almost want to say. But of course I don’t mean that.)
Yes, I’ll be out on my own as often as I can. But now I have to confess my worry about this: How will I find them? I’m able to wait very patiently. But I struggle so to recognize their songs! This is what I most need help with. I think I have a tin ear; I wonder if I can really learn.
I know “personal asides have no real place in a scientific field note-book”—unless they pertain to the field of study, in this case our “quest to know these marvelous creatures.” I hope the things I’ve written here seem to you to pertain. Either way, I guess I needed to tell you all this.
The thing I most want from this class (you did ask us to write about this) is the ability to hear a bird’s song and know it instantly, as you do.
Already I’ve forgotten the song of the wood thrush. On Monday, when we heard it during class, I thought it was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard. Now I’d give anything to recall it, but it’s gone.
two
TYPICALLY, MORE WOMEN THAN men were enrolled in Biology of the Birds, which was thought to be a function of Tom Kavanagh’s allure; it was affectionately known, among the students, as “Birds and Chicks.” For all its appeal, though, the handsome Irish instructor and the strange blend of science, music, and poetry he was famous for bringing to this unusual class also scared many students away. There was the poetry, for one thing; “What does this have to do with biology?” science majors had been known to ask. And there was also Tom Kavanagh’s fervent insistence on the tenets of evolutionary theory, as notorious among the more religious and conservative students at Burnham as the required five A.M. field excursions, every weekday for the entire five weeks of the term.
Cora and Lou had signed up for the course as well. Cora, a biology major, had been saving the course for her final term at Burnham. Lou, always the curious flirt, had different reasons; throughout her four years at Burnham she’d admired Tom Kavanagh from a distance—his wiry, muscular skill on the basketball court at intramural games, his accomplished fiddle playing with a group of local musicians. And now she wanted a closer look.
Addie had her own reasons for taking the class. She had been longing to take it since the previous fall, her full-scholarship semester abroad in Great Britain, a time when she was to have been awash in Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. And when she had, instead, immersed herself in Turner landscapes and the works of John James Audubon.
How