BY KIMBERLY MAYER
I am on a bird walk. Comfortable shoes and binoculars are all that’s required, and I carry in my pocket a small notebook and pen. As our guide, Tyler Davis, says, “there’s just so much happening up there.” There’s a lot happening down here too, as participants in his bird walk in the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park seem to double, triple, and quadruple each month this summer.
We stand in a circle and it’s easy to feel dizzy as swallows perform in flight around us.
We learn there are six species of swallows on San Juan Island, five in the Sculpture Park and one out by the ferry landing. Our guide knows all the birds, their appetites, and who’s returning every week. We learn that robins move around, that winter robins and summer robins may not be the same. There are 11 or 12 species of gull on island in the wintertime, and bluebirds are being reintroduced. That quail live in brambles to protect themselves from foxes. Ducks nest in trees. Cowbirds historically follow cows and the buffalo out west. That bird bones are honeycombed to keep them light in flight, and that birds migrate by using celestial cues and following the stars.
We walk on.
Like a conductor Tyler hears everything around him, sometimes cupping his ears to hear even better. “So much of birding is by ear,” he states.
The busiest time of day for song is sunrise, but before sunrise there’s also what birders call a dawn chorus. Some birds sing when seated, some only in flight. The goldfinch cries, “potato chip.” The white crown sparrow, “me me pretty me.” Tyler’s favorite is the flute-like sound of a Swainson’s thrush, which he describes as “a summertime song, ethereal.”
“Like a spiral staircase,” he adds, twirling an index finger in the air.
Spotting and listening to birds not only enhances our time outdoors, but paying attention to birds may be beneficial to our well-being. “Everyday encounters with the bird kind are associated with better mental health,” writes Richard Sima in “Why Birds and their Songs are Good for our Mental Health” Washington Post, May 18. Known as attention restoration theory, “natural stimuli, such as birdsong,” he explains, “may allow us to engage in soft fascination which holds our attention but also allows it to replenish.”
“The special thing about birdsong,” writes Emil Stobbe, an environmental neuroscience grad student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, “is that even if people live in very urban environments and do not have a lot of contact with nature, they link the songs of birds to vital and intact natural environments.”
We continue walking. I’m thinking we are learning to listen with our eyes as well as our ears.
Twenty acres of naturalized gardens, fields, meadows, a pond, woods, and shoreline. The San Juan Islands Sculpture Park is indeed a wildlife sanctuary. Numerous birds live and alight here, and according to park president David Jenkins, “Turns out birds love art.”
We are all in a reciprocal relationship. Protecting and preserving natural environments has everything to do with sustaining bird life, and in turn, our own mental well-being. The more in tune with birds we are, the more in tune with ourselves.
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 
Just lovely!7
Thank you.
So much to know about birds and our place together in the natural environment. It is hard to imagine a world without them even though we try so hard at times to ignore them. Still, they’re there and sometimes it takes a pleasant outing such as the one you have shared with us here to bring us around, full circle, aware, content and “all’s right with the world.” (Kilmer)
Thank you, Trent. I’ll respond with this from Mary Oliver, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
And I know she wasn’t just talking to poets and writers.
Beautiful Kim, just beautiful. Nature feeds our soul❤️
It does. I had finished with the piece and I walked back up to the Sculpture Park to see if I may have missed anything. And there, strolling through the meadow were five or six women in saris, their silk fabric brushing the grasses and lending color to the garden. Fed my soul even more.
As always, Kim, you slow me down and point my senses toward beauty. And truth. Thank you.
You’re so kind, the feeling is mutual. And I would add humor.
What a wonderful piece that hits home for me. As I write I am watching the bird activity in the juniper tree outside my office door and listening to the activity drifting from the many feeders around our house. You always get my mind traveling and rambling in different directions.
Boria Sax, a writer, says that birds are deeply integrated into human culture and provide us with essential models of qualities such as “paternal care, physical grace, determination, beauty, community, courage, and transcendence.”
We are only now uncovering the many similarities found between humans and birds. In looking at child development across species, for example, we now know that both birdsong and spoken language are culturally transmitted across generations.
Erich Jarvis at Rockefeller University is doing some great research and said that he would, for example, observe zebra finches singing or a starling singing in a tree and think that it just seemed so different from what humans do. And then he and colleagues discovered the connectivity of the circuit or the mechanism of how birds are producing the sounds, and found that it’s so much like humans.
As you wrote, “The more in tune with birds we are, the more in tune with ourselves.”
Despite humans and birds being only very distantly related they have remarkably similar brain circuitry for vocal learning. Both vocal-learning birds and humans have these rare analogous brain circuits that enable them to learn and imitate sound.
When children grow, naturally their linguistic skills improve as they learn. They learn by the sounds they hear around them. They especially learn by repeating what their parents say as well as that of the influential people around them. All the vocalizing animals of the world probably do the same thing as we know human infants do — babble in imitation of what they see and hear around them. In a recent study, a research team discovered that parrot chicks babble in the nest while they learn the calls and vocalizations that surround them and are important for them to know. This imitation has been studied in the aptly named African Hill Babblers as well.
I love that park president David Jenkins said, “Turns out birds love art.” No surprise that birds have an aesthetic liking for art as you describe while in the sculpture garden. We now know that birds have intentionality.
Just like other animals who intentionally ‘show’ others something like a dog who looks back and forth between a human and a treat and adding a bark to get the owner’s attention first, ravens also appear to show objects to other ravens by holding them in their beak – usually only if the other bird is paying attention.
You wrote that your guide Tyler remarked that “So much of birding is by ear.”
Many would say that our understanding of what birds hear and what matters to them has been limited by what we are able to hear and perhaps by what we can see.
You indicate that when you say, “there’s so much happening up there.” Makes me think of forest canopies.
Meg Lowman, a botanist, founded Tree Foundation and builds canopy walkways in vulnerable rainforests around the world through a project called Mission Green. The goal is to shape economies based upon eco-tourism rather than deforestation. She and of others invented a new word: “arbornaut,” an explorer of the tree canopy.
Meg became a botanist because she loved birds. She says that being in the tree canopy is surround-sound birdsong. Feathers. Colors. It’s just an amazing cacophony, and it’s gorgeous. She describes it as like being in Times Square if you grew up in rural upstate New York, like she did. You move to the place where the people and the action are, and you’re almost dizzy—in this case, with joy.
Finally, you write that, “Everyday encounters with the bird kind are associated with better mental health.” So important. Being in nature—pausing in it, sitting with it, discovering its wonders—brings a sense of calm and renewal.
Thank you as always for your beautiful writing and for such a wonderful topic. I imagine the beauty of the sculpture garden you traversed, and am reminded that in the beginning of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she asks us to imagine a world without birds.
What I learn from you is enormous, dear friend. But when you say “Birdsong” hit home with you, I think I know why. Your mother was an exemplary birdwatcher, as she was in everything she did. She stepped out with the right wardrobe for it, binoculars around her neck, sun hat, and was into it. We were too young and foolish then and not about to follow in her footsteps. But I want you to know what an impression she made on me, and continues to have on me. Not a day out there in the Sculpture Park amongst the birds that I don’t think of her, and basically want to be her, in the moment.