Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay

Ecotone Two: Field Guides

99 ecotone two Birding and other forms of nature observation seem to be a symptomatic response to the disjunction between human life and nature typical of modern societies. – Andrew Durkin, “A Guide to the Guides: Writing about Birds in Russia in the Nineteenth Century” (6) FIELD GUIDES He would be a bird book full of lavish illustrations with a text of metaphor. – Don McKay, “Field Marks” (B 15) Because it is an ecology unto itself. – Steve McOrmond, “Field Guide” (39) For the third day this week, BC lingers in bed listening to the earlymorning traffic on 4th Avenue. Hundreds of people move past his apartment on their way to work, or back from work, or to school, in the time between the ringing of his alarm and his first cup of coffee. The past few mornings, the sun has insinuated itself with a welcome vitality. He imagines the starlings roosting in the building next door, having finally mastered the red-winged blackbird song they’ve been practising for weeks, throwing the sunlight through the window onto his bedsheets. Starlings defenestrating sunlight. But no; he stops mid-thought: “defenestration” means to throw something (or someone) out of a window. What’s the opposite? Has there ever been a need to describe the act of throwing something (or someone) in through a window? Birds and words: the two things that have been occupying BC’s mind lately. 100 • Ecotone Two As he begins to rise (so he can look up “defenestrate”), he hears another sound that has become familiar, a sort of whistling that he’s assumed was coming from a traffic cop directing vehicles at the intersection. But he hasn’t seen a traffic cop on his morning walks with Mackenzie, and it seems unlikely that the traffic lights would malfunction around the same time each day. He decides to skip the coffee—well, postpone it—and head out with the dog right away, energized by the notion that there is work to be done. The possibility that there are birds to be found. As a literary critic interested in how his work might effectively participate in environmental, ecological, and (related) political discourses, BC often feels like the stereotypical environmentalist defended by historian Richard White. Responding in part to a bumper sticker with the offensive rhetorical question “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” White challenges those intellectual, philosophical approaches to environmentalism that consider work—specifically physical labour—in opposition to conservation. Most environmentalists, offers White,“equate work in nature with destruction. They ignore the ways that work itself is a means of knowing nature while celebrating the virtues of play and recreation in nature” (171). This resistance to physical labour—farming, fishing, logging—not only ignores certain ways of “knowing nature” but presumes a particular way of knowing to be more important than others. It also assumes, rather arrogantly, that no farmers, fishers, or loggers work in a sustainable manner on a local scale. Like White, who admits “not hav[ing] to face what [he] alter[s]” because of his urban, academic position, the birder-critic (BC) consequently “learn[s] nothing from” the physical world beyond his office walls, beyond words on the pages he reads daily, and beyond his own supposedly limitless imagination (184). But that is changing as BC spends more time walking around his Vancouver neighbourhood, listening to, looking for, and learning from field marks. He turns to bird books that are “written to instruct the novice,” aware that “a minimum degree of assimilation to the work of birdwatching is required” (Law & Lynch 285). Birding—not unlike gardening—occupies a space between physical outdoor labour and imaginative indoor work. Except for the familiar birds—crows, rock doves, starlings, and Steller’s jays—BC has a hard time identifying a number of species he sees and hears on his walks. He saw a hawk one morning bathing in Tatlow Park. It looked odd standing in the water, dipping its head into the creek before lifting and tilting its neck so the water trickled down its back; it Field Guides • 101 looked, as hawks seldom do, like a giant sparrow having a dust bath. It looked vulnerable—as hawks seldom do—and yet there was no murder of crows chastising and chasing as there usually is in the park. Was it a Cooper’s hawk or a sharp...