Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides

Conclusion: The Birdwatchers of the Montlake Landfill

| 151 | CONCLUSION The Birdwatchers of the Montlake Landfill In 2003 and 2004, I spent a sequence of Sundays at Seattle’s Montlake Landfillthe covered-over landscape described in chapter 5in an effort to observe and talk with birdwatchers there. I have said a lot in this book about birdwatchers, their politics, and their attitudes; this field work was my attempt to study them in person. In the end, I contacted a dozen birdwatchers at the landfill, and to add to those findings, I circulated an online questionnaire to subscribers of two e-mail discussion lists used by birdwatchers in the Pacific Northwest.1 With their consent, I recorded the conversations I had with the twelve birdwatchers at the Montlake Landfill and received completed online questionnaires from 225 respondents. Most of the online respondents to this qualitative study described themselves as fairly experienced birdwatchers (78 percent reported the ability to identify more than one hundred species “off the top of my head”),2 whereas the birdwatchers I spoke with in person varied in level of experience and reasons for birdwatching. My findings from this qualitative research are in no way representative of all birdwatchers in the Pacific Northwest or elsewhere, but what I discovered helps provide a backdrop for what I have said about birdwatching, field guides, and the environmental imagination. As a way of concluding Binocular Vision, I want to describe what I 152 | CONCLUSION learned from this group of birdwatchers in and around Seattle in relation to the main themes in this book. Binocular vision, as described here, is rooted in the histories, technologies, and representations of birds in birdwatching field guides. At the same time, my shaping of the term binocular vision is meant to describe a much broader approach to encountering and studying a separate, nonhuman “nature.” Birds, animals, insects, rocks— these things and others are also sorted and broken down into categories. They are identified, managed, and all too frequently imagined as separate from some of the more pressing environmental crises of our time. Although there were many correspondences between what I expected to find at the Montlake Landfill and my encounters with the birdwatchers there, there were also some surprises. One I will spend some time describing involves the ways birdwatchers modify their field guides. I take this practice of altering print field guides as metaphorically suggestive of the kinds of dialogues that exist between birdwatching as an off-the-shelf, preconfigured environmental pastime and birdwatching as a potentially more individualized, adaptable, and customized hobby. By discussing the ways many of the birdwatchers I studied inhabit field guides and birdwatching in personalized, eclectic, and varied ways, I suggest that the pastime of birdwatching is in some ways based on altered, variable uptakes of binocular vision that have potential for change. A major theme in this book has been history. Since the 1880s and ’90s, when birdwatching first took shape as a named hobby, what birdwatchers do, why they do it, and the tools birdwatchers use have all changed considerably. These changes have had to do with a range of factors, everything from new print technologies and conventions in field-guide design to developments in environmental conservation and law. When birdwatching first emerged as an environmental pastime, nineteenth-century practitioners did not have competitive birding events to attend, nor did they have portable electronic field guides that played birdsongs at the touch of a button. But they did have narrative guides written by authors who drew on a range of influences to develop sentimental, emotional registers for birdwatching. Birdwatching was first formulated as a complex of feelings intended to make saving birds something that birdwatchers and others would feel strongly about. One of the birdwatchers I talked with at the Montlake Landfill | 153 The Birdwatchers of the Montlake Landfill described her own collection of field guides as a repository for histories about birds and birdwatching. I call her the “Master Birdwatcher” because, on the day I contacted her, she was out giving a birdwatching lesson to a novice birdwatcher: Master Birdwatcher: I even have some of the, uh, um, the old National Geographic bird guides. They’re printed in 1938. With colored plates. And those are really fun to look through. They’re not exactly field guides, but they’re enormous fun because, uh, first of all, the birds all have different names [inaudible] has changed, just reading the text, you can...