433 Notes: “Why do we love birds?”

A conversation on birds and the anthropocene with Erik Anderson, author of ​Bird (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Marisabel Rodriguez Ramos

The goal of Object Lessons, a series from Bloomsbury Publishing, co-edited by Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg, is to allow everyday people the chance to interact with objects in a critical, yet tangible way. From ​Hair​, to ​Ocean,​ to ​Cell Tower,​ Object Lessons covers matter in all forms, and the effects of such reflection can be long lasting.

When I first received my copy of ​Bird​, as an avid bird-lover, I was extremely excited. I carried the book with me as though it were an appendage. Anderson follows the trail of fallen tail feathers across the grid, articulating his findings with an undeniable personal touch, and a philosophical sting that leaves you wondering, “what made us fall so deeply in love with birds? Why did it stick? What is beauty?” among other considerations. Anderson is the lead explorer in a journey that, for many, is long overdue. Before we know it, the journey extends farther than bird-watching and observation, and we are left looking at nature with the absence of our human goggles.

Despite his unexpected findings, Anderson does exactly what he set out to do. As rogue scientist Peter Warshall, mentioned in ​Bird​, put it, Andersen manages to “find new ways to be receptive to the world,” inviting us all to not only find join in that receptivity, but, more importantly, guiding us towards a world to receive.

Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College. The reach of his diverse writing style stretches across the spectrum, from poetry and lyrical essays, to creative nonfiction and scientific writing. Anderson’s ability to diverge and follow his curiosities is precisely what takes his writing to the next level. ​Bird​ is Anderson’s fourth published book.

Marisabel Ramos (MR): Let’s start from the beginning. In the opening pages of your book, from what I’ve gathered, you suggest that birds, or, more specifically, our perception of birds, is somewhat of an enigma to you. Do you recall specifically what compelled you to write about birds?

Erik Anderson (EA): ​The short answer is that I wanted to solve a mystery. Initially, I thought I could discover the story of how the striking South American hummingbird I write about in the first chapter wound up in the basement of our local natural history museum. I followed the leads where I could, but most turned out to be dead ends. So many birds were deliberately killed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—often, oddly enough, for use in women’s fashion—that my bird was a needle in a haystack.

But then just as I gave up on that particular story, a curious thing happened. What I thought was the mystery (how the bird got to the museum) wasn’t the mystery at all. It opened onto a much larger mystery. Why, as a species, do we love birds so much? And is it really fair to call it love? Or is our attention more insidious than we believe?

MR: What is the worst consequence that arises from this popular approach to appreciating birds?

EA: ​I’m tempted to answer: “Jonathan Franzen,” but as much as I disagree with his approach, it’s probably unfair to pin the loss of billions of North American birds on his variety of thinking.

Birds, I would argue, are an exemplary demonstration of missing the forest for the trees. We pursue our lives, individually and collectively, as though humanity were somehow separate from nature. But what COVID-19 has made painfully obvious is that individual choices made by strangers on the other side of the planet can reverberate in one’s backyard. When we fetishize nature, when we turn it into a cuddly or romantic or delicious Other, we fail to comprehend the deeply interwoven character of all existence, which means that we won’t act on climate change, as we didn’t act on COVID, until it’s too late.

MR: Do you observe any benefits with respect to the popular fetishization of birds?

EA: Any kind of knowledge, Claudia Rankine writes, can be a prescription against despair, and I think birds serve that function admirably for many. In general, I would say that knowing more about the world is never a bad thing, but I think the question is always, what do you do with what you know? Because look, knowing more about the natural world actually hasn’t, in itself, solved the most existential dilemma in human history. The solution to climate change has far more to do with the whole population acting ethically, reframing our moral calculus, and mustering political leadership and will, than it does with the current parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. Science has an evidentiary role, but that can’t be where it stops.

MR: (a)What are some of the key takeaways or challenges of analyzing, or criticizing, both the physicality and metaphysicality of birds?

EA:​ In terms of challenges, the problem for me was largely a writerly one: at what points was I repeating myself in my drafts? Which birds, or ideas, overlapped? And which could I cut?

(b)Which did you find easier or more natural to comprehend?

EA:​ On the surface, probably the physicality. I’m not a scientist, and such a big part of my work on this book was to read through thousands of pages of research written in idioms that are geared toward a different audience, namely, professional ornithologists. But while the meaning making came easier on a superficial level—it’s what I’ve been trained to do—it took a long time to develop. And in some ways it’s incomplete, by design. The final gesture of the book, after all, is to implicate the reader in the process, to join in the construction of what birds (and nature) will mean moving forward.

MR: In your book, while describing the early findings of Alfred Russell Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, you write: “...it’s a crisis to which the naturalist responds as well as he can, seeking in approximation (e.g., umbrellabird) the kind of exactitude his experience denies him.” Is your goal in this analysis to imply that we as humans do not have the capacity to fully comprehend the complexity of birds? Or just that we’d need to take a step to the side from science to do so?

EA: ​I don’t think we have that great of a capacity to even comprehend ourselves, so the idea that we might fully understand another species is just absurd. But we’re also really bad at staying focused, especially now, which means that, you know, why not launch a Mars expedition? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Well, my point is, no, not really, especially considering that we haven’t even figured out our own planet yet. Why would we want to go screw up another one?

In many ways we’re no further than Bates and Wallace, giving tentative names to things in a quixotic effort to nail down some of the reality of the world before it slips away from us. Words are always an approximation, of course, but they’re the primary tools at our disposal. We try to name things, but those names not only fail us in some ways, they also fail to fully get at the realities they attempt to describe. And there’s really nothing to be done about that except to keep trying, knowing that your efforts will ultimately fail, that the best you can hope for is that someone else will come along, see value in your work, and refine what you said for a new generation. That’s the human project.

MR: The honesty in your voice is incredibly compelling, what made you decide to get so personal and compare, for example, a bird’s behavior to your own romantic experiences?

EA: ​Virginia Morell tells this story about Jane Goodall in her wonderful book ​Animalwise​. When Goodall was about to publish her first scientific report about chimpanzees, the editor returned the manuscript with all of the personal pronouns crossed out and replaced by “it.” Goodall’s response was basically that if the editor couldn’t acknowledge the chimps’ individual personalities, the least he could do was to give the animals the dignity of their respective sexes.

There’s this long tendency of refusing to see ourselves in animals for fear that we’re anthropomorphizing, but the greater danger is this even longer speciesist tendency of setting ourselves up on a pedestal, of denying our continuity with the animal world. Evolution, we know, is often convergent: traits or behaviors that evolved in one species frequently evolve independently in another. So the notion that my bond with my spouse is somehow totally different from the bonds between wandering albatross pairs is really just anthropocentric bunk. I would argue, further, that until we see ourselves in (and as) natural world, “nature” is a lost cause.

MR: In the process of writing ​Bird,​ you come to a better understanding of these creatures as symbols and/or otherwise significant. Would you say your investigation partially involved you trying to garner a better understanding of ​people,​ as well? You very beautifully illustrate, almost in the form of a journal, watching others fetishize, hoard, exterminate, and rarely, humanize birds. In those vivid descriptions I sensed both curiosity, and discomfort. Are there times where the conclusions you drew about other people were more fascinating, compelling, or disturbing to you than the conclusions they drew about the birds you observe?

EA: ​There’s a great 2013 piece from the science writer Michelle Nijhuis that appeared in a series of ​New York Times​ articles, since discontinued (insert sad face emoji), on craft. After college, Nijhuis says, she worked “​a series of minimum-wage jobs looking for strange animals in strange places.” At one point the scientists she was working with were loosely gathered around a rattlesnake, fascinated by the creature coiled on the warm asphalt. Just outside of their circle, Nijhuis was fascinated too, but by their fascination. I think this gets at my experience, and that of many people who write about science, quite well. To paraphrase the late neurologist Oliver Sacks: the science writer is part theorist and part dramatist, equally interested in nature and people, equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and seeing both in the human condition.

MR: What made you decide to use birds as a medium for writing about the Anthropocene?

EA​: The better question may be: what about the Anthropocene made birds a good subject for me, a writer who admits in the book to receiving a somewhat lousy science education, a writer who long dreamed of becoming a poet before turning to something as amorphous as nonfiction?

Someday, Elizabeth Kolbert writes in ​The Sixth Extinction​, “all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.” There’s nothing you can point to on the planet that isn’t, or won’t be, affected by climate change. The sad and startling reality is that ​every ​subject is now a medium for writing about the Anthropocene, which means that every writer—even or especially if they don’t realize it—is writing the Anthropocene. Every book you read, every movie you watch, every song you hear, is saturated with it.

MR: While philosophizing on this phenomena of birds, were your expectations ever challenged?

EA: ​I don’t know if my expectations were challenged, exactly, because I’m not sure that I set out expecting to find any particular thing. There were plenty of times, as with the buoy bird I describe in chapter 3, where I had to check myself and to consider whether what I was seeing in the natural world was accurate or whether I was merely projecting onto birds what I wanted to see.

There were also times, while drafting, that scientist friends and colleagues pushed back against some of what I was saying in the book, which was helpful and productive. Sometimes, in spite of their protests, I kept certain lines of argument that they assured me would be controversial. Sure, you could be more diplomatic, one encouraged me, but you’re also telling unpleasant truths, so I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

MR: So, either during or after the writing process, did you see yourself begin to better relate to, or even admire the symbolism of birds?

EA​: I accept that many of us have a form of biophilia: we want a connection with the natural world. I accept that, for some of us, this includes turning birds into symbols. I’m not immune. Birds are powerful. Symbols are powerful. And birds make for powerful symbols. But the question is about when and how our symbols fail us, and about when and how they fail the birds. If we just accept the old tropes and canards we’ve inherited about ourselves, about the natural world, and about our place in it, we’re just going to keep making the same mistakes we’ve always made. Which is a straight-up disastrous recipe for the future of our species. Proust was wrong. We don’t need new eyes. We just need to use them better.

MR: Should we expect to read more about birds from you in the future? And, if not, what are you working on now?

EA: ​Bird ​extends a trajectory of writing about the human/animal divide that began in my first book, ​The Poetics of Trespass, and proceeds through ​Estranger  and ​Flutter Point​. The subject is clearly one of my obsessions, and it’s probable that I’ll continue to write about it in some way, shape, or form. Last summer, for instance, I began to write about the body in motion, which is inevitably to ask questions about our animality. I’ve also been working on a book about—wait for it...wait for it—Justin Bieber. Well, not about Bieber exactly, but about how he’s a lens for understanding our cultural moment. I didn’t really get Bieber when I started writing about him, and maybe I still don’t, but it turns out he has a tattoo of a bird on his neck. I take that as a sign I’m on the right track.

Erik Anderson is the author of The Poetics of Trespass, Estranger, and Flutter Point: Essays, selected by Amy Fusselman for the 2015 Zone 3 Nonfiction prize. His new book, Bird, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury's noted Object Lessons series. He holds an MFA from Naropa University and a PhD from the University of Denver, and he teaches creative writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

Marisabel Rodriguez Ramos is a recent graduate of Loyola University New Orleans. She has a BA in English, with a concentration on rhetoric. She has interned for the New Orleans Review, Object Lessons, and is now the Associate Poetry Editor for the Chestnut Review. Outside of interviews, Rodriguez’s writing tends to lean more towards academia, specifically sociology and religion. She is currently writing a book on Latine culture and spirituality.