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This past weekend, while waiting for the Lazuli Bunting to show up, I was entertained by numerous observers offering conjectures about the hidden habits and activities of the wary bird. One man who had seen it briefly two days earlier, elaborated at length about how it always hung out with White-crowned Sparrows, hid behind a certain bush, and always came in between 9 and 10 am. Another speculated that the bird roosted nearby, but then disappeared to spend the rest of the day living in luxury eating seeds from a backyard feeder somewhere. In a total absence of real information, people were stringing together all kinds of speculative ideas based on the tiny bits of information gleaned from the past sightings of others.
I spent a lot of Friday morning engaging in this myself, wondering where I would go if I were a lone bunting, and wandering the neighborhood in search of the bird, and an explanation for its behavior. Saturday morning, as I recounted all of the available information to a newcomer, another birder quipped, "you're never going to get inside the f%*#in bird's head--it's either here, or it isn't."
In chasing birds, it is interesting to see how speculation goes wild when people are trying to find a bird but it isn't making itself available. The last few years of Ivory-billed Woodpecker searching are full of this kind of speculation. Lacking any real solid evidence, many wild and fantastic stories have been put forward about Ivory-billed Woodpecker ecology and behavior. But when you really get down to it, the bird is either there or it isn't. So far, there isn't convincing evidence that it's still there.
But that's just a side note--an interesting example--of this general practice of creating wild speculative stories about the comings and goings of rare birds. We try to find meaning, even when we don't have real information to do so. And when we finally see a bird we've been seeking, we like to think that somehow we've mind-melded with it, that we've somehow put ourselves into its world in order to connect with it on its own terms. Maybe we have, or maybe we haven't. How far do we really ever get into the bird's head?
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5 comments:
Thanks for another insightful post! It's so important to recognize speculation for what it is. Many beginning birders and non-birders assume science knows everything there is to know about birds already, which often leads them to take speculations for granted.
Thanks for another insightful post! It's so important to recognize speculation for what it is. Many beginning birders and non-birders assume science knows everything there is to know about birds already, which often leads them to take speculations for granted.
I'm not sure about getting inside birds' heads, but I've noticed smething interesting going on inside birders' heads. We tend to "imprint" on our early experiences with a bird, a place, whatever, and forever more expect them to "always" be like that. I've heard many proclamations like "You can always find an oldsquaw there if you look hard enough," but then when you look into it, you'll find that only one oldsquaw was ever found there, it just happened to be the first time the person making that statement ever went there. Or, "look for the merlin on that fence post, he's seen there all the time" turns out to mean that this person got their lifer Merlin on that fence post in 1979, but no one has seen one there since.
Interesting...it's easy to identify anthropomorphism in a Disney cartoon, harder when we deal with the subtleties of living creatures. I guess we can't help but see birds through the prism of our human experience, and it's natural that we try to put our ideas in their heads. I've noticed hunters do the same thing, coming up with all kinds of elaborate theories to explain why the game they were after eluded them (e.g. "once it got our scent it circled around behind us and doubled back on its tracks"). I think sometimes these stories serve the purpose of making the teller feel better about their poor luck (the bird/animal was just way too crafty or too furtive). Probably goes back to caveman times, I'm sure back then hunters also talked up the fierceness or intelligence of their prey to explain their failure to bring the meat home. Extreme example - I once heard a late night talkshow host seriously discussing with a caller the possibility that Bigfoot can never be captured because they are able to escape through pan-dimensional gateways in the space-time continuum, or something like that...hmmm, maybe that could explain the Ivory-billed Woodpecker situation... :)
Thanks John, makes me wonder, has Coast to Coast gotten hold of the IBWO story yet?
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