Why are you doing this?
Ha. Caught you off guard, didn’t I? I’ll bet you’re flustered now. Wondering how the hell I knew you were elbow deep in a bag of diet-defeating substance, wearing socks two days in a row, or fantasizing about doing you-know-what with you-know-who.
Actually the question had nothing to do with any of your guilty secrets (unless you were fantasizing about birding with David Sibley and helping him sort out gull plumages). It had to do with your suspect choice of avocations.
What I want to know is why you are bird watching?
Don’t deny it. Don’t tell me you are reading this column because you are supportive of the arts or hate to see ink applied to paper needlessly.
You are reading a bird watching column. This makes you a bird watcher. One of those mal-adjusted, cerebral, and socially arrested malcontents that infest Cape May.
It doesn’t matter that you are only a casual, recreational birder (not a true addict) or insist that you used to be a birder but kicked the habit; been clean for months, years even but…
Just fell off the wagon recently. With this very column, in fact.
Be honest. Recognition of the problem is the first step in dealing with it. You’re a birder. You like birds. You choose to put yourself in situations where watching birds is unavoidable.
Like being in Cape May.
You have, then, as an act of volition, put yourself at odds with Society at large. Chosen to eschew such socially acceptable activities as working an eighty-hour work week, buying stuff you don’t need on QVC, or losing money at the casinos.
I’ll bet you don’t even know what NASCAR means, do you?
(It does mean something, doesn’t it?)
You don’t have any idea who played in the Super Bowl?
(Tom Petty, right?)
So why are you doing this?
The answer is you probably don’t know. Most birders don’t. The foundation of this affliction goes very deep, frequently back to childhood.
Many birders, it turns out, suffered trauma at the hands of permissive adults. During their early and impressionable years terminal birders were allowed to wander in natural areas at will.
Engaging nature first hand; finding discovery and wonder at every turn.
These instilled expectations for a rich and exciting life and supporting behavior patterns are almost impossible to erase once they have become ingrained in a person. Often suppressed during adolescence and early adulthood, the bird watching behavior commonly re-emerges as adults find themselves unfettered of the banal, pedantic, and mundane trappings of everyday life.
I.e. once they retire from their eighty-hour work week jobs, own everything they don’t need, get tired of feeding slots at the casinos.
With time on their hands and their craving for discovery given reign, they fall back into old patterns. Get up early. Talk long walks. Wear binoculars. Actively search for things like buntings, orioles, warblers, waterfowl, and other animate and colorful envoys of the natural world.
Many, perhaps most, seem unaware that by readopting this pattern, they have broken with the social norm. When asked “what they are doing?” many will openly admit that they are “bird watching.”
But if asked why, they have no answer except to say that they are “having fun.”
It’s hard to image how in this day and age anyone might think that “having fun” constitutes a legitimate reason for doing something.
Why would anyone choose to have fun over working an eighty-hour work week, figuring out where to store all the stuff you don’t need or losing money?
And why am I asking you? You’re a birder.