Why Birds?

My senior thesis is off to a much slower start than I expected. We are now a third of the way through October, and I have yet to create an outline. I have yet to narrow down my 40+ sources. I do not have a thesis statement.

I’m disappointed in myself that I haven’t gotten the ball rolling on this project, because I was, and am, very excited about it. I spent the summer poring through nature anthologies and bird field guides, interested in ornithology, field identification, bird-watching as a hobby, and of course, the beautiful imagery found in nature writing from Dillard to Thoreau to Leopold. Maybe it’s due to my extensive reading over the summer, and my concomitant creation of a bibliography--pages and pages long--that has caused this project to become so overwhelming. I wish I could include it all, but the time is approaching when I must narrow my sources down and discover why I’m really writing about birds.

So why birds? Why did I spend $30 on a Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America and spend my lifeguarding hours this summer behind a pair of binoculars, looking more at the trees and sky than at the lake? Why am I considering starting a “life list” of birds that I’ve witnessed living in the wild?

The truth is that before I proposed this project, I knew that I wanted to do my senior thesis on environmental literature, but I didn’t know what I wanted my subject to be. I was thinking of choosing a single author, such as John Burroughs, and exploring why his once famed nature writing has now fallen into shadows; I was thinking of comparing authors' ideas of “place” in nature writing. But I chose birds. The idea popped into my head one day, and it just seemed right. I thought to myself “I’m going to take bird symbolism one step further.” Why one step further? Because somehow, birds have become a symbol for my father.

In a speech at my father’s funeral, his friend Chuck McKay said, “He understood the cruelties of nature both in his own life and that of the outdoors, but he also saw the beauty in it all. He understood souls took on different lives and looked to the birds as the ones who were truly free. He now flies there, while we, landlubbers, cannot understand the joy that this may be bringing him.” Birds were also present at the funeral in the songs “Blackbird” covered by Sarah McLachlan and “Birds” by Neil Young; in a traditional Cheyenne Prayer given to my family, in the stanza “I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight”; and in a list my father had compiled of things that were important to him in the years before he died, third from the bottom, “Paddling beneath a bald eagle on the Delaware.”

Birds were important to my dad. I don’t know why. I was never old enough or interested enough in what he was doing to understand why he sat on the couch in the wintertime, facing the glass door where he had a view of the bird feeder in our yard. I wasn’t intrigued enough at that age to want to know the names of the species he knew, but I do remember his excitement at seeing an oriole dart into the bushes or the arrival of the first robins in the spring.

The Great Blue Heron was one of my dad’s favorite birds, and it quickly became my family’s symbol for him after his death. It is always exciting, uplifting, and comforting to see one flying across our yard or poised, still and serene, in a pond or lake.

To take this symbolism one step further, I wanted to read about birds. I wanted to learn about them, historically and scientifically, and find what place they hold in environmental literature. I want to dissect what birds tell us about our natural environment, what they mean for ideals of conservation in our society, and most importantly, what they symbolize for other individuals. Hence, my senior thesis, “Wings and Words”, a work in progress.