My Gateway Bird

How I Got Into Bird-Watching

We have hit May in Chicago. This is bird-watching season in my household as millions of migrating warblers, miraculous tiny, colorful pieces of sky, hunker down here for a while, before continuing on to Canada.

This is the time of year when my friends are surprised to learn that Tatum and I enjoy bird-watching and confess to me that they only know crows and pigeons. That’s perfectly normal. It just tells me that they have not yet encountered their gateway bird. Tatum’s gateway bird was a scarlet tanager, for example.

Scarlet Tanager - Tatum’s gateway bird.

Let me explain in altogether overcomplicated fashion:

Categories are heuristics — shorthand cognition derived from experience. We use heuristics to zap everything into previously-formed categories. I think heuristically about fish. To me, fish constitute a recognizable category with a complicated taxonomy. I don’t know this taxonomy so I’ve subdivided fish for my own purposes. Big fish. Small fish. Sharks. Edible fish. Frightening fish. Bizarre fish like deep-sea-bioluminescent fish. But, ultimately a fish is still this:

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I’m sure divers (my brother and sister both enjoy scuba diving) must think, ‘Raghav, you are missing out.’

I suspect many people think heuristically about birds. A small flying form. Attack drone? No. Bird. Probably a pigeon, crow, or sparrow. Is it flying towards me? No? Good.

To see a bird as if for the first time, engaging the fullness of sight, not simply to deposit it into a category and move on with life, takes a gateway bird.

I encountered my gateway bird in sixth grade in a residential school in India — Rishi Valley School.

At 6 A.M. one morning, I was on my way to mridangam (an Indian percussion instrument) class. I took a shortcut down a rough, muddy trail through a vacant patch — part parking lot, part forest. I saw something I had never seen before, that belonged to no category.

A white blur zipped from branch to branch. No discernible features. No clue if it had a head or a tail. There was a jet stream trailing it. I thought it was a sprite (I was reading a lot of fantasy). It occurred to me that it might be a species of arboreal animal that no one had discovered before. Clearly, people needed to know about this thing. It was astounding.

I ran back to the dormitory and woke up Hariprasad. His dad was a farmer and, for us, Hari represented all practical knowledge. He knew how cement was mixed and how pulleys worked. Surely, he would know.

I described it. White blur. Zipping. Jet stream. Patiently (he was always patient with me), he heard me out. And then consulted Salim Ali’s ‘Book of Indian Birds’, India’s equivalent of Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds.

“Is this what you saw?”

The Asian Paradise Flycatcher. As breathtaking a bird as you’ll ever see. Some call it a tail. I call it a jet stream.

Asian Paradise Flycatcher. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

I never made it to another mridangam class. But I did join Hari and the birdwatching club on their Sunday morning walks sometimes led by S. Rangaswami, one of India’s leading ornithologists, who once told a gathering of us, ”Bird-watching … is the art … of watching birds.”

For me, birding is a mazy, long walk with friends occasionally punctuated with exhilarating moments. And if you don’t see many birds, you still had a lovely walk.

My gateway bird smashed open the category of birds for me. I looked with wonder, aheuristically. I felt that it wasn’t just one item of a category or taxonomy; it was a node of life force.

Still, categorization can create barriers to experience in birding as well. You’re looking at a bird. Someone supplies the name. And it’s like you’ve stopped looking at it. Your senses deactivate because it’s been added to the catalog.

What can I say? Just as there is a joy to exploding a category. There is a delight in fitting something into one.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, I hope you chance upon an unforgettable gateway bird this May. Perhaps today or some other day.