Bird of Passage: December 2023
Still looking for the perfect holiday gift for your aunt with the backyard birdfeeder or your uncle who’s really into World War II and the space race? My book, Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration, will delight them both. If you purchase a copy as a gift, email me and I’d be happy to mail you a signed bookplate.
I’m a cancer survivor. Some of you doubtless already know this—I mention it briefly in my book, and I’ve also written about it for Audubon. I was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma in spring 2020, just before my thirty-third birthday, and spent that first pandemic summer doing six rounds of chemotherapy while also being the primary caregiver of my then two-year-old. By fall I was officially cancer-free, but I’ll have periodic checkups and monitoring for the rest of my life.
Living with cancer means making peace with dread. Dread of how you’ll feel after your next treatment day; dread of what your next scan will show; and, for those fortunate enough, like me, to go into remission, dread of recurrence. And in the years since cancer entered my life, I’ve come to realize that this experience has taught me a lot about taming the other major source of dread in my life: climate change.
When contemplating a huge existential threat, I tend to react in one of two ways. Either I numb my fear with TV and junk food, or I go into obsessive information-seeking mode, filling my Google search history with queries like “nodular lymphocyte-predominant Hodgkin lymphoma five year survival rate with R-CHOP chemo”—or endlessly doomscrolling whenever the latest apocalyptic IPCC report drops. But cancer treatment went on and on for months, and I had a kid to take care of. At some point I had to pick myself up and keep going, and to do that, I came up with a pep talk for myself.
No one, I reminded myself, actually knows what their future holds. I could go into permanent remission and die at age ninety, and a perfectly healthy person could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Spending all my energy on anxiety isn’t actually going to influence how things turn out, so I’m just going to focus on how I can live a good, joyful, meaningful life today, no matter what scary things may or may not be waiting for me in the future.
I’m not saying any of this is terribly original… but it did get me to stop wallowing and start living my life again.
The planet’s prognosis may be a bit grimmer than my own (turns out if you have to get stage 4 cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a good kind to get)—but eventually, I realized I could apply the same approach to living with climate change. This mindset doesn’t absolve us from doing what we can to influence things; I vote and call my representatives and donate to environmental causes (and on the cancer side, I follow all of my healthcare providers’ advice and try to take good care of my health). But once I’ve done those things, I try to give myself permission to not spend the rest of my precious, limited time obsessing over a future I can’t fully control.
While I was in treatment, I read Victor Frankl’s famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, about Frankl’s time in a concentration camp during World War II and the conclusions he drew from that experience about what makes a meaningful life. I highlighted this quote when I came to it: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Being miserable all the time isn’t actually going to fix climate change. So every day, I do my best to choose an attitude of joy, and gratitude, and even fun.
Words About Birds
The month in bird news started with a bang when news broke that the American Ornithological Society is embarking on a process to change “eponymous” bird names, the ones named after people, like Bullock’s Oriole and Bewick’s Wren. Many of these bird namesakes were, frankly, super racist, so the plan is to just get rid of all of them and replace them with names that describe species’ appearance or ecology. I ended up covering this for Audubon, and yes, I see the irony that I wrote about this for an organization that recently decided not to change its own name despite the fact that John James Audubon was a slaveowner and all-around unsavory dude.
Also by me: Just for fun, I put together a list of ten facts you might not know about Ivory-billed Woodpeckers for Mental Floss. The one that blows my mind is that although the last confirmed sighting of one of these birds in the U.S. was in 1944, there was another population in Cuba that persisted into the late 1980s, as documented by an international team of ornithologists. Sadly, the Cuban population is, uh, also almost definitely extinct now. (No, I’m not a believer—although the drone footage released this year made me revise my opinion from “they’re definitely extinct” to “there’s a 95% chance they’re extinct.”)
Like many of us, I’m fascinated by bird intelligence, and I enjoyed this study from the long-running gull research project on Appledore Island, Maine, showing that Herring Gulls learn to recognize (and detest) the helmets worn by the scientists. The gull researchers involved in this project wear bicycle helmets when approaching gulls’ nests to protect their noggins from the aggressive birds. It seems that over time, the gulls have begun to recognize the scientists’ headgear and now react more aggressively toward them than toward non-helmeted humans. This is, apparently, the first time “object recognition” has been demonstrated in a gull.
One of the radar ornithology researchers who appears in my book just published a new paper on how “skyglow,” the nighttime light pollution produced by the artificial lights of big cities, affects birds’ behavior during migration. We already knew that birds are attracted to artificial light at night (though it’s not clear why), and these findings show that city lights are a major predictor of how many birds will make a migration “stopover” in a particular area, creating potential “ecological traps” if birds are stopping to rest and refuel in places that don’t necessarily have a lot of great habitat.
Finally, anyone who’s cared for an infant will be able to sympathize with how nesting Chinstrap Penguins make it through the breeding season. They have to remain vigilant around the clock to protect their eggs and chicks from predators, so as parents trade off foraging time and nest duty, the parent at the nest can’t just go to sleep at night. Instead, new research shows that these penguins make it through the day by taking 10,000 “micronaps” that are each just a few seconds long. I feel you, penguin parents. I feel you.
Book Recommendation of the Month
Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa Sevigny. I love a good tale of old-fashioned natural history exploration, especially if it involves a trail-blazing woman. Sevigny’s book delivers a double dose, telling the story of Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, two University of Michigan botanists who became the first women to successfully raft the Grand Canyon when they mounted an expedition to document the region’s botany in 1938.
Upcoming Events + Miscellany
December 14: Virtual book talk for Kitsap Audubon (via Zoom, free and open to the public)
Spring 2024: Excited to announce that I’ll be speaking in person at two Washington bird festivals next May—the Grays Harbor Shorebird Festival on May 3 and the Leavenworth Spring Bird Fest on May 18!
Current project: Now through the end of the year, I’m keeping busy editing the text for the forthcoming 8th edition of National Geographic’s bird field guide. (To be very clear, I am not the writer, I was hired specifically as the text editor.) I’ve never been involved with the production of a field guide before, and I’m really enjoying it. Stay tuned!