Raptor. Is there a cooler word in the whole English language? It feels fast, sleek, fierce. As a Millennial, my relationship to this word is tied up in the movie Jurassic Park where raptors were the dinosaurs that ate the most people. However, as a kid I also had a small obsession with the book, My Side of the Mountain, in which the main character runs away from home and finds / steals a peregrine falcon to train in order to bring back animals for them both to eat. That book led me to explore the world of falconry and that's when "raptor" took on even more meaning to me. It didn't mean dinosaur, it meant "bird of prey."
Birds are everywhere, raptor or not, and they are a paradox to me. For how ubiquitous they are, they're also really hard to see. Sometimes they're more of a background element than anything else. They are loud and silent. They can be extremely close, but they fly away when we get close.
Two weekends ago as I was preparing for an especially daunting work week, I decided to try something new to slow down and center myself. My default is to go on a walk, but that wasn't enough. I take a lot of walks, and they're always accompanied by an audiobook in my ear. This means that my movement through space is not calming—it's intellectual and preoccupied. I needed something about this moment to be different.
In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell talks about how she started bird-watching and observed that it often feels more like bird-noticing, because it's quite difficult to find the birds you want to see when you want to see them. Instead of making it an active quest, allowing the birds to reveal themselves could be the point. This gave me the inspiration for my latest experimental slow-down activity: walking to a place where I can bird-notice.
I grabbed my binoculars, put on gloves and a coat, and headed out into the brisk morning. At first, I was missing my headphones but I quickly convinced myself that this was crucial to do without them. Once I arrived at the spot I had planned out, I realized that it would be impossible to do this with voices in my ear. I looked around at the bare, winterized trees and I couldn't see anything interesting. But I could hear that birds surrounded me.
This was the first time in years that I had gone to a secluded spot and actually used more of my senses. The trees started to show me subtle movements where birds were hopping from tiny branch to tiny branch. The scurry of little talons on the dried leaves under brush alerted me to the presence of camouflaged birds. I got to the top of a hill and was enveloped in a cacophony of bird calls. It was louder than I expected, and there were robins everywhere I turned.
I’d been hoping to see something more interesting than robins, which are extremely common where I live, but this was about getting used to the idea of bird-noticing and I tried my best to resist my boredom with these birds. In my binoculars, I could watch them closely—more closely than I could normally, which I know seems obvious, but it wasn’t just about seeing more closely, it was about watching their behavior and getting to know them. I was observing that they often had little white feathers around their eyes, and finding them snagging little berries off of branches and swallowing them with a few fast lurches of their neck. The more I watched, the more I noticed, and the more I noticed, the more interesting to watch these birds became.
I came back the next week with my camera instead of binoculars, hoping to catch a different species if luck were on my side. It felt like a replay of the prior weeks's experience: exciting anticipation, then realizing I'm just gonna get a lot of pictures of robins.
After an hour, I ended my robin photo shoot and started walking back. I noticed a bird on a telephone line that looked quite different than the now very familiar silhouette of a robin. I got closer, aimed my camera and realized I was looking at a raptor.
Cyborg
Bird-noticing is hard work. It demands nothing of me.
The whole experience was a battle for my mind. I kept trying to turn it into a productivity-based activity, which is the literal opposite of why I wanted to do it in the first place.
Admittedly, the camera made it even harder to keep my bird-noticing session pure. When I have a device that creates an artifact; a record of my activity, it gets harder to stay present and just be with the birds and the environment. The advantage is that it was an actual camera—not a phone—which meant that I could get a little wrapped up in my artistic impulses, but at least it couldn't distract me with social media temptations or even Google searches for species identification (not that I really needed it).
Where I hope this helps you, though, is in the noticing part of bird-noticing. Maybe birds aren't for you, but there are so many things that hide in plain sight that can become a world of wonders to explore. Being aware of our local environments is a crucial part of our humanity, and yet it rarely gets attention, at least from my experience. I walk around bustling animal activity that is unobserved because of the constant stream of noise I put through my earphones. It has made me feel even more disconnected and isolated from the real world.
A practice like a weekly bird-noticing session seems like the perfect way for me to re-engage in reality, to appreciate the life that surrounds me, and to help me calm down when stress is at an all time high. The point is to not have a point. This is anti-productive in the capitalistic hustle-culture sense. This is just for me.
Raptor has Latin roots for the concept, "to seize." The kestrel I saw at the end of bird-noticing this weekend is the smallest falcon in North America. While most of the time I feel that my attention, my time, my worries, and my preoccupations are seized by corporations, politics, and technology, my little friend has reminded me that I can seize back. I may be small, too, but I can seize control of my attention, my curiosity, my connection to the world.
If the choice is mine, I'll be a raptor.