In 2016, a Vermont naturalist named Bridget Butler, at the point in her life that I’d been in mine when I started producing “For the Birds”—with three tiny children and a need to do something creative and useful while being the best stay-at-home mother possible—created a website and blog, introducing the term Slow Birding to the birding community via her warm and inviting workshops and online courses. Slow birding simply means paying closer attention to the birds we see, sometimes plopping ourselves down to watch or listen more deeply than when we feel obligated to keep moving on to the next bird. She told me:
The essence of my Slow Birding practice is connection; connection with the birds, the land, with myself and with other people. That type of connection comes with an open heart and deep listening. For me, there's no room for gatekeeping or exclusivity. We're all born with the ability to observe and notice and connect and I receive great joy in helping others find that feeling by watching birds.
On her website, she adds that she strives “to encourage folks to take that passion [for nature] and turn it into action, paying it forward for the landscape they love & enjoy.”
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| Bridget Butler slow birding |
Slow birding is a very old concept even if Bridget is the one who introduced most of us to her wonderful name for it. In 2020, Bridget Butler was Nate Swick’s guest on the American Birding Association’s podcast in a segment titled “Secrets of Slow Birding with Bridget Butler.” Bridget and Nate’s easy banter gave the lie to the belief of some that the ABA is only about rushing and listing. Bridget created her own niche in a community that has many overlapping niches, and like a chickadee, she negotiates the birding world in a spirit of cooperation, not competition. As the ABA motto says, there’s “A million ways to bird.”
In March 2021, Bridget was a guest on Ray Brown's Talkin' Birds radio program, discussing Slow Birding and a cool community science project. She also wrote a charming article for the June 2020 issue of the ABA’s magazine Birding, titled “Backyard Big Year: Family Style,” about how she and her small children keep track of all the birds they see in their backyard.
I recently learned of a new book published by Penguin-Random House, Slow Birding, and immediately assumed it was by Bridget Butler, but it wasn’t. Joan E. Strassmann, a biologist who studies the evolution of cooperation and the control of conflict in microscopic animals, says birders should:
Sit and watch the birds. You might draw them or take notes on what they are doing. Then when you see those birds again, they will seem like old friends.
That's of course good advice, familiar as it sounds. Indeed, it's the style of birding I usually do and write about, focusing on my own backyard birds as well as those further afield.
But Strassmann’s book isn’t about how we do that—rather, she chose 18 species that could be found where she lives in St. Louis and wrote about a few scientific research projects about each. Her examples of “slow birders” are people who not only place USF&W bands on birds but also color band them, place RFID tags or geolocators on them, take blood and feather samples for DNA and/or parasite analysis, and collect preen oil by rubbing a small capillary tube on a bird’s preen oil gland. Some of the research she cites involves extremely invasive methods such as implanting time-released testosterone tubes on wild birds, putting split-shot fishing weights on the tails of nesting songbirds specifically to disrupt their balance and make flight more effortful, conducting laparotomies to look directly at internal sex organs, and slicing the delicate skin on birds’ heads to look at the skull for aging. One researcher even clipped the colorful feather tips from American Coot chicks to document that their parents stop feeding them or even peck them to death.
Every one of these scientific activities requires state and federal permits above and beyond standard bird banding permits, much involving highly sophisticated and expensive laboratory analysis. In other words, the work she focuses on in Slow Birding is nothing most of us birders can possibly do. Reading it wasn't a waste of time, but I so wish she’d titled it something closer to what she actually wrote about; maybe Detailed Descriptions of a Few Specialized Ornithological Research Projects on Some Familiar Birds. The birding community already understands the term “Slow Birding” thanks to Bridget Butler, who shows us how to engage with birds in our own backyards in ways that can both enrich our lives and benefit the birds themselves, individually and collectively. I can’t wait for her to write a book.
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| Bridget Butler |
I hardly ever write negative reviews of books, but I'm making an exception. I realize that titles can't be copyrighted, but the birding community is so familiar with the term "Slow Birding" in the context of Bridget Butler's work that I am distressed that Joan E. Strassmann didn't acknowledge her at all. Plus, the book is not about Slow Birding, but about ornithological research. My more detailed review, which repeats some of the points already mentioned, follows.
Joan E. Strassmann came up with her book title Slow Birding decades ago, inspired by the "slow food" and “locavore” movements. She writes in her preface:
Slow Birding brings these ideas to birding. All too often, birding is something done racing around in automobiles, stopping for moments to pick up a species here and there, then driving on. I call it “motor birding,” the birding equivalent to eating fast food.
What if instead we stayed close to home and watched the birds that intersect our lives? What if we learned more about our birds, building our knowledge more slowly through daily observation? It may take some practice to get more out of local birds. It may be hard at first to learn to watch birds instead of ticking them off a list. This book will help.
Strassmann's book has some fascinating information, but would more appropriately have been titled Detailed Descriptions of a Few Specialized Ornithological Research Projects on Some Birds. She calls each of the researchers she cites a "slow birder," though every one of them is a graduate student or a professional researcher with a Ph.D., and all the work she describes, often in great detail, involves highly specialized research projects requiring state and federal permits. Strassmann highlights 18 species found near her home in St. Louis, but despite her emphasis on birding locally, virtually none of the research she cites took place anywhere near St. Louis. Her examples of “slow birders” are people who not only place USF&W bands on birds but also color band them, place RFID tags or geolocators on them, take blood and feather samples for DNA and/or parasite analysis, and collect preen oil by rubbing a small capillary tube on a bird’s preen oil gland. Every one of these valuable scientific activities requires state and federal permits above and beyond standard bird banding permits, work which usually must be done under the auspices of a recognized research institution. And analyzing DNA, blood parasites, and preen oil compounds can only be done at highly sophisticated laboratories, usually at great expense. In other words, the work she focuses on in Slow Birding is nothing most of us birders can possibly do.
Many of Strassmann's “true slow birders” capture and keep wild birds in aviaries or laboratories, at least temporarily, involving additional state and federal research permits. And many of the techniques she focuses on for field work involve extremely invasive methods such as implanting time-released testosterone tubes on wild birds, putting split-shot fishing weights on the tails of nesting songbirds specifically to disrupt their balance and make flight more effortful, conducting laparotomies to look directly at internal sex organs, and slicing the delicate skin on birds’ heads to look at the skull for aging. In one case, Strassmann condescendingly reassures her readers, “Don’t worry—she treated the birds humanely and held them in a cage until they had recovered from these procedures and could be let go.” Nowhere does she mention the additional permits, institutional support, and training this researcher needed to do this legally and ethically. Again, some of the results of these kinds of invasive experiments are interesting, but a title mentioning ornithological research would have been far more appropriate than "Slow Birding."
The research Strassmann calls "slow birding" may involve years or decades of carefully studying a single species, but it's hardly "slow." Anyone who has participated in simple, ordinary bird banding, especially during migration, knows that. Some people scramble to retrieve birds from nets, a painstaking procedure that must be done both carefully and quickly as more birds continue to get caught, then place each one in a bag or tube and rush it back to the banding station where other people are processing each bird—that is, banding, weighing, taking other measurements, sometimes removing one feather, recording all this data, and releasing each bird as quickly as possible.
Even the best banding stations have some mortality, an issue not mentioned in Slow Birding. (I seldom focus on that either, because it's rare and banding operations are so important in both ornithological and conservation work.) But Strassmann also describes the techniques of some “slow birders” who know their study subjects will die specifically because of their research. Some changed the color of eggs or substituted fake eggs to document the reduced parental care given chicks who hatch (or seem to have hatched) from sub-optimal eggs. One painted the mouth edges of chicks to document which ones would get too few feedings to thrive, and one even clipped colorful feather tips from American Coot chicks to document that their parents stop feeding them or even peck them to death.
Strassmann’s first species account is about one of my favorite birds, the Blue Jay, one of the three birds illustrated on the beautiful cover. She focuses on their diet, going into great detail about a very toxic food they never eat in the wild—monarch butterflies and caterpillars—and one food item that makes up a significant part of their diet from October through March—acorns. She makes absolutely no mention of the many, many other things these omnivores eat, including berries—the very food item the Blue Jay on the book's charming cover is eating—nor of the fact that Blue Jays seldom eat acorns between spring and early fall.
Strassmann gets into the nitty-gritty of Lincoln Brower’s classic experiments from the 1960s on captive jays, showing how eating a monarch makes them violently ill. I assumed that after lavishing seven lengthy paragraphs on an insect Blue Jays avoid in nature, she’d let her readers in on what insects Blue Jays do eat, but she simply wrote, “There are plenty of other delicious insects for Blue Jays to eat, but insects are not their principal food,” despite the fact that insects make up 22 percent of the adults’ diet year round and a much larger percentage of the food parent jays feed their nestlings.
Year-round, adult Blue Jays eat more vegetal than animal matter, and the connection between Blue Jays and acorns is well known. I’ve mentioned on lots of radio programs and articles that Blue Jays are credited with “planting” acorns as glaciers receded such that oaks sprouted up much more quickly than trees with wind-borne seeds, and that jays select healthy acorns with about 88 percent accuracy. Strassmann doesn't seem to realize that even though acorns are an important part of a jay's diet for half the year, these omnivorous birds eat a lot of other nuts, seeds, and berries as well, and hardly any acorns once other food becomes easily available in spring until new acorns appear much later in summer or fall. Nor does she mention how much Blue Jays eat at bird feeders even as researchers are showing that widespread bird-feeding is altering Blue Jays’ winter distribution patterns.
For each species, she provides suggestions for slow birders, but except for including Cornell’s FeederWatch in a list with other formal projects readers might look into, she never suggests paying attention to what Blue Jays eat in our own backyards except acorns, and never mentions how interesting their behaviors at feeding stations are.
Even more surprising considering that Blue Jays belong to the family considered by most researchers to be the most intelligent of birds, she only indirectly discusses their spatial memory; her direct references to their intelligence are in the context of lame jokes. After telling a charming story about a jay in her yard who took silver-colored coins out of her small children's hands (something it apparently learned from being raised in captivity and then released by someone else), she writes that it was “smart enough to take our silver coins but not smart enough to spend them.” And her joke about how scientists must fool secretive captive jays to observe their caches fell flat, at least for me:
Blue Jays are smart and might not go to their caches if they knew they were being watched, even by a species as different from Blue Jays as we are. But they were presumably not smart enough to understand one-way mirrors.
Understanding avian intelligence is complicated, but I was shocked that someone who taught college-level animal behavior could write this:
The jays are smart enough to cache and smart enough to find most of their acorns but not quite smart enough to find all of them.
Nowhere does she cite a single study that suggests that Blue Jays forget their caches. Researchers have established that Blue Jays cannot subsist on acorns alone, and even in banner acorn years, they find fresh food sources throughout winter along with retrieving the many other food items they've cached. The fact that oak trees sprout from acorns “planted” by jays is not at all related to the jays’ not being “smart enough to find all of them"—it's simply that they cache away more than they'll normally need, just in case.
In her account of the Great Egret, Strassmann focuses specifically on the “slow birders” who not only observed siblicide in egret nests but swapped chicks from one nest to another to see which chicks would be killed. Doug Mock, one of the researchers she cited, told her about a newspaper interview he’d once done:
…she asked, “How can you stand it?” And I replied, “The first step in studying siblicide is that your soul has to die.” I was being flippant, of course (as usual), but it really is pretty harrowing to watch . . . until you habituate.
The research Strassmann includes is fascinating and, for the most part, provided valuable information at the time it was conducted—indeed, I myself have mentioned a lot of it in my own work—but her accounts focus on too narrow a slice of each species’ life history, with so many details about one or two studies that she misses nuances that have been picked up by other researchers studying the same questions. And her narrow focus gives short shrift to other aspects of each species’ life history, often some of the very aspects that St. Louis birders really could study in their own backyards.
Strassmann frequently mentions the slow food movement, so I guess it makes sense that her final recommendation for “slow birders” is to “Hunt Snow Geese in the spring…when the meat tastes better.” I do not at all oppose legal hunting, but hunting is not Slow Birding. Strassmann was specifically talking about conservation issues related to Snow Goose population surges on their Arctic breeding grounds, but in her entries about European Starlings and House Sparrows, two non-native species, she doesn't suggest that "slow birders" try to avoid subsidizing them at our feeders or nest boxes, much less shoot them.
The writing is far from elegant. Several times Strassmann drops a subject temporarily with a clunky phrase like “as we shall see.” In the Dark-eyed Junco entry, she grabbed my interest with this:
I could talk about the finding that males copy songs from neighbors, but those songs are of less value in attracting mates than a male’s own invented songs. Or I could tell of the study of Elise Ferree, who found that females with more white in their tail feathers had more sons.
But then she didn't "talk about" either.
Strassmann is unsettlingly gossipy about researchers’ marriages and even about one's death by suicide. And one garbled sentence about two people in her neighborhood was utterly out of place. They:
had the dream of grandparents down the block until he took an unfortunate medicine, went on oxygen, then ultimately both went to a retirement center, where he finally decided to go off the treatments and died.
She goes off on many odd tangents like this, but her anecdotes about people seemed especially unseemly and off-putting.
There are many, many inspiring books out there about ways we can more closely look at the birds in our own backyards, and far more providing fascinating looks at our own backyard birds, with much more complete looks at their lives and behaviors. I'm afraid Slow Birding misses the mark on both counts.