It is easy to give a pretty tidy summary of the first ~18 years of my life. I’ve got that narrative down pretty good at this point. It is where my core core identity was established. That’s why they call them formative years, right? The next 18 years are harder to summarize. College. Deciding what you want to do. Who you want to be. The creation of your future self. You, but with more specificity. Loving science or nature doesn’t exactly qualify you for a job. Long story short, I set out to become a behavioral biologist; someone who goes out into the world, watches animals do what they do, and figures out why they are doing what they are doing. Sounds fun, right?
But, some of my academic pursuits weren’t as fulfilling as I thought they were going to be. You might guess I just didn’t want to take the obligatory physics and chemistry, but that wasn’t it. And, in the meantime, with a bigger buffet on the offering in college, I did discover there were other subjects to learn about—ones that I couldn’t have even conceived of—that were cooler than I could have imagined.
Which is to say, by the time I enrolled into college I had already sort of developed a pretty strong identity as a nature girl, a biology student, and a devotee of the academic field of animal behavior. But despite an enthusiastic search that went on for the full four years of my undergraduate time at Cornell University, somehow I never found the behaviorist community I was looking for (which, I have to say, probably reflects more on me than Cornell). In the meantime, I did happen across another academic community that was more about the evolution of animals’ bodies than about animal behavior specifically: functional and evolutionary morphology. These fields asked how animals evolved across broad stretches of evolutionary time, and even how features of animals evolved; like the idea that it is not only species that have their own origin stories and histories, but any given feature of a species has its own history too! Like, our teeth are derived from bony scales in some ancestral fish. Whuuuut??? Or, our ear bones can be traced back to a part of gill arch or jaw of another fishy ancestor. Truth is stranger than fiction. These “origin stories” are from the realm of macroevolution, which is evolution across very large periods of time, like millions of years. And get this, even the behaviors of animals can be seen to evolve independent from species like morphology does. The complex waggle dance of the honey bees? Precursors of that complex behavior still survive in honeybees’ closest relatives. No, really. I eat this stuff up man. Crazy cool. Objectively cool, right???
Thus, I left from my four years at Cornell with a degree in biology, and also in the process of transforming some aspects of my identity. I still thought of myself as a nature girl and scientist, and even a behaviorist, but truthfully, a lot of the wind had gone out of my sails for the most strictly defined world of what I now thought of as “behavioral ecology.” At least as I had found it as an undergraduate who didn’t qualify for Work Study at Cornell. On the other hand, I still loved nature, loved biology, and I felt a lot of excitement about this bigger evolutionary picture I had come to see. However, it would take several years for me to let go of one dream I had about who I wanted to be, strictly speaking a behavioral ecologist, and to develop a new dream. I was reforming my identity as I adjusted my dreams and goals. It took a while for the transition to settle in. You can’t just switch your identity overnight you know.
During this period of transition I discovered a new passion (or was it an obsession?): Bird-watching. LOVED it. Couldn’t believe a nature girl like myself could hike the woods of upstate New York for years, graduate with a biology degree from Cornell University of all places, and still have no idea what a Brown Creeper was. For those of you reading this, if you do not know what a Brown Creeper is, don’t feel bad, that just means you are not a birdwatcher. I will give you this hint though: if I was ever gonna get a tattoo, it would be a little Brown Creeper creeping up my thigh, and that would be cute (sadly, I am not a tattoo person).
It wasn’t like I was totally clueless about birds. My parents had pointed out Cardinals (a rarer sighting in New York when I was young), Baltimore Orioles, and even Brown-headed Cowbirds and Grackles at our feeders and in the yard. I still have the image burned in my head of the first Scarlet Tanager we ever saw, a tiny glowing speck of red and black in a giant tree in our back yard. And as I had roamed the woods and fields, I had “discovered” the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Rufous-sided Towhee, and the Indigo Bunting by simply lifting my binoculars to look at small birds on my walks. But I didn’t understand those sightings were just the tip of an iceberg of bird diversity moving all around me.
But it was within months after graduating that I became truly tuned in: there it was, all around me, sweet, cute, funny, not to mention beautiful, entrancing and exquisite little birds I didn’t even know existed. Singing in bushes as I drove by. Sweet sweet sweet, I’m so sweet! Kevin McGowan had put me on to to the recreational hobby of birdwatching, especially “birding by ear” (recognizing species by their songs and calls). It caught with me like well-cured wood struck by lightening. I spent the next three years with a field guide tucked in my shorts, a very cheap pair of binoculars around my neck, putting 1000s of miles on my family’s old Dodge Caravan, and trying to see as many different kinds of birds as I could find between New York and Arizona, (my two home bases for those years between college and grad school). Fuh-uhn.
In those years I saw so many beautiful beautiful things. It was like I had discovered a secret world of fairies that co-existed around all of us, but it was so much more rich and beautiful and full of wonder than I ever could have imagined. I drank up the sites of so many birds in their beautiful homes. Majestic trees, tangled bushes, swaying grasses. Dawn, dusk, sunny skies, rain coming, a sudden brisk breeze. Birds in the mountains, birds in the deserts. Birds courting, birds hunting, birds scolding me. That one Bewick’s Wren that I noticed working its way toward me through the sparse, dry vegetation of Sonoita Creek Sanctuary, AZ. He was unafraid. Curious. In a manner of seconds his path intersected mine and he landed at my feet in the dusty path. Then, after wren-fast scrutiny of my leg, he flew up and briefly considered landing on my knee—wafting my leg with his fluttering wings—but he thought better of it and dropped back down onto to my boot. Then he flew up again, apparently having decided my shorts, and especially my pocket, looked promising…Insert bill…nope, nothing. Back to the boot. This weird tree is devoid of any grub. Well, it was worth a look…
…And off he went.
And did I mention the colors? Bold and saturated primary colors. Yes, Mountain Bluebird sky blues, Vermillion Flycatcher reds, and, ahem, Yellow-breasted Chat yellows (no Canaries in the States). All of these birds, eye-popping. But it was all those muted colors, the shades of brown and gray and tan and olive and buff and ochre and cream and chestnut…those got me the most. Think sparrows are just dull brown blobs? You haven’t had a good look at a Sage Sparrow in the warm morning light through binoculars.
I will always envy the birds their feathered coats.
And yes, I was in love again.
The only cloud hanging over me during this period was the sense I’d fallen off my path. I had wanted to become a biologist, and had my heart set on a career in academia. So, after my time exploring and discovering the bird world—through the eyes of a student of animal behavior, AND functional morphology, AND macroevolution—it was time for me to go back to school. I was going to study birds. I was going to study something about how they evolved: maybe their songs, maybe their feathers, maybe their bodies or their behaviors, but I just wanted to love all over those birds. It was all clear to me again, this would become my life’s work; a career as a professional evolutionary ornithologist.
This Brown Creeper photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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