by Jonathan Rosen, The New YorkerBirding is the opposite of being at the movies—you’re outside, not sitting in a windowless box; you’re stalking wild animals, not looking at pictures of them. You’re dependent on weather, geography, time of day—if you miss the prothonotary warbler, there isn’t a midnight showing. On the other hand, birding, like moviegoing, is at heart voyeuristic, and you can’t do it without technology—to bring birds closer you must interpose binoculars between yourself and the wild world. To find them in the wild, you need planes, trains, automobiles, and motorboats. Birds are natural; birders aren’t.
And some birders are less natural than others, like the three characters at the heart of “The Big Year,” who are driven to see as many North American species as possible. They are genial caricatures of normal people, partly because they’re in a Hollywood movie, but mostly because they are birders. As a birder myself, I recognize the symptoms: I’ve travelled great distances to see birds; I’ve totted up the names of birds on lists and felt weirdly comforted, as if they guarded me against oblivion; I’ve listened, like Jack Black’s character, to birdcalls on my iPod. But I have to admit that at bottom I’m an indifferent birder, despite having written a book called “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of the Nature.” At the end of the day I am a bird-watcher, not a birder.
This may seem like a pedantic distinction in an already marginal world, but it matters—though the two terms bleed into each other. Crudely put, bird-watchers look at birds; birders look for them. Ahab wasn’t fishing, and the guys in “The Big Year” aren’t watching birds, they’re scouring North America in a ruthless bid to tick off more species than anyone else. They don’t even have to see them—hearing their call is enough.
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