Birding as a Pantakinesis gateway ...
- sciart0
- Feb 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 26
Excerpt from interview with author Ed Yong in New York Times:
"To me, the difference between being casually bird-curious and being an actual birder is making a specific effort to go and look at birds.
Exactly. So early September of 2023 was when I made my first trip to a local wetland to specifically look at birds and nothing else. That was, honestly, a life-changing moment.
I went to a place called Arrowhead Marsh. It’s this relatively small stretch of wetland that has a boardwalk sticking out into this little chunk of bay, and on that day, I saw all these creatures. I’ve been writing about animals since I’ve been writing about anything, but a lot of my knowledge of the natural world, if you want to be reductive, it’s just trivia.
Whereas the knowledge I gained from birding, that started on that boardwalk, feels rooted in the lives of the birds themselves in time and space. I look at the birds, and I see how they behave. Small things that I would never have noticed if I was just reading scientific publications.
Those two halves, the academic side and the more lived knowledge, beautifully interact with each other. And the thing that I felt palpably at that place on that day, that I still do every time I go birding, is this incredible sense of being present.
When you’re watching birds — and this could apply to the natural world writ large — there is so much going on that is basically beyond our comprehension.
Because of our sensory capabilities as human beings, we are condemned to having only an ankle-deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth.
To me, that’s humbling and mind-blowing. What do you think?
I fully agree. I mean, that is a beautiful précis of basically my entire body of work.
Nailed it! [Laughs.]
I can go home now, right?
All of it is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don’t perceive it and don’t understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand.
I’m now working on Book 3, and I see them as a trilogy that all touch on this theme. “I Contain Multitudes,” the first book, was about the microbes that live inside our bodies and those of other animals, and the enormous influence they play in our lives. “An Immense World” is about how other creatures perceive things that we miss, and about how each of us is perceiving only a thin sliver of the fullness of reality, which is a wonderfully humbling concept.
The book that I’m currently working on takes those themes and runs with them. The book is called “The Infinite Extent,” and it is about life at different scales. It is about what it is like to be the size of a blue whale or the size of a bacterium, to live for millennia like a bristlecone pine, or for just a few hours like a mayfly. It’s about these extremes of experience and existence.
I have a curmudgeonly question. Developing an awareness of the magic that’s happening all around us at any given moment, and understanding that there’s this vast cosmic dance playing out — in the abstract, I can see how internalizing those perspectives might change one’s perspective. Sometimes I’m able to get to that place.
But the way I’m picturing it in my head is like, I blow up a beautiful balloon. I’m carrying that balloon around and looking up at the balloon: What a beautiful balloon I’m carrying with me. Then I get to the office, and the balloon pops on the halogen light, and I’m back in the [expletive]. Did your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about actually help you in the moments when you were struggling?
I can say that thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me. It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and despair that I was feeling. It doesn’t cure it, but it fills my life with wonder and joy, and that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with.
One thing I’ve said about science as a field is that it is one of the only areas of human endeavor that take us out of ourselves.
We exist at a time when we are being crunched ever inward. Whether it’s through a novel virus, or frayed social connections, or algorithms that feed us more of what we already were seeking out. There is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world, and the science and nature writing that I’m prioritizing, and the birding that I do, are all counters to that.
They are a way of radiating your attention outward. I’m still wrestling with the curmudgeonly question that you asked. Like, does any of that matter? Sometimes when I go out and look at birds, there’s a voice in my head that says, Is this reall