Birding, the quest for certainty, and national polarization.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

“It’s a cuckoo! Stop the car, stop the car — back up to just before that big dead tree on the side of the road.”

There, at 6:15 on a bright June morning, winding our way along narrow roads among the hedgerows of central Italy, I saw a large bird, smaller than a crow but bigger than a robin (all the birding books have a sample size chart that runs from sparrow to robin to crow to heron or some other very large bird) mostly gray but with flashes of white, long-bodied and perched upright like a predator on a bare branch, giving it an unobstructed view of skittering rodents or smaller songbirds.

We are due to catch a train in the tiny dusty town of Terontola; we are close and have left ourselves plenty of time, so with a sigh, my husband Andy brakes and then backs up 100 feet or so while I scrabble in my too-tightly packed backpack for my binoculars. I wear my binoculars as much as I possibly can — while walking pretty much anywhere, from the sidewalks and parks of New York or Washington to the towpath on the Delaware-Raritan canal, when driving to the store, or when sitting and working with a view of a feeder or an olive tree. I look a little odd, I know, but it is an article of my birding faith that if I do not have my binoculars around my neck or within easy reach, I am bound to see a bird that I have never seen before or one that I very much want to see again. Here’s the proof, once again. If I’d had my binoculars, I could have grabbed at least a glimpse of my presumed cuckoo. But they are tightly wedged in with my books and toiletries, with snug protective covers over their lenses, and by the time we have reversed far enough to take a good luck at the tree, the bird is gone.

We have cuckoos in Umbria; I hear their unmistakable eponymous call in the mornings and evenings and through the somnolent air of Italian Sunday afternoons, a quiet so deep that it has its own presence, seeping through the cracks of the stones and through the shafts of slanting light. I heard one earlier this morning, rising up from the valley near the lake, floating notes through my window as I folded my skirts and dresses in their battered cleaner bags. My birding books and apps tell me that cuckoos look and sometimes perch like sparrow hawks; their mimicry of predators makes it easier for them to colonize other birds’ nests to lay their eggs.

So here, surely, in the valley, alone and looking like a predator, at an hour when cars are barely on the road yet and the fields are still, is my bird. And yet… perhaps it was a shrike? The bird I glimpsed was stockier than the slim falcon-like shape of a cuckoo, streamlined for lethal plummeting dives (in the falcon, that is). I think that its chest, puffed out a bit like a bully, was white against the gray, but I did not see any bars, which the cuckoo has. The beak was crueler than a cuckoo’s. Most relevant, although cuckoos look like predators, they are not. They feed on invertebrates like caterpillars and worms. So they have no need of high perches on bare trees, the hallmark of the hawk.

Shrikes, on the other hand, are predators. Indeed, their very name makes that clear, a cruel combination of letters that is just one away from “strike.” The Great Gray Shrike is also a fairly common local denizen; Merlin, the absolutely indispensable birding app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, tells me that great gray shrikes “breed in open forests and shrubby areas across Europe,” and that they are “found in open areas with prominent perches, including power lines and short treetops.”

Common Cuckoo

Great Gray Shrike

I have never seen a shrike either, so either a cuckoo or a shrike would be a “lifer,” meaning that I could go home and enter it into my life list of birds. Having a life list is what distinguishes a happy backyard bird-lover, a host of feeders and provider of nest boxes, an attentive listener of morning birdsong, into a birder. Birders are the people I once called “bird-watchers,” but as an amateur initiate into a serious and passionate community, I now understand that finding birds is more about listening and knowing where to look than simply watching for a flash of feathers in a tree.

Still, I can’t be sure it was either one. I simply did not get a close enough and long enough look. One of the many lessons of the birding life is the self-imposed integrity of the life list. I do not enter a bird unless I am certain of a sighting. A mere hearing definitely won’t do, even one as unequivocal as “cuckoo, cuckoo.” (Merlin’s companion app Ebird, however, does allow birders to indicate a bird as “present” when heard but not seen, all in the cause of deploying birders as data-gathering citizen scientists.)

Certainty, however, is hard. Unless you see an absolutely unmistakable bird — a pink flamingo, a scarlet tanager, a mature bald eagle (although young eagles lack the white head and tail for years, meaning that they look like very large mottled hawks), or, my personal favorite, a Eurasian hoopoe, you have to question your sighting.

Eurasian Hoopoe — they really DO look like that, right on your lawn!

Color and size are just the beginning. Was the shape right? The shape and type of the bill? Of the wings? Tail? The color of the legs? The habitat? The behavior? The sound — a song, a call, a warning rattle? The variables are many, which is why Andy shakes his head at the muttering that so often punctuates our days when I return home to my bird books after a walk or trip to my favorite nearby marsh. “Was it a cuckoo? It could have been a shrike…. I think it was fatter … I’m not sure about the chest feathers … the bill didn’t seem quite right… what would it have been doing on the side of the road? Etc, etc, etc., the birding version of a harpsichord continuo in Baroque music, omnipresent and rarely crescendoing to a conclusion.

I have been trained as a lawyer and a scholar of international relations, a discipline that transformed itself over the 20th century from diplomatic history into a social science. Lawyers learn to question everything they hear and see; the scientific method, translated into various methodologies appropriate for examining the behavior of governments and nations, is premised on skepticism and the search for disconfirming evidence. Discipline is the right word, requiring its practitioners to check their natural impulses. I know myself to be still far too accepting of much of what I read and hear, particularly in a media environment primed for outrage. It is just so easy, and often so satisfying, to be certain. “They” are the enemy; “we” are on the side of the good and the true. In a world as complex and distorted as ours, it is imperative to check and question our own certainty.

Suppose we had a birding checklist for complex events or people? The great birder Roger Tory Peterson, author of the Field Guide to Birds of North America, which is to birding what Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is to cooks, instructs beginning birders to focus on size, shape, behavior, flight patterns, and whether it climbs trees, swims, or wades, before moving on to an entire host of more specific “field marks.” What would a Roger Tory Peterson cheat sheet look like for news? Here are some of the questions we might ask, as reflexively as a birder checks for field marks.

— Who wrote this? What were their sources?

— What other explanations might be plausible?

— What might I be misperceiving?

— Why might I want to believe this to be true?

— What would I need to know to be certain?

I have recommended Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict before; her original Medium post summarizes her argument about our need to resist “simple binaries” and instead “complicate the narratives” we hear and tell ourselves to escape the bitter “high conflict” that Americans are locked into as a nation. A reflexive check-list could help. The stakes are surely high enough to exercise the same discipline that I strive for in identifying a bird.

Was it a cuckoo or a shrike? I cannot be certain. Neither will make it on to my life list. I learned quite a bit from asking, however, and will be better prepared next time, knowing more precisely what to look for. For now, as so often, I will have to live with the uncertainty. Just not enough evidence to tell.