TAKING FLIGHT LAUNCH TALK


INTRO

Thank you for coming tonight to celebrate the publication of my book, Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America. The book is published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press and describes how humans and birds have interacted in the Midwest over the last 12,000 years. The questions that it raises about nature and culture have been part of my life for 30 years and I couldn’t be happier to see them take such a lovely physical form thanks to my colleagues at the Press.

By Midwest, I mean a rough triangle stretching from Buffalo west through the Great Lakes to Fargo, and south to St. Louis or Memphis. By humans, I mean not just scientists but the common people -- unlettered immigrants, farmers, hunters, and Native Americans. The book describes what birds have meant to people who lived and died on the landscape that we inhabit, and who were surrounded by the same birds that we see. 

Tonight I’d like to explain where the book came from, describe some of the challenges I faced while researching and writing it over three decades, and read a few passages from it. The project changed shape and scope several times because, as Mary said to me recently, our writing is part of daily life, and evolves as we do. I’ll talk less tonight about the history of birds than about the history of the book, which is what I always like to hear about when I attend these sorts of events. Let’s begin at the beginning, with the introduction.

Pages 1-3:

"I began birding more than thirty years ago, when my wife was pregnant for the first time. Anxious about my upcoming responsibilities, I did what many new fathers do. I ran for the hills—or, more accurately, for the swamps—where I distracted myself from impending fatherhood by trying to identify momentary bursts of color in Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America. 

"Mary and I had traveled that summer to a cabin poised on the edge of a northern lake. I was unpacking the car when a great blue heron floated silently past, almost close enough to touch. I’d never seen one before, never seen anything like it. When it landed on a small island just across from the cabin and stared back at me, I was hooked... and I began spending as much time as I could outdoors with my eyes on the sky… 

"Birds are all around us. They paddle along our shores, flee from our footsteps, perch on our fences, and soar above our houses. We see birds every time we step outside. And we usually see what we expect to see. A wood duck perched on a low branch by a pond is a check mark for a birder, data to a biologist, a potential trophy for a hunter, and a source of wonder to a child. As an old Hindu proverb puts it, “When a pickpocket encounters a saint, all he notices are pockets.” When we look at birds, we see what we look for. So did our ancestors.

"Many of [them] believed that if a whip-poor-will landed on your roof, death or bad luck was sure to follow. They thought swallows hibernated all winter in the mud beneath frozen ponds like frogs. They believed birds possessed souls, climbed high or dove deep into other realms, and could carry messages from the spirit world. They roasted vultures to smear the dripping fat on achy joints. They buried rooster claws under enemies’ doorsteps to bring bad luck. They wore eagle feathers for courage and prayed to bird spirits for guidance. They held these views with the same certainty that we ascribe to scientific facts today. Like us, they saw their beliefs, desires, and values reflected in the birds that surrounded them."

As that last paragraph suggests, soon after I took up birding in 1985 I began to wonder how earlier observers had reacted to the same birds that I was seeing in the field. Since my day job was at the nation's largest American history library, I started to comb through old scientific reports, the diaries of travelers, interviews with formerly enslaved people, letters of pioneer settlers, logs of Renaissance ship captains, memoirs of American Indian elders, and writing by anyone else who might have commented on the birds I was seeing. They were captivating, and I began to imagine an anthology of historical eyewitness birds accounts arranged by species. I even approached a couple publishers with the idea (unsuccessfully).

I continued to compile bibliographies, photocopy quotations, make notes, generate indexes to my notes, and draft summaries -- activities that have given me pleasure all my life. Some people like to play golf; I like to do library research. As the years rolled by, in my spare time I worked my way through more than 1,200 primary sources containing firsthand descriptions of North American birds. I gradually became fascinated less by the birds and more by the history of ways that people looked at birds – what did birds mean to my predecessors on this landscape? Not just to scientists but also to uneducated farmers, new immigrants, enslaved Africans, and native peoples around the Midwest. By the early 1990s, my focus had shifted from compiling evidence to making sense of it.


NAMING AND KNOWING

The first stumbling block I encountered involved bird names. 

Pages 161-162:

"Twenty years ago I was standing in line outside Chicago’s Field Museum, waiting for the doors to open and watching a flock of Canada geese nibbling in the flooded grass. A few feet behind me, a mother tried to keep her impatient children entertained. “Look at the ducks,” she cajoled, pointing with an outstretched arm. “Look at those big ducks!” 

"As every new birder discovers, mastering the names for birds is the key to understanding everything else. You can’t navigate a field guide, find information on the Web, or connect with other birders unless you speak the language. Until you understand the jargon, you’re like that exasperated mom — though you can see the birds, you literally don’t know what you’re talking about... You can’t understand football if you don’t know the difference between a quarterback and a cornerback, and you can’t understand birds if you can’t tell a goose from a duck...

"But mastering bird names isn’t easy. As a new birder, I was stumped by my first field guide. The book seemed to be arbitrarily arranged. It didn’t show birds alphabetically, or by color, size, habitat, geography, or any other feature I could decipher. Instead, the birds were grouped under headings with incomprehensible Latin labels. Inside those sections, every species had not one but two more Latin names, usually based on an obscure detail that could be seen only on a dead museum specimen. The English names weren’t much better. Most of them seemed to be holdovers from medieval Europe, often combined with the name of some long-dead white guy, like Bewick’s wren. And then there were all the weird names I couldn’t figure out at all. What the heck was a phalarope?

"I remember feeling intimidated as I hunted in vain through my spotless new field guide. Something was wrong with me for not understanding how these bird names worked. After all, they had 250 years of science behind them. Who was I to question all that accumulated wisdom? I respected the names in the book as if they’d come down from heaven carved in stone, like the Ten Commandments. Standing beside a marsh with my copy of Peterson, I struggled to look up each new bird in its maze of officially sanctioned categories, which I assumed corresponded to the natural order of things. Only later did I realize that both the names and their arrangement were artificial. Species and genera don’t exist in nature; they exist in our minds."
 
And pages 3-4:

"This was driven home to me one morning when my five-year-old and I were playing with our dogs. When we stopped because it was time to get dressed for school, she asked, “Dad, do the dogs know what time it is?” I stopped in my tracks. Of course the dogs didn’t know what time it was. Time isn’t something that can be sniffed or heard or seen. Without understanding numbers and the arithmetical patterns that govern them, the dogs could never know what time it was. 

"I realized that I usually considered time to be part of nature outside myself, like air or gravity, when in fact it’s actually a concept in my mind. The dogs obviously couldn’t know distance or direction, either. A foot, a meter, north, south, above, below, left, right—these, too, didn’t exist outside me in the natural world. They were just ideas inside my head; every culture distinguishes them differently. And, I realized, if such fundamental aspects of reality as time and space were socially constructed, then what about all the bird names I’d so carefully mastered? They weren’t really about birds at all, but about the way that birders and scientists talk about birds."

It turned out that every culture has had its own names for the birds that surrounded them. Scientists spoke and thought in certain ways; uneducated working-class people in different ways; American Indian elders in still other ways.  

Take, for example, the Ruddy Duck, a pretty little bird found all over Wisconsin which ornithologists call Oxyura jamaicensis and classify in the genus of stiff-tailed ducks. When its Latin names were created in the 19th century, they clarified for ornithologists what it looked like and where it fit into scientific taxonomy. But the Latin binomial meant nothing at all to Yankee hunters, who already knew it as the "blue-bill," "booby coot,” “dip-tail diver,” “sleepy-head,” “water-partridge,” "hard-headed broad-bill," "spoon-billed butter-ball," and "horse-turd dipper" -- not to mention 150 other colloquial names. French and German immigrants had their own avian vocabulary, as did African-Americans and each American Indian nation. 

When the country’s leading bird journals switched to using the new official Latin nomenclature in the 1880s, lay readers complained that it was “hard to spell, hard to pronounce, hard to remember, and harder still to understand.” In 1897 one exasperated Milwaukee subscriber complained to the editor, “Why don’t you have it all in Latin, it would mean just as much to us.”

To identify the birds being talked about in the hundreds of eyewitness accounts I’d collected, I needed to be able to translate their bird names into standard scientific terms. Working on that problem produced a massive spreadsheet of colloquial names. It also led me into the anthropological literature on how humans around the globe give names to natural things, which became a central part of chapter eight, called "Ahonques, Timber-Doodles, and Shitquicks." How each community named birds expressed something about what they saw, what they overlooked, and what they valued.

FOLKLORE AND SCIENCE

Since illiterate working-class informants generally published no books and left few written records, I had to look elsewhere to discover how common people thought about the birds that surrounded them – to the proverbs, sayings, customs, folktales, and exotic practices gathered in the field at the turn of the 20th century.  This folklore had passed down several generations orally, since Europeans and Africans first arrived in the Midwest, and was gathered by dozens of field workers just before mass media homogenized American culture in the early 20th century. My sources included everyone from hardy Mennonite farmers in Ohio to underground voodoo queens in St. Louis, all of whom assumed certain things to be true about the birds they encountered every day. This folklore generated chapter nine, called "Feathers, Fetishes and Fables." 

Until modern times, far more people understood birds through inherited superstitions than through science. For most of our history, the majority of Americans had little use for science, which was a kind of esoteric knowledge confined largely to urban elites. Anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf urged us not to mistake scientific ideas for “the apex of the evolution of the human mind, nor their present wide spread as due to any survival from fitness, or to anything but a few events of history — events that could be called fortunate only from the parochial point of view of the favored parties.” 

Scientific ideas about birds only became widespread during the 20th century, after four centuries of slow growth:

Page 109:
"Today, common sense tells me that the world is filled with discrete objects, that they’re composed of molecules and atoms, that events in the world happen randomly (apart from the laws of physics), and that an object’s value depends mainly on the price for which it can be sold. But 350 years ago, common sense told intellectuals like [Jesuit missionaries Jacques] Marquette, [Louis] Nicolas, and [Gabriel] Sagard that the world was enchanted, that objects were infused with spiritual significance, that events happened according to God’s will, and that an object’s value depended on its place in a Great Chain of Being with God at the top and angels, souls, humans, animals, plants, and minerals ranked below Him. 

"The shift from their worldview to ours took place very gradually as new discoveries and educational reforms replaced old assumptions with novel ones. In 1600, astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting that the sun was just one of many stars and the earth just one of many planets. But in 1700, after another century of observations with the telescope, that idea was widely accepted by educated people. During the course of the eighteenth century, experiment and observation slowly replaced inherited dogma as the standard of intellectual authority. Reason and science superseded faith and magic in the minds of people who wrote about birds."

During the 19th century, this shift in perspective sent dozens of explorers across the Midwest in search of birds, naturalists like John James Audubon, Alexander Wilson, and less-famous contemporaries. There was Thomas Say, so devoted to science that he slept beneath the exhibit cases in a Philadelphia museum at night, or Thomas Nuttall, the original absent-minded professor whose caricature by James Fennimore Cooper spawned countless later stereotypes in books and films. The middle third of the book tells the stories of these missionaries, explorers, and fledgling ornithologists, and explains how scientific ornithology displaced folklore in the minds of Americans looking at birds.

NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITIONS

Everywhere they went, of course, early observers encountered America Indians with their own ways of understanding and acting toward birds. For example, in May 1791, American colonel Thomas Proctor complained that Seneca leaders refused to meet with him to discuss diplomatic affairs because “it was their pigeon time, in which the Great Spirit had blessed them with an abundance; and that such was his goodness to the Indians that he never failed sending them season after season, and although it might seem a small matter to me, the Indians will never lose sight of those blessings.” To the Seneca, gathering, eating, and giving thanks for the pigeons was much more important than white people’s politics.

Memoirs by Native American elders, studies by ethnologists, and accounts of missionaries enabled me to discuss the importance of birds in indigenous communities across the Midwest since the time of the first European invasions in 1539. Their faith in the spiritual power of birds did not disappear when science became orthodox in mainstream America. Micmac author Evan Pritchard interviewed American Indian elders and shamans around the nation for his 2013 book, Bird Medicine, concluding that “it is clear that a living, dynamic tradition still exists concerning our spiritual relationship with birds.” Nor did American Indian attitudes toward birds suddenly spring up when white people began recording them during the Renaissance. Their beliefs stretch back thousands of years and are the focus of the first three chapters in Taking Flight.

But how could I get at the long pretextual history of humans and birds? The earliest archaeological evidence of contact between the two comes from 12,000 years ago, but words about birds only go back 400 years. I realized about 15 years ago that if I didn't solve this problem, the book would ignore 95% of human history. But could archaeology reveal how people interacted with birds here long before ink was put on paper? 

Page 13-14:
"Trying to understand the beliefs of preliterate people by looking at the mute objects they left behind is risky. Most archaeologists prefer to stick closely to physical evidence, like the measurements of projectile points or pottery shards, and hesitate to make deductions about intellectual life from stones and bones. This led archaeologist Robert Hall to worry in the 1970s that his profession was “more concerned about how Indians made their livings, than about what Indians thought it was worthwhile to live for.” He and a few others in the field went beyond the physical evidence to also consider ethnological studies of modern American Indians, historical accounts from the recent past, insights from contemporary psychology, and even disciplines like linguistics and neurobiology. Equipped with these additional insights, they speculated about the beliefs of prehistoric peoples.

“Sometimes this interdisciplinary approach yields startling results. For example, anthropologist Peter Nabokov once told me about listening to archaeologists puzzling over a series of symbols repeated on a prehistoric pot, which he immediately recognized as steps in a dance that’s still performed. Hall and other “cognitive archaeologists” argued that persistent motifs displayed on objects fabricated at different times express the same concepts in different media across the centuries, something like Jungian archetypes or Chomsky’s universal grammar expressed in pots, tools, and rock art. "

A staggering amount of archaeology has been done in the Midwest over the last 40 years, with tens of thousands of artifacts brought to light and analyzed. The consensus of archaeologists, ethnologists, art historians, and religious scholars is that indigenous peoples embraced the same basic shamanist view of the universe found around the globe. 

Page 15-16:
"For shamanists, what we can know through our five senses is just one of many realities. As twentieth-century Mexican shaman Maria Sabina put it, “There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened, and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says.” ...

"Indigenous people everywhere have viewed the world this way for countless millennia. To shamanists (at the risk of oversimplification), the universe consists of an Upper World, part of it revealed to humans as the sky and stars; a Middle World that humans experience with their physical senses; and a Lower World, which can be entered through caves or under water. … In this three-tiered universe, time unfolds cyclically, like Earth’s seasons. Everything comes into existence, grows and develops, decays and dies, and then is reborn and renewed. The cosmos is timeless and everything possible has already happened. Everything humans encounter is sacred because the entire universe is animated by spiritual forces. Shamans cultivate specific techniques, including rituals involving birds, for moving through the two other realms in order to create outcomes in ours."

Page 17:
"Through ritual purification, hypnotic drumming and chanting, ecstatic dancing, and hallucinogenic plants, shamans replace everyday consciousness with mystical states. Their followers believe that they actually take the physical form of other creatures or allow animal spirits to occupy their bodies. Birds are among their most important guides and helpers.

“Birds,” writes archaeologist Karine Tache of prehistoric people in the Midwest, “are powerful symbols perceived as mediators between the various cosmic realms. Bird motifs or anatomical parts — feathers, beaks, claws — are often part of a shaman’s regalia and/or paraphernalia, conferring on him the power to communicate with creatures and spirits inhabiting realms beyond the world known to human beings.” 

For thousands of years, birds or human-bird shapeshifters called “falcon-warriors” were depicted on clay tablets, copper plates, engraved shells, ceramic pots, carved stone pipes, painted cave walls, earthen effigy mounds, woven baskets, and incised cliff faces throughout the Midwest. Feathers, bird skulls, and even entire bird carcasses were buried with shamans or adorned ceremonial objects like calumets and headdresses. An oral tale about a shape-shifting falcon-warrior named Red Horn that is still told by the Ho Chunk today has been found illustrated in 1,000-year-old cave paintings in Missouri and Wisconsin. 
To indigenous peoples, birds obviously possessed transcendental powers that anyone could see: raptors soared so high that they disappeared into the Upper World, while loons and ducks vanished underwater to travel to the Lower one. To someone who sees the entire universe as a sacred whole, birds are obvious messengers between people and the gods.

CONCLUSION

These, then, are some of the topics and stories shared in the book. It’s also heavily illustrated, thanks to the generosity of two underwriters who enabled is to use better paper and include many full-color photographs.

What the book shows, in the end, is that humans in the Midwest have understood birds in many different ways, which prompted them to act in very different ways. During the late 19th century, certain beliefs and the invention of new technology combined to lead Midwesterners to kill hundreds of millions of birds, until the populations of most species had been reduced by half and several species had been wiped out altogether (the topic of chapter 10). And then new beliefs, carefully cultivated and promoted through what can only be called a sophisticated marketing campaign, led to the Progressive Era conservation movement that outlawed indiscriminate hunting and protected crucial habitats. 

The book’s underlying argument is that mind prevails over matter, and that to change the world we must first change how we think. This point is made in the short conclusion, with which I'd like to end:

Page 225-227:
"Although we go outdoors to watch birds, we mostly encounter ourselves. As novelist Anais Nin put it, “We see things not as they are but as we are.” 

"Hearing a distant squawk and looking up, my awareness is flooded by sights, sounds, and smells. My mind instantly transforms this stream of sensations into words, fits them into categories, and colors them with my memories, fears, hopes, and desires. I can’t separate the wedge of geese overhead from those associations in my mind. I don’t experience the geese as they are, but only through my own particular cultural and psychological filters. 

"Whether a person sees migrating geese as scientific specimens, spiritual brethren, quantifiable data, divine messengers, indications of approaching winter, or a potential meal (or even whether they mistake them for big ducks) depends on how their community speaks and what it values. The actions they take depend on those same influences. Whether I’m tempted to reach for binoculars or a shotgun, stop to pray, or merely smile in gratitude is determined by the shared beliefs, desires, and values of my culture. 

“These change over time. At my favorite birding spot on the edge of town, a dirt road winds through the woods to a scrubby point jutting into the Yahara River. As I reach the end of it and sweep the water with my binoculars, I stand next to a conical burial mound made by Hopewell people two thousand years ago. This little peninsula was special to them, too… A mile downriver, where the Yahara empties into Lake Mendota, a flock of bird effigies overlooks the shoreline. Generations of hardwoods have grown old, tumbled to the ground, and melted back into the soft earth while these sacred bird mounds tried to balance heaven and hell.

"But in just the last two centuries, we have unintentionally brought the entire planet to the brink of disaster by altering its climate. To save ourselves from scorching droughts, increasingly violent storms, and the political and military calamities they’ll produce, we need to change how we think. The Buddha taught that actions follow ideas “as surely as the wheel follows the footsteps of the ox.” Changing the planet begins by changing our minds...

"Do we really need to burn millions of barrels of oil trucking food thousands of miles from field to table? Leave hundreds of millions of computers and televisions buzzing on standby twenty-four hours a day? Overheat and air-condition millions of homes and offices merely for personal comfort? Flush billions of gallons of perfectly clean water down our toilets? Drive our two-thousand-pound cars half a mile to the supermarket? Why do we think these actions are “normal”? Who wins and who loses when we perform them? How will our descendants judge them? What could we do differently? 

"Each of us needs to imagine how we might nurture the world as well as exploit it, how to tread as carefully in our own lives as a great blue heron does in the shallows. This starts by replacing our narcissism, fear, and greed with empathy, humility, and respect, and then by altering our daily habits to express those new values. If enough of us can do this, perhaps our children’s children will also feel inspired by the ancient Thunderbirds guarding the mouth of the Yahara, and sandhill cranes will still stalk the meadows beside them."

Thank you.