We used to love putting labels on things. Of course, it started in a garden, a hotbed of growth and mutation: “And the Lord God caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food … [and] fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.” After Adam came Noah, the floating zoologist, another ready inspiration to collectors and classifiers such Carl Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. But how far we are fallen since the golden age of natural curiosity. Half a century ago, in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow hinted at the problem of man’s alienation from his physical environment:
“And what about this other plan, with Wallace? Photographing houses and identifying trees.”
“It does sound hokey, but it’s really a very good business idea. … If the thing pans out, I’ll organize it nationally, with sales crews in every part of the country. We’ll need regional plant specialists. The problems would be different in Portland, Oregon, from Miami Beach or Austin, Texas. ‘All men by nature desire to know.’ That’s the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I never got much farther, but I figured that the rest must be out of date anyway. However, if they desire to know, it makes them depressed if they can’t name the bushes on their own property. They feel like phonies. The bushes belong. They themselves don’t. And I’m convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.”
This tendency toward environmental ignorance has only advanced, even if the nagging feelings of depression and phoniness may have faded. We name the things for which we have regular use. We forget, or neglect to learn in the first place, how to identify and appreciate flora and fauna for the same reason that we don’t know the names of our supermarket baggers or car wash attendants: They’re just part of the scenery.
Back in 2015, a group of authors, including Margaret Atwood, Robert Macfarlane, and Andrew Motion, protested the removal from the Oxford Junior Dictionary of some 50 nature words and their replacements with ephemeral technology jargon. The Guardian noted at the time that “instead of catkin, cauliflower, chestnut and clover, today’s edition of the dictionary, which is aimed at seven-year-olds starting Key Stage Two, features cut and paste, broadband and analogue.” For just $25, Fischer-Price now sells “My Home Office” for toddlers, with a plastic laptop, smartphone, coffee cup, and telephone headset. There can be no overstating the impoverishment of our inner lives as a consequence of this sort of thing.
The coronavirus pandemic may have begun to reverse our inexcusable amnesia about, and neglect of, what Matthew Crawford calls “the world beyond your head.” The pandemic kept us indoors long enough to recognize and fantasize about what we’ve been missing. A springtime walk after the housebound months of Netflix and chilling death tolls was for many a reawakening to natural wonder. Suddenly, we were all John Muir, longing to tramp into the woods with nothing but a ragged cloak, a few crusts of stale bread, and an attention to detail whetted by routine and confinement.
As luck would have it, the relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions has coincided with the release of the gorgeously illustrated new field guides Trees of North America and Birds of North America by the National Audubon Society. These are by no means pocket guides: At roughly 7.5 inches by 9.5 inches, each book is coffee table ready, a pleasure to browse in at will, and comprehensive enough to furnish a sense of real mastery. Keep these close at hand when reading nature writing — John Burroughs, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Franzen — for a richer, more stimulating exploration. Boots and binoculars are sold separately, but cultivating one’s patience and attention is the work of a lifetime.
Birds, all of which “belong to the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, and the class Aves,” are organized in Birds by order, and 350 pages are devoted to the largest group, the passerines or perching birds, but the Parliament of Fowls also includes shorebirds, falcons, owls, and kingfishers, as well as (to the beginning birder) rarer birds: tubenoses, goatsuckers, and the psychedelically colorful trogons, quetzals, parrots, and cockatoos. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but every other color on the visible spectrum is well represented here, not to mention every conceivable palette and pattern of plumage.
The poetry of avian nomenclature is sometimes noble, sometimes ridiculous. Along with the golden eagle and the magnificent frigatebird, we find such suspect characters as the bananaquit, the bobolink, the dickcissel, and the limpkin. The red-necked stint is found in Alaska, where, from the sounds of things, it spends its days on fishing boats, pounding Natty Ice and pecking at crab guts. The yellow-bellied sapsucker and the sulphur-bellied flycatcher sound like Sergio Leone desperadoes. Many bird names evoke appearance, as with the black-necked stilt, whose incense-stick legs are as tall as its whole body, or the ruby-crowned kinglet, a 10-centimeter micro-monarch with a flamboyant red crest.
This big book of beady eyes and sinister beaks offers more than just the basic file: not only legal (Latin) name, street name, aliases, mugshots, and surveillance photos, but also precise descriptions and measurements, dietary preferences, notes on “voice” or calls, habitat maps, range and nesting behavior, a summary of conservation status, and a list of similar or lookalike species so the user can hone his spotting and identification skills. “Voice” is a surprising joy. To see bird calls transcribed is a vivid reminder that sounds such as kwup, yank-yank, chu-whe, psseuu, and seee-bzzz are language in miniature, that these creatures inhabit a social world parallel to but largely overlooked by ours.
The Audubon Trees is a more meditative experience. It suggests utterly inhuman scales of size and time and the silence of that part of nature that humbles us with its indifference. On page after page, we see dazzling feats and fruits of the evolutionary process: the white, coronavirus-shaped flowers of the poisonous buttonbush, the enormous saw blades of the cabbage palmetto, the ropelike, needle-armored branches of the monkey puzzle tree, the unearthly coiled seedpods of the screwbean mesquite. Having so much biological variety collected in one book engenders a hunger for it, a desire to do more and better noticing.
Knowing what things are called helps us to see them and recognize how they fit into our existence and vice versa. A fascinating feature of Trees is that it tells us how these organisms are used, both by animals and insects and by us. Railroad ties (chestnut oak), guitar soundboards (western red cedar), perfume (black cottonwood), chopsticks (big-tooth aspen), shingles (bald cypress), violins (Engelmann spruce), and Christmas spirit (jack pine, et al.) are just a few line items of our towering debt to the Giving Tree.
As with any field guides — for moths, mushrooms, minerals, take your pick — Birds and Trees leave the reader feeling more at home in the world and as though there is a great deal more in the world than he or she had noticed. Burroughs, a patron saint of New York’s Catskill Mountains, wrote in Winter Sunshine (1875) that “man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage, till he has established communication with the soil.” Natural explorations “make a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits.” Here’s your chirping, rustling, pine-scented reminder, as the long year of lockdowns draws to a close, that it’s all right where you left it.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
