August 25, 2011
Painted Redstart with nesting material
Painted Redstart with nesting material
We are already so deep into the era of twitter and tweets that most non-birders don't even remember when those terms referred only to our feathered friends. One of my earliest columns back in the dark ages of 2005 spoke of birding as an escape, to or from the real world, depending on your point of view. My first column in 2010 revisited that theme, and in this age of twitter It bears reiteration.

One week last spring, out in the so called real world, I lost a handful of clients due partially to unethical practices by work colleagues, partially to lack of client loyalty. Clients today want it all, wanted it yesterday, have short attention spans, and follow the crowd to the always ephemeral greener grass seeking shortcuts to the promised land. The promised land for me the following weekend was Mt. Ord on the Beeline north of Phoenix.

On Friday night a coyote chorus drifted up to my campsite from somewhere down the mountain. On Saturday I watched a Painted Redstart ferrying nest material to a niche in the rocks beneath a tangle of tree roots. On Sunday morning I found a female Black-chinned Hummingbird drinking from the overflow pipe at a spring box constructed for wildlife. By Monday morning I had emerged from a dark place and had forgotten the clients' names.

Last month there was much angst in certain circles as to why, except for the occasional spasm of patriotism during World Cup competition, soccer has never taken hold of this country. It seems no mystery to me that promoting soccer love in a country whose thumbs are never still is a fool's errand. Ours is a society of instant gratification in which self-esteem is measured by the size and frequency of the scores--in war, in business, in personal relations, in the games we play.

The reconnection to nature, especially through birding, takes us out of ourselves and back to a simpler place and slower time where there is more to life than what we see in the mirror or on our media screens. Go sit for a couple hours in solitude with a pair of binoculars. I’d recommend a cabin in Greer, a bench by one of the water features at Boyce-Thompson Arboretum State Park, or one of the bridges over the creek in Madera Canyon.

The Arizona Wilderness Coalition (azwild.org) offers weekend "restoration" trips. I've always figured the volunteers come away more restored than the sites on which they worked. Face to face, heart to heart with nature heals the soul more surely than the blizzard of impersonal communication offered by today's "social media," surely the twenty-first century's first cultural oxymoron. Nature is where it all began, that connection to the earth that is in our species' DNA. That's the real world. Slow down. Visit often. Pick up authentic twitters. And leave the personal devices behind.

Black-chinned Hummingbird female drinking
Black-chinned Hummingbird female drinking