What the Robin Knows -- Book Review
What
the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the
Secrets of the Natural World. By Jon Young.
Boston & New York: Mariner
Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2012.
Jon Young's book, What
the Robin Knows, is about more than birds.
It is about how to see, how to perceive, how to experience oneself in the natural world. Civilized people, who do not grow up
surrounded by nature, and who do not depend on their knowledge and
understanding of the natural world for their day to day survival, have lost
much awareness of this world. Humans
have succeeded in distancing themselves from this world of nature from which we
arose, and with this disengagement has followed a loss of knowledge,
understanding and awareness of its inner workings that was once commonplace and
vital. Jon Young is attempting to
reawaken not only the knowledge, but the mode of perception, and very
importantly, the way of relating, that
has fallen into disuse. The subtle alarm
calls of the invisible junco simply have no relevance for most modern
people. Therefore they are not even
perceived. Yet in the wilderness they
carry a powerful significance that can make the difference between life and
death for some creatures, including ourselves.
Birds do not know that they are living in civilization. Their ways of life, survival and death are
the same as they have been for millions of years. Every day of a bird's life is lived under the
constant threat of imminent death, and every day there are life and death
dramas played out among all the birds and animals in the habitat. He relates a striking incident where a male
cardinal rescues his female companion from the pursuit of a hawk (pp. 32-33)
and he points out the relationship between such an incident and the
"companion calls" that birds are constantly making to one
another. This kind of eyewitness report
is very apt and interesting, and these kinds of stories make this book a very
informative, engaging read. Young
relates a number of hawk anecdotes that are quite dramatic, and several
chapters of the book are spent describing different types of alarm calls and
behaviors in response to different types of predatory threats.
I think the most important lesson of this book is that all
bird songs and all bird behavior is meaningful,
and very much context dependent. To
observe birds well, you need to observe the entire environment, the entire
ecosystem that they are living in.
Everything a bird does, every tweet a bird makes, tells you something
about the immediate circumstances around that bird. There is nothing idle or superfluous in
nature. And all the other birds and all
the other animals know this and are paying attention. The entire habitat is an intensely communicative
network.
The main idea is not to hear birds.
The main idea is to hear everything.
(p. 59)
This book is written in the first person and has the
character of a birdwatcher's journal rather than simply a dispassionate
exposition on the behavior and language of birds. For example, he opens Chapter 3 with a long
anecdote about how he became acquainted with white throated sparrows and juncos
walking back from a fishing excursion in New Jersey at the age of 11. At first it annoyed me that he injected so
much of himself into his account. It is
not so important to me how he acquired his knowledge. I felt that he should focus on the birds and
leave himself out of it. I gradually
came to realize that his approach is the right one after all, because his
object is not so much to teach or expound on the behavior of birds, but rather to
mentor and train people who have an interest in the natural world to hone their
sensitivity to the subtleties and complexities of being in that world. He wants to train you to become a participant
observer in nature, and he must do this by example. This book is not so much a field guide as it
is a self-help manual. Altering ones
attention to the natural world means changing
oneself from the inside. Grasping
the interconnectedness of the daily dramas in the natural world alters our
perception of our own place in it. This
is the real object of What the Robin
Knows.
If we learn to read the birds
-- and their behaviors and vocalizations -- through them, we can read the world
at large. Anyone with a working
understanding of this discipline can approach an unknown habitat and quickly
draw all sorts of 'natural world' conclusions.
The types of birds seen or heard, their numbers and behaviors and
vocalizations, will reveal the locations of running water or still water, dead
trees, ripe fruit, a carcass, predators, fish runs, insect hatches, and so much
more (p. 173).
Tecumseh was not only the greatest Indian warrior, he
excelled at hunting far beyond his Indian peers. In a hunting competition he once brought in
nearly three times as many deer as his nearest competitors (Eckert, pp.
486-87). During the winter of 1779-80,
which was one of the coldest and severest on record, many Indians starved or
died of exposure, but Tecumseh's hunting skill brought in hundreds of rabbits,
turkeys, raccoons, grouse, squirrels, opossum, deer, buffalo, and bears that
enabled his village to survive and earned him the highest praise (Eckert, p.
244-45, N220). Young's book explains how
he must have done it. Tecumseh must have
been a master reader of the signs and language of the birds and the
forest.
Another subtext running through this book is a critique of
modern life. Young describes how the San
Bushmen of Africa create bonds of recognition between themselves and the birds
and other creatures in their environment.
They distinguish between recognition,
which is a bond, and merely seeing without recognizing, that does not create a
bond.
I want to point out that the
San's concept of seeing without recognizing is practically the definition of
the rushed, hectic modern experience. I
really don't believe that a daily schedule chopped into quarter-hour segments
is who we are instinctively. That is our
acquired self, not our evolved self. (p. 180-81)
And I would like to add that this lack of recognition that
characterizes our perception of the creatures of the natural world applies
equally well to the lack of recognition that we accord each other. The disconnectedness that the modern urban
dweller experiences from our fellow human beings is on a continuum with our
disengagement from the natural world.
He notes along the way many interesting features of
particular birds and their communicative peculiarities. Being able to distinguish between the many
varying alarm calls birds voice can provide much information about the type and
immediacy of other predatory animals in the environs. He notes that jays around the world can
perfectly mimic the calls of hawks and then sound alarm calls for those
illusory hawks. If the ruse works, it
scares other birds away from a food source the jay was eyeing (p. 55). Many
songbirds have ventriloquial abilities, which are used to confuse attacking
hawks (p. 128). Chain link fences are a
preferred refuge for songbirds because they provide good protection from
hawks. If a hawk approaches from one
side, the small songbird can pass through an opening to the other side
thwarting the hawk (p. 151f.). The book
is full of small observations and facts about birds that provide the reader
with constant engaging interest.
The appendix gives detailed step by step instructions on how
to begin learning bird language in earnest.
Like learning any language it requires a lot of time and it helps to
live in the environment where the language is used for daily life. What
the Robin Knows is an excellent guide for the serious birdwatcher who
wishes to go beyond simply cataloging the birds to understanding the entire
ecosystem in which the birds live and how the subtle nuances in their calls and
behavior reveal hidden aspects of the natural world.
Notes
Eckert, Allen W.
(1992) A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life
of Tecumseh. New York: Bantam.