Bird Nerd

"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words, and never stops - at all"

- Emily Dickinson

I never meant to become a bird nerd.  I really didn't.

While it's true that I'd always wanted to be a zookeeper, in the dreams I was always a mammal keeper, or maybe a reptile keeper.  When I went on trips to the zoo as a kid, those were the animals that I fixated on and spent all of my time watching.  The birds, by and large, I treated as filler.  I wasn't alone in this.

While a few "rock star" bird species, like the flamingos and the penguins, were given top-billing (pun intended), most of the birds were tucked into corners and crevices of the zoo, filling in the small spots between the bigger exhibits.  Heck, a lot of their exhibits didn't even have signs... and if they did, it was just the name, the Latin name, and maybe a drawing.

It's really no wonder that I never acted more interested in birds growing up when even the zoo acted like they were boring.

Later in life, an appreciation for birds began to creep up on me.  Part of it was a high school biology teacher I had who was an obsessive bird-watcher.  An even bigger part of it was the bird-of-prey rehab center where I volunteered while I was in college (there being no zoo in town, it was the closest thing I could find).  A huge part of it, I suspect, came in my last year of college, when I studied abroad in East Africa.  Sure, there were lions and elephants and rhinos and zebras when we went on safari, but somehow I never was able to see them as totally wild - it was like we were in the jeep and they were outside, and it was all some sort of really cool zoo exhibit.  It was when a superb starling - iridescent blue with a chestnut breast - suddenly perched on the edge of my camp chair, or when towering marabou storks flew directly overhead, that it really sunk in that we were in Africa.

Once you develop an appreciation of birds, one of the first things that you notice is how few people share it. I'm not just talking about the visitors, who will walk through an aviary and say, "It's just birds..." (seriously, can you imagine them walking past a gorilla exhibit and saying, "It's just a mammal").  I'm also talking about the keepers.  Much like the staff at my hometown zoo, a lot of them seemed to have the idea that birds are eye-candy, just there to fill in the gaps between the cooler animals.  It still makes me cringe to realize that there are keepers I know who can't even identify all of the birds in an exhibit that they care for (when I brought this up to a fellow staff member once, she simply shrugged and said, "Well, as long as you take care of them the same way, does it really matter if you know what it's called?).

Most of the bird keepers I know  - and by that I mean full-time, birds-only keepers, not generalists, like me - are driven crazy by this.  I've always sensed that a lot of them are frustrated by the inability of many people - zoo administrators, fellow staff members, and the general public alike - to appreciate just how awesome birds are.  There are, after all, about ten thousand kinds... surely among that variety, there are some that people can appreciate.

There are hummingbirds with wings so fast that they can hover, or even fly backwards.

There's the rhinoceros hornbill, where the female is sealed inside a nest for weeks at a time with her eggs, surviving because her mate passes her food through a tiny slit in the door.  

There are the weaver birds of Africa, which build elaborate hanging basket nests (and, more importantly from a zoo perspective, will happily do this right in front of visitors).

There is the cassowary, a man-sized man-killer which can eviscerate a person with one lethal kick.

There are birds-of-paradise, with some of the most extravagant, outlandish mating displays on any animal.

Sure, a lot of birds are small, drab-looking perching birds, nicknamed LBJs ("Little Brown Jobs") by birders.  But birds also have a lot going for them, compared to mammals and reptiles.  For one thing, they can fly (or at least most of them can).  Flight is one of mankind's lasting dreams, and even in the age of airplanes, many people still wish they could fly... on their own.  If that wasn't awesome enough, the ability to fly has allowed many birds to become brightly, beautifully colored and behave very actively and conspicuously, since they don't need to hide from danger.  Most birds are active during the day, just like we are.  Many birds are very vocal and make lots of noise, parrots being the most obvious example.  Also, many birds are intensely social, some colonial - flamingos and penguins, again, being two of the most popular examples - and having so many animals housed together and interacting constantly can be fascinating for visitors to watch... more fascinating, say, than a tiger which sleeps 20 hours a day?

And if that weren't enough, here is another plug - many birds are endangered.  Some are the victims of habitat loss, others of hunting or over-collection.  Pollution effects other species, while climate change is poised to have a major impact on several others.  Some species, such as the nene, California condor, and whooping crane, have already benefited greatly from the conservation support of zoos.  Still, many others are in need to our help, both in the zoo and around the world.

Zoos, however, sometimes show a troubling habit of focusing more on species that people like than on species which are in the most need of conservation.  If many endangered birds are going to stand a chance of surviving, they are going to need more voices of support, more champions among the zoo world.

In other words, we need more bird nerds.