PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao. Long before he was a professional ornithologist...Drew Lanham’s life was defined by birds... like the many he grew up with in rural South Carolina.
J. Drew Lanham
I could always just count on birds. I could depend on them to be in these places that seemed unkempt, were ragged around the edges, but the birds found comfort there, and I found comfort in the birds being there.
Anita Rao
Drew’s ability to lock in and deeply observe nature led him to a dual career as a scientist and artist...who centers his love for birds in both professions.
J. Drew Lanham
If we're gonna use the science to save birds or to save us, then we are not just gonna have to think about it. We're gonna have to feel.
Anita Rao
What birds can teach us about wildness, joy and belonging...Just ahead on Embodied.
For J. Drew Lanham life has always been about the birds.
J. Drew Lanham
It was easier for me to learn bird calls and to speak to birds, and to have them answer on occasion gave me a kind of comfort that I did not have with people.
Anita Rao
Drew grew up on 200 acres of land in rural South Carolina, which had been in his family for generations, his day-to-day life, wandering those woods as a kid was defined by wildness.
J. Drew Lanham
I try to tell folks that growing up in a place where there were. More whitetailed, deer and wild turkeys was my life situation. That's what rural is to me. It's being able to go outside your back door and hear foxes bark, or turkeys gobble or flushing a cve of Bob White quail up from. A roadside ditch.
Anita Rao
As Drew got older, his passion for birds was challenged by outside expectations and responsibilities and the realities of being a black man in the rural south. But throughout it all, he's held onto the belief that birds are an essential portal to joy that we must not overlook. This is Embodied our show about sex, relationships, and health. I'm Anita Rao.
Ever since the pandemic, it seems like everyone I know is talking about birdwatching, whether they're downloading identification apps or joining birding groups. More people than ever are interested in birds. I have been reticent to join in on the hype for some personal reasons, but we'll get to that story later.
Drew has been tracking this boom in birdwatching as both an ornithologist and a poet, and his take is that the hobby doesn't require a bunch of gear or expensive trips. You can just slow down and look around wherever you already are. That's what he did as a kid. Drew was born in 1965 and was raised in between the two houses on his family's property, his grandmother, Mamatha's house, and his parents' house. He spent a lot of time walking between the two observing nature.
J. Drew Lanham
Those walks daily. Once I was old enough to make the what as a kid seemed like miles, but in reality is about a quarter of a mile walk between my grandmother's house where I slept in my parents' house, mostly by the dirt road. But that time added up those walks, those wanderings cumulatively speaking became. Really my, my love affair, my first love affair with nature.
Anita Rao
So what is the first bird that you remember really falling in love with? Is there one that really called to you?
J. Drew Lanham
The bird that called to me literally were, were Bob White Quail Uhhuh, um, that birds, my grandmother called partridges. That call of. Was, was what greeted me when I came out of her house. And hearing that call, especially in the spring and the summer and the fall was, was a reassurance because I, I kind of knew where the flocks of those birds. Um, and for coil, we call those flocks, cubbies. I knew where they hung out and so on that wandering from the ramshackle to the ranch, I knew on the first curve where my bicycle often got mired up in the sand. There was a little ditch there that led up to a hill that was always sort of bramble and you could almost always count on a half dozen or more of those. Bob white quail flushing from that thicket and then scattering, um, to the four winds, kind of, and then there would be this recovery
Anita Rao
Flushing is just like this explosion of feathers. Is that what that is?
J. Drew Lanham
Yeah, exactly. It's an explosion of feathers. It's, um, your first reaction, and I would imagine a predator's first reaction on encountering a covey of quail is that you can know where they are, but ultimately they will surprise you.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
J. Drew Lanham
And so that was, I think, the first bird that I fell in love with because it was as familiar. As any friend to me, and I could count on them, I could always just count on those birds. I could depend on them to be in these places that seemed unkempt, were ragged around the edges, but the birds found comfort there, and I found comfort in the birds being there.
Anita Rao
So you didn't have your own binoculars as a kid, but you had lots of creative ways to try to see birds up close. And I know that sometimes you even play dead to like literally lure them close to you. Tell me, tell me about that. What were you doing?
J. Drew Lanham
Well. No, I didn't have binoculars. I dreamed of having binoculars and, you know, lots of kids will use their hands like binoculars and that that actually helps you to focus in on a bird. But then I wanted to be closer and, and, and knowing who the vultures as my grandmother and most of my family called them at the time, who the buzzards were and what they wanted. I decided one day after taking the trash out to the gully as my grandmother would have me do, there were vultures, there were buzzards, as she called them. Again, circling, and so I just took it upon myself to see if I could draw them in closer. Now, these were. Turkey vultures as I remember. So I didn't know at the time that those birds depended largely on, on smell to find carry and to find dead things. But I laid out in the pasture on one of the trails, as dead as I could be, as a living little boy. I guess I was little boy. Stinky, but not volter, stinky. Because the birds circled, right. And it seemed to me that they were drawing closer and closer so that I could see their heads turning to look at me. I, I guessed. But then after they got so close, I remembered my grandmother's warnings about. Vultures about buzzards picking the eyes out of their prey. So I remembered that. And, um, I liked my eyes, I wanted to continue to watch birds and, and so I got up and, and ran away because it seemed to me the vultures were getting a little close. And, uh, I didn't really wanna be dead, so
Anita Rao
I love that. I mean, yeah, you had a lot of different tricks. You also tried to fly at times, jumping off of, jumping off of your house. You had a lot of tricks up your sleeve to try to get closer to birds.
J. Drew Lanham
It was, again, it was constant. I, I spent so much time outside watching birds and, and wondering how they flew. Mm. I didn't know any of the science. I didn't have. Any clue about lift and thrust and the air foil of a feather. And I just knew that on Saturday mornings, I, I could watch Wiley Coyote fly to some degree. And so I figured that Professor Wile e Coyote was trying to tell me something. And so I would go outside and anything that was high enough, I would jump off of it in an attempt to, I don't know, catch some. Wind under cardboard wings or parachute from trees with plastic bags. I tried the Mary Poppins method and immediately inverted several umbrellas, which got me into a a little bit of trouble, but that act of flight proved impossible for me. A husky sized boy who loved jelly cake and grits, but. It, it nonetheless inspired me to think about flight as, um, as a way to, to gain access to far away places, um, that it was the ultimate. Freedom that birds expressed.
Anita Rao
So you had these lessons firsthand from your experiences on these walks, your experiences trying to fly, your experiences, getting up close to birds, but then you also had your grandmother's voice in your. And you've mentioned these different names your grandmother had for birds buzzards, for vultures and partridges, and she was in many ways the first person to teach you about birds, but you've described her as a teacher of mystic ornithology. Tell me about that mysticism and how that shaped your early love of those creatures.
J. Drew Lanham
Well, it um. She was a very religious person who had me read to her from the Bible every night, and she was the chief of the usher board at her church. But then you contrast that with these nightly visits from ghosts and, and dead folks. And so I lived in between these worlds of, of, of a fundamentalism. And kind of this, this fantastical world of mysticism. And so the birds that she recognized by different names, as you said, rain crows for yellow, build cuckoos, yellow hammers for northern flickers, big owls for barred owls, cat owls for great horned owls, snowbirds for juncos. All of those. Became my ornithology and, and yes, she was really the first person. To present this affection for birds because she would, she would throw out handfuls of grits, um, raw grits from the bag because there were all these brown birds and then the gray and white junko out scratching around on the ground. And, um, it was her. Sympathy for birds. Her saying that she pitied these birds because they were out in the cold trying to scratch out a living. My grandmother's personal ornithology is still with me. It directs me and how I think about nature and how I think about birds as, as these beings. That are worthy, um, deserving of our care and consideration in how we live our lives.
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll talk with Drew about how he almost ended up as an engineer and the specific bird call that pulled him back to Ornithology. You're listening to Embodied from WUNC, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking with poet and Ornithologist Drew Lanham about his lifetime of loving birds and what it's taught him about both nature and people. Drew's passion for winged creatures started when he was a kid and was solidified by his experiences growing up on 200 acres of land in rural South Carolina. But when he got to high school and expressed interest in studying birds in college. Counselors told him there was no way to make that into a living. He was good at math and science, so they pushed him in the direction of engineering.
J. Drew Lanham
There was no normal black person, especially that studied birds, at least according to guidance counselors and, and, and those around me, both adult friends and teenage friends. And so as a couple of. Pretty healthy scholarships dropped and I had the opportunity to send myself to school. I succumbed to peer pressure in a way and said, okay, maybe you're right. I'll take the money. I'll do this engineering thing. But that was quite a few years of, of suffering and, and being passionless.
Anita Rao
So then what changed your mind? Like what happened that when you were a junior that made you switch gears?
J. Drew Lanham
Honestly, what I, I now understand was, was depression just this listlessness, um, that had me considering all kinds of things and, um, that if I wasn't gonna be able to live my life according to the edicts of birds coming and going and knowing this song and that song that maybe I needed. To do something else, um, like be in the military and maybe fly. It was, of course, at that point in time, the age of Top Gun and, uh, Tom Cruise. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll do that. I'll fly away, literally. Hmm. And at times I, I, I just thought about not existing and so, you know, a dream deferred, as they say is, um. Can be a nightmarish thing. And so living in that, in that state became overwhelming. Yeah. In a way. And so I stopped going to class. I, I didn't really care about grades. I started looking for alternatives in my life because I had, I had spent so much time jumping through the proper hoops and the expected hoops for everyone else. That I had not taken the time to understand that I had my own dreams.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
J. Drew Lanham
And so I remember coming back to the old home place that after my father died, uh, my mother moved. And I've, I've sort of realized this recently, but once I left home for college, I never went home again to the home that I had known. And so. When I took my first trip back there after the property had been logged and abused and I was still in engineering and I was there on spring break, I remember looking out across this landscape that I had always known as wooded and um, it had been stripped of trees and there were just a few scraggly saplings standing. I heard the song of a Prairie Warbler just this Climb up the chromatic scale this, see, and I didn't have binoculars. Mm-hmm. But I could, I could see this bird lift its head open, its beak, and let this song pour out. And in that moment, that bird helped me make a decision. It helped me solidify. It brought me back to the initial love, and I knew that when I went back to school after spring break, things had to change.
Anita Rao
So you really had this huge turning point from which you began a new path. You turned what had long been a deep passion and a deep love into a professional pursuit. You went on to get a master's degree in Zoology, that you then got a PhD in Forest Resources and I'm, I'm so curious about what it was like to. Turn what had been a hobby and something that was just for you into something that now you had to calculate and measure and, and think about as a scientist, what was that transition like?
J. Drew Lanham
It was, it was freedom uhhuh, it was, it was like all the jumping off of higher things that I had done and fallen that something caught me and lifted me up. And, um, it was the, the winds of wonder, I think, that were reinvigorated that I was able to catch and fly. And so when I left engineering, I was in my, the second semester of my junior year, going from engineering to zoology. Should have. Probably cost me an extra, I don't know, two and a half years. But I had an advisor, Dr. Jim Schindler, who was, was just amazing at understanding my passion. He wasn't a bird guy. My new advisor wasn't a bird guy, he was a limb neurologist, a lake specialist. But he saw in me the passion for. Ornithology for becoming a naturalist, and he really helped to open this door through which I, I didn't walk through it. I flew through it.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
J. Drew Lanham
And, and he knew that I needed to fly through it. And so he made that possible and there was very little that I didn't liken my new major. And so the listlessness disappeared and was replaced by this energy and this tail end. That has brought me to really to this point.
Anita Rao
As you continued to advance in your studies doing a master's degree and then a PhD, were you able to hold on to that mystery and that deep sense of love of birds even as you were really learning how to study them as a scientist?
J. Drew Lanham
Yeah, that's a great question and and part of what I am understanding in my life now as a scientist and artist. Is is sort of that tension that develops between the analytical left brain and the creative right brain. And, um, I didn't feel that initially where some of that began to emerge between that left and that right brain. Was a bit further down the line as I saw students that I was teaching sort of really begin to question why they were even. There all the news that we can ever have about the environment that we were giving about extinction rates and habitat fragmentation, and people were beginning to have these conversations about climate change. Seemed to do nothing but illicit looks of despair from the students and so. How, how do we take a love of something and, and turn it into despair? Well, I, I think part of what we do as scientists is that we deliver the data, we deliver that news, that, um, erstwhile truth at least of a phenomenon as we have measured it, and the statistics tell us. But then how do we move forward and do anything with, with this sort of paralysis of, of over analysis really sometimes. And that, as Rachel Carson said, is sometimes more important to feel than to think. And so if, if we were gonna use the science, if we're gonna use the science. To save birds or to save us, then we are not just gonna have to think about it. We're gonna have to feel, just as I had developed these feelings for Bob White Quail, and I knew that I could depend upon them, and I had my own sort of ornithology born of my grandmother's. That was a turning point for me. Reading things like a Sand County Almanac from Aldo Leopold, or reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and reading the poetry of Walt Whitman, or understanding who Henry David Thoreau was. All of that contributed. To me becoming, I think, maybe a different kind of scientist who wasn't afraid of the tension between that, that right creative side and that left analytical side.
Anita Rao
What were some of the bigger scientific questions that have driven your career, that allow you to combine both of these parts of yourself?
J. Drew Lanham
Well, the, the, some of the bigger questions I think. Initially were about how we carve up habitat and how birds respond to that. And so I studied that for a while in, in terrestrial systems and, and still relate to that. But then my, a good bit of my work with endangered species begin to interface with. Really the, the, the creature that demands the strictest management, which is homo sapiens, it's us. And, and understanding that many of these birds and other wild things that sometimes given a, a minimum of a chance found a way, but we weren't and haven't been giving them even. A minimalist chance to survive and certainly not to thrive. And so that question of resilience, that question of persistence of how we survive under stress became important to me, especially as as a black man who lives a bit of that life on the daily. And so I began to see. These larger questions of range of how my life both spatially and temporally collides with the lives of wild things and the things that they experience, and so the stressors that a bird, that a black bird might feel.
Of being persecuted because it's a black bird and it gathers in large flocks and maybe it's social or maybe too loud for some people, or maybe they don't see any redemption and it not being a colorful bird. And so it's persecuted. It's not thought of in the same way that a more colorful bird like a painted bunting might be. And so. My questions of existence as a black man in America began to converge with the questions of persistence for not just black birds, but but all birds in America and beyond, because it, it really became an essential question once again, Anita, of of, of how we feel about a thing or how we feel about. Someone, and that's, that's where the personal ornithology, I think all the years of establishing my range, um, as a black man from a kid, loving birds, to someone pushed away from it, to someone returning to it, and now living that life. Have given me a chance to think about my range map, to think about where I thrive versus where I just survive.
Anita Rao
In hearing you talk about this, you so easily blend like the, the philosophical musings about humans and birds with the scientific questions that you have with. Your feelings about all of it. And I know my partner is a scientist and we talk a lot about how, you know, in academic writing, you're not allowed to really express feelings and there's not an encouragement for scientists to, to talk about their feelings openly. So I'm curious about what it's been like for you to navigate this as someone who is a tenured professor. You are in these academic spaces, like have you had any hesitations about crossing and, and blurring these lines?
J. Drew Lanham
Uh, I haven't had hesitations about doing it. I think at times it's given hesitation to peers and, um, and, and chairs and deans, uh, and others. Who, who is this, who is this guy? What is he doing? Um, and so I've, I've been full speed ahead with it, in part because my heart. Has told me that I'm in the right place. It, it feels right to do what I do. And so it's hard to be hesitant when passion is pushing at you.
Anita Rao
Hmm. Yeah.
J. Drew Lanham
Um, you can be at that ledge and initially afraid. To fly not knowing whether your wings are cardboard or feathers, or whether you're gonna be held up by something. If there's passion there to push you, you know that it's gonna catch you. And so in the hard days, even now, in thinking about the work that needs to be done for bird conservation, the work that needs to be done for social justice, the work that needs to be done for our environment. It's, it's a pretty simple motivation. It's, it's what I love. And so there's no hesitation in that.
Anita Rao
Throughout all of this, um, writing and research, you've also kept birdwatching as a hobby, and I'm curious to know what it's been like to navigate the predominantly white hobbyist spaces as a black man and how that's changed for you over the years.
J. Drew Lanham
Well, it's, um. At times it's been like, I don't know, being, being a crow in, in a flock of snow geese. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so you have, you have a good bit in common. You can both fly, you, you both recognize the environment, um, in a way that feathered flighted things do. But if, if you're, if you're a crow or raven in the midst of mostly white snow geese. There. Yeah, there are a few blue phase snow geese out there. But here, here, here, here I am. Um, here we are. The few of us who practice this as professionals still at meetings and maybe given sidelong looks, um, as people wonder, some people wonder what we're doing there. It, it has gotten better on. Several fronts, of course, with black birders week and, and young birders coming through who sort of have a different way of attacking the issue. Those of us who would call ourselves the, uh, the old heads would say, yeah, you know, we've, we've been loving these, these birds for a while, even when people saw our differences and wanted to punish or isolate us. Because of that. But I always like to go back, Anita, to the, this whole idea of the ancestors also noticing birds. They had to, you know, the story goes that, that not infrequently, um, the enslaved who were being brought over in the middle passage would approach the coast of South Carolina and see the Sea Islands and, um. The birds of those sea islands, the gulls and the waiters, and, and think that they had returned home. Hmm. And so as we watch birds today through binoculars and high tech equipment, I think we've always looked skyward, no matter the, the color of our skin. And so I'd like to think of my ancestors as having. In many ways led me to this place. And, um, that idea of, of Sankofa, that that bird reaching back to bring forward the past is, is where I am. And so if there's a bird for me to wave on that flag, it's that idealized, um, Sankofa to recognize those before me that have done what. I'm doing, but in a different way and in all likelihood, bravery than I have had to exhibit as their humanity was constantly called into question, but they still look skyward to see some birds flying free knowing that that was what they were aspiring to. And so being able to write that. Being able to communicate that as a poet and a creative writer means everything to me, that I'm able to take words. Sometimes the data that's been gathered that we've gathered as scientists and to aim it more at heart than head is. That's my job. It's my job to, to have people feel as well as think, and if we can bring those two powers together, then not just birds, but, but we all stand a chance at some hope
Anita Rao
Just ahead. I make a confession to drew about my complicated relationship with birds and ask him for some advice. As always, you can hear the podcast version of this show by following body. Lead on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. We're talking today about falling in love with birds and how one man has maintained this passion for decades. Despite the obstacles and challenges along the way, that man is ornithologist author and poet. Drew Lanham. He's written a memoir and two poetry collections that reflect on his upbringing close to the land in rural South Carolina and his experiences as a black man who loves nature. Drew thinks deeply about wildness and the natural world, and I was really moved by his writing. But after talking with him for a while about his many experiences with birds, I had to share that my feelings about the creatures are different.
So I've been spending a lot of time with your poetry and with your memoir over the past few weeks and embedding myself in these stories of how you fell in love with birds and why you have fallen in love with birds and what the pull is of birds and. Through that process, I've started noticing more birds around me and have been reflecting a lot on my relationship with birds, which is that I have to confess to you very late in the conversation that I have a somewhat complicated relationship, and I think it's. I had a few kind of traumatic experiences with birds as a kid that turned me off like I was the, the main one was when I was seven years old. My family went to the San Diego Zoo and there was like a bird feeding experience for kids. They gave everyone these little vats of nectar and you were just supposed to stand there and these parrots were gonna come and like sweetly take. The nectar from you and I was standing next to my sister and there were all of these birds, um, like coming one at a time to get nectar from her and no one was coming to me. Then an adult just like pushed me into the shade from the sun and like, I don't know, it felt like a dozen of these parrots came all at once and were like landing on my arms and my shoulders and I completely freaked out. Like felt like I was living the movie The Birds. And I just like have had a very visceral reaction for a long time to like birds in flight coming toward me. And like intellectually I know that they're beautiful, but I feel. A sense of fear watching them fly, especially when they're, they're close. And I'm just so curious to pose that to you as someone who is so comfortable being so close to these creatures. Like is this fear of birds something you've encountered? Is this common?
J. Drew Lanham
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I, I've encountered it. Okay. And you know, there are, there are family members, I have family who, who, who have those same fears. To give you and, and those folks a little bit of grace. You know, the media hasn't done the greatest job of teaching us, you know, Alfred Hitchcock Exactly. Do anyone any favors And those Laura Keets, those birds that Yes, that's what they were,
Anita Rao \
Lorikeets, yes.
J. Drew Lanham
Yeah, yeah. That came down to you. I mean, here, all of a sudden these, these inaccessible. Creatures, these flighted things that we'll never touch are all over you.
Anita Rao
Yes.
J. Drew Lanham
And, and you begin to feel differently about them because there they are.
Anita Rao
Yeah.
J. Drew Lanham
And so there's a boundary between human beings and birds.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
J. Drew Lanham
And, and that boundary between us is primarily the, the domination of the skies without any engine except the one beating in your chest. You know, birds ha have been engineered by evolution to do something that we will never be able to do without engineering in itself. And, and so to have those creatures so close and to, to have sort of this, the, the mystery and the mystique of birds suddenly in your face. I think for, for some folks, there's. There's sort of this, um, there's this ignition of the limbic almost as it is with, with many, many people and reptiles, especially snakes.
Anita Rao
Yes. Yes.
J. Drew Lanham
That seeing a snake when you're not surprised by it is very different. Then, I don't know, picking up something and, and there it is underneath, or that it's in a place where it's not supposed to be and birds aren't supposed to be close to us. Yeah, exactly. You know, they're wild things that live these lives that are mysteries. And so I, I think there's this algorithm that sort of puts itself. Together and again ignites the limbic to say, oh my God, these birds are here. Why are they here so close to me? Alfred told me that they would spin themselves into my hair or that they would peck my eyes out, let me scream and run away, and we've largely not been disabused of that.
Anita Rao
Yeah,
J. Drew Lanham
that oftentimes the. The fantastical thing that happens when someone maybe has a negative encounter with a bird is magnified versus. All of the positive encounters or non encounters that occur.
Anita Rao
I mean, you make such a good point that that is the anomaly, is that the bird is so close to me like they are not supposed to be that way. We are not supposed to be feeding them probably in, in that controlled setting of a zoo. But yeah, that is a really helpful reframe of like that one experience. Was these two creatures being put in such close proximity that they're not actually supposed to be in that proximity.
J. Drew Lanham
Yeah, I mean, it's. In the larger context, Anita, I think we can expand that to wildness and wild. Yeah, and part of the reason there are so many conflicts now between human beings and wild animals as we encroach upon their world, and then some of them are adaptable enough to live in the world that. We have created by destroying their world. There are boundaries that break down. And as those boundaries break down and you can look out into your backyard and there's a raccoon or there's a coyote on a sidewalk, I mean, think about it. Those two things just don't seem to go together. Why is that animal here? And it elicits a very different response than seeing that animal out in the wilds where you know it. Quote unquote should be. But all we have to do is sort of turn that on its head and say, well, what is the coyote thinking? The coyote is saying, why are you here? And so those sorts of things that as a scientist, we would advise, don't anthropomorphize, don't give human qualities to wild to non-human beings. As a poet and a creative writer, I can do that. At the very least have us think not just as human beings, but think of ourselves as biospheric beings who are sharing this earth with wild birds and other wild things. And once we begin to get a little bit of a grip on that, then I think maybe we're less likely to be instantly afraid or to want to persecute. Animals for being animals. Hmm.
Anita Rao
I'm, I'm so curious to ask you about that. Line between the noticing of wildness and how it actually impacts how we interact with birds. Because I feel like there has been such an explosion of bird watchers and people who, bird since the pandemic, and there is like this renewed interest and excitement of people paying attention to birds and, and getting into birding. But has that had any impact on. Conservation or, or conversations about conservation. Like, are we changing how we interact with birds because so many more people are watching and, and noticing them?
J. Drew Lanham
That is a great question. Something that I, that I think about on a daily basis and write about a good bit. I, I think, um, the easy answer for me. Is it hasn't helped nearly as much as it should have. Mm-hmm. If, if I had to, to choose an answer between yes and no, has it helped? From a conservation standpoint, I, I would have to say yes, but marginally, because there are now millions of bird watchers, but billions of birds have disappeared since bird watching became popular, since it was sort of sporterized. Into birding in the late sixties and early seventies. In those 50 years, we've lost 3 billion birds, but gained millions of birders. And so those two lines on a graph are going in opposite directions. And as, as people would say, make that make sense. Hmm. How does that happen? And I, I, I think part of where it's happened is that. The scale at which we can see birds, that we can watch, birds that we can list birds has been accelerated by technology, by better glass and binoculars, by apps that can tell you with a great degree of certainty what a bird is, even if you were only hearing part of its song. In the midst of all of that. I don't think that we have developed any more empathy. Hmm. For the dual plight of birds and all other beings. So I think there has been an objectification of birds in many ways in modern birding, and that the birds end up on lists and that some of these lists are very helpful for understanding the ranges of birds, maybe even understanding. The population dynamics of of certain birds, but it does not seem to be translating to fewer birds disappearing. And if you look at the history of this country, when. We've experienced extinction in the last few generations of birds like Carolina parakeets or ivory build woodpeckers or passenger pigeons, or heath ends, or Labrador ducks, or dusky seaside sparrows. That technology has had some role in that, that our rates of destruction lead to the despair of birds. And so we have to think about that. We have to think about what kind of earth we want to share, and it can't just be the earth that humans want. It also has to fit what the wild things, demand and desire. And, and so that again, um, that conundrum of more birders, birding, giving us more data. Has not yet from any data that I have seen translated into more birds being saved. And so as, as someone feeds birds in their backyard and, and they buy the seed to feed the birds and watch the birds and maybe some, some out of range rarity shows up. How do, how do we take bird feeding and watching birds to that next level? I want that to be the question.
Anita Rao
Hmm. So at this phase of. How do you make time for the deep noticing that's required to be present with birds in a way that's beyond just, you know, seeing them to log them in the app. It's actually a, a way of connecting with them, which I know is important to you. How do you, how do you make time for that? What does that look like in this phase of your life?
J. Drew Lanham
It, um, it increasingly, it looks like going out. Without my binoculars, uhhuh, I, I found that sometimes going out and accepting what I can see with my eyes and my eyeglasses or, um, the pictures that I can take with my cell phone. This point in my life is about the broader field of view. I love birds more than I ever have, and I, I want to be able to see them close up. I love seeing the eye of a bird or watching a sparrow yawn in a sunny spot on a cool day. Um, it just gives me a great deal of joy to see that close up. But it also gives me this, this joy of wonder when a flock of blackbirds flies over. And I'm hearing those metallic calls knowing that there are grackles there, but maybe I'm hearing something different that might be a brewer's blackbird or a rusty blackbird, or maybe there are starlings mixed in, but I can't quite tell, and I'm okay with that. I'm okay with the wonder of not knowing every single answer. And that's part of the magic of birds. We can never know what birds are really thinking, we can't say. And watching hawks pair bonding this time of year and screaming and careening through the air and kind of doing some of these acrobatics that there isn't a certain amount of joy involved in their flight. Science tells us not to anthropomorphize though. And so the scientist holds back from thinking about that certainly holds back from reporting it, I should say. The poet sees it and doesn't necessarily put human qualities on the bird, but gives the bird the freedom to have its own joy in the way that that bird has joy and that humans can't. I know I'm on the extreme end of things, but to see birds as who's rather than what's, if you think about just that transition in itself, it puts non-human beings on equal footing with human beings. If we see these as fellow earth travelers with superpowers that. We can only imagine seeing in the ultraviolet spectrum, um, following star charts that they see, but they probably also feel being able to sleep half your brain, being able to hover midair or fly backwards as a hummingbird does, or being able to sleep on the wing as a swift does. Or being able to sing three notes at once as many Thrushes do, look and think and feel. And you'll come to a conclusion that birds are not just worthy of love and adoration for me. They're worthy of a kind of worship.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
J. Drew Lanham
And so I try to take that with me when I go on, whether it's short walks around the farm or. Whether I'm in some distant place to try to give the birds a chance to show me who they are rather than me chasing them to tell them who they are.
Anita Rao
Drew, thank you so much for the conversation, for all of the wisdom and stories that you have shared today. Uh, it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
J. Drew Lanham
Thank you so much, Anita, for the time and for sharing your bird stories too.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Drew Lanham and his work at our website, embodiedwunc.org. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Sara Nics provided additional editorial guidance. Adesina Newkirk is our intern, and Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla, wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. WUNC is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.