Robin sent me this story because we both understood at once that this woman was really writing about beavers and just called them birds by mistake. I loved it right away and I am sure you will too.
Building a Flock: How an Unlikely Birder Found Activism — and Community — in Nature
When Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed Trish O’Kane’s home and neighborhood and took some of her neighbors’ lives. As the toxic floodwaters receded, O’Kane, who had worked as human-rights journalist in Central America and was about to start teaching writing at a college in the city, found hope in a surprising place.
“I wake up the first morning, totally disoriented in a new place, and it’s silent. I can’t hear traffic, I don’t hear people. I lay there in the bed thinking, “Oh my God, I’m in a city. And it’s very quiet. And that’s because a lot of people died and a lot of people haven’t returned, and who knows if they will?” It was very strange and sad.
Right then I heard this clicking and I had the window open and I looked outside. It was probably about 6:30 a.m., and there’s this red bird in a bush. I knew it was a cardinal. That’s all I knew. Nothing else. I just saw it and thought, “There’s something still alive here.” A lot of animals drowned, but the birds were there, and that’s how it began, really with that first cardinal.
Birds are accessible. They’re a portal into the natural world.”
Whoa. Unexpected observer of nature finds that a wild neighbor pulls her out of herself and her grief and connects her to the natural world.
I can’t relate to that at all.
I never imagined myself doing this. I wasn’t a birder or a bird person, or even really an environmentalist. This is a second life for me. I was an investigative human-rights journalist in Central America for 10 years, and then several years in the deep South.
What happened was, I had moved to Madison to get a Ph.D. in natural resources so I could understand what a wetland was and what had happened in Katrina. I took ornithology because I got interested in birds in New Orleans because of that cardinal. The professor tells us our homework is to go birding for an hour. We were living across the street from this wonderful park, called Warner Park, and I started birding in that park an hour a week, and then it was an hour a day, and then it was up to five hours a day, and then it was weekends and owling at night.
Any birder who’s reading this will know what I’m talking about. I went off the deep end.
I mean suddenly you have two terabytes of beaver footage and are spending more time at the dam then you spend at your desk. Go figure.
Soon after that, about a year or two, I discovered that there was a city plan to build in this park and to pave areas of it, and it was going to destroy the birds’ homes. I was distraught. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never done any environmental organizing, but I thought, “These birds are saving my soul. I have to do something.”
So I started going to neighborhood meetings, city council meetings, and it was a city counselor who I was fighting with at the time over the development plans, who said to me that this park is surrounded by latchkey kids with parents who are working two jobs. They live on the edge of this park, but there’s no environmental programs and the kids aren’t playing very much in the park.
Wait, I know this story. So the nature your cared about in some way was threatened and you got the community to rally around it?
We started with five kids the first semester. Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be 45 and then 95 signing up five years later. That’s how it all happened. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t expect to do it, and I certainly would never have chosen middle school kids. I am sorry now to say that because they were delightful. I fell in love with them, but I was afraid at first.
Also, I didn’t do this alone. I’ve had some incredible mentors all along the way. There has been an explosion of groups led by birders of color. I use two books in my class as texts. One is Rodney Stotts’ Bird Brother: A Falconer’s Journey and the Healing Power of Wildlife. The other is Dr. Drew Lanham’s Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair With Nature. The birding world and my work has been heavily influenced by him. He came to Madison and helped me with the kids.
First you get the kids involved then you get the grownups and the media and then you save the park. Or in her case write a book and get a dissertation.
Looking back now does it seem like a leap from human rights journalist to someone who teaches birding?
It’s not two separate lives. I’m still a journalist. It’s just that I see myself as interviewing the birds now and other nonhumans. That’s not easy. There are different techniques you have to use.
The other thing is in my teaching, the social justice aspect and the human rights are part and parcel of what I teach. I am not just teaching ornithology. My [college] students are paired with kids at the local school in my neighborhood [in Burlington, Vermont]. Through birding together, my students are forced to examine — as I was forced to examine when I started birding — how much privilege is associated with birding and with recreating outside, especially in a place with such a cold climate. Every winter here in Vermont, and it happened in Madison, there are some students who will declare after two or three weeks, “What’s wrong with these kids’ parents? How come the kids are wearing cotton socks or sneakers? How come they don’t have good boots?”
In the beginning it feels like two separate lives like you are completely unprepared for the task ahead. But then you realize being trained as a child psychologist might be helpful in working with the difficult personalities involved and making learning about beavers fun.
Oh wait. You’re still talking about birds. Sorry.
Their teachers report that the kids start raising their hands in class. They start seeing kids who had never spoken up before telling stories about the animals. One little boy at the school here ended up on TV. We were invited by a local TV station to give a presentation, and it was in City Hall, standing room only, packed to the rafters. This kid gets up and gives the first speech about the park. Some of his teachers were in the audience. His first-grade teacher came up to me afterwards, she said, “He never raised his hand. I can’t believe it. He’s the quiet one.” I said, “Well, he is not quiet in our club.” He never stopped talking about the animals.
Kids like learning about beavers too. It’s a whole thing.
This is a respite for my students. It teaches them that all they have to do is go outside. We’re lucky and privileged to live on a beautiful green campus. It teaches them what I learned after Katrina. The birds are there for you. The animals are there, the trees are there. Get outside and you can calm yourself. And then we can start to find a way forward together. But if we’re not calm and we don’t have clear heads, how are we going to find our way out of this mess?
One of the main goals of my class is to build a flock. I have my students over; they were here two weeks ago for bagels and coffee, birding in my backyard in the morning, which they love. And we saw birds. But the main goal was for them to get to know each other better, get to know me better and get to know the neighborhood better. I walk them around the neighborhood. This is where the kids live who we work with. live.
It’s almost like beavers build neighborhoods. Ya know?
There’s over 100 scientific studies on the benefits of spending time outside. Not very many of the studies, very few of them, focus on birds because it’s hard for scientists to parse out the benefits of watching birds versus just being outside with the trees and the vegetation. But I think that so many of the public health problems we have right now in this country could be solved if people just spent more time outside.
It’s a wonderful article that will seem at once very familiar and very new. Go read the whole thing and if you didn’t get a copy of Trish O’Kane’s book under the tree pick one up yourself.
