Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  The various complaints from Prum and the others who had questioned his evidence—what did he make of those? They were useful, he said, because the brief controversy lent an air of scientific struggle and, by extension, legitimacy. Barely an air, though. At the end, he posted a slide in his PowerPoint presentation that read “Scientific Spice” and then listed Prum, Robbins, and three other minor skeptics. His body language and vocal tone formed its own communication, suggesting that while he should obviously feel nothing less than contempt for these pathetic apostates, he had conquered the world and so it was easier to be generous in a chuckling, belittling sort of way.

  “I particularly want to especially thank these guys for adding scientific spice to the discussion all summer long,” said a bemused Fitz.

  Science was less than an appetizer. It was a pinch of herb sprinkled over the main dish. Even the bird was not the entree. Throughout the talk, Fitz invited his peers to journey with him past the shaky evidence to the larger marketing campaign for big-scale land conservation. In his very last line, before he accepted the grateful applause of a thousand ornithologists, he intoned: “We can save these forests, and we can do it with a great badge of a bird at the top of the treetops if things work out right.”

  Words betray us. To Fitz, the ivory-bill was not a bird. It was a logo.

  V. Shotgun Blast at the Wall

  By the following winter, the aimless discontent of some professional ornithologists exploded in a small magazine called the Auk. It’s not a scholarly journal, but it is respected. The author was Jerome Jackson, the man whom the cozy club of ornithologists had long known as the go-to guy for ivory-bills. Just why Fitz had not brought Jackson in from the beginning is still one of the great mysteries. Jackson was to have been an author with Prum and Robbins on that suppressed paper, and now he let fly with a cri de coeur all by himself.

  He charged that Fitz’s proof was “molded more by sound bites than by science.” He said that the massive federal funding was a ruse. Jackson charged that the big money Secretary Norton had pulled together from the Interior budgets “was not a new appropriation, but a re-allocation of funds from other budgeted projects, including ongoing efforts on behalf of other endangered species, resulting in cutbacks to those projects.”

  Jackson slammed what is known as “story creep.” Tim Gallagher’s popular book on the rediscovery, published in May 2005, had described his sighting of the bird when he was in the swamp with Bobby Harrison. He estimated his distance from the bird at “less than eighty feet.” That July, though, his wife wrote in Audubon magazine that it was “less than 70 feet.” In an interview on 60 Minutes in October, Gallagher said the bird was “about sixty-five feet away.” At one news conference, Fitzpatrick observed that if Gallagher and Harrison had not shouted, the bird “might even have landed on the canoe.” Jackson wrote: “Observations can become more and more ‘real’ with the passing of time, as we forget the minor details and focus inwardly on the ‘important’ memory.”

  He noted that Prum and Robbins never did retract their assertion that the video showed nothing other than a pileated. He said that when you examined the evidence carefully, Fitz’s stuff wasn’t science or even scientific spice, but rather “faith-based ornithology.” Jackson closed by alluding to the paranormal TV show The X-Files: “Whether truth is in the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers or in the perception of the presence of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, we now have hope. But hope is not truth. It is only the fire that incites us to seek the truth. The truth is still out there.”

  Fitz fired back immediately, charging that it was Jackson dressing up dubious evidence as science: “Despite being neither peer-reviewed nor fact-checked by the Editor, that article was treated as a scientific contribution by the public media, a perception actively fostered by its author in public appearances and interviews.” Fitz rebutted each point and—being standard media advice in the age of the marketing rollout—he accused Jackson of precisely the failings Jackson had alleged: “We agree with Jackson’s statement that ‘sound bites must not pass as science.’ This is why we were flabbergasted by Jackson’s own use of the phrase ‘faith-based ornithology’ in referring to our work. Who, exactly, is compromising science with sound bites here?”

  VI. Audubon’s Children

  So it sat for a while—another gnarly scientific quarrel—until I heard from another bird person, David Allen Sibley. Like Audubon or Roger Tory Peterson before him, Sibley is a careful field birder who studies birds in the wild and paints them.

  I met Sibley years ago through a mutual friend, and one day he was telling me that he was going to come out with a paper in Science. He was joining the ranks of the video skeptics. Up until now, the complaints about the video had been broad—“I think it could be a pileated.” Sibley and three other authors got right into the details, questioning the video frame by frame.

  For example, when the blurry image was blown up and “de-interlaced,” according to Cornell, a portion of the perched bird could be seen as a droplet of white that is peeking out from the tree’s edge. The Cornell team saw this image as the tucked-in feathers of a perched ivory-bill. Sibley provided a drawing in which he argued that it was just as likely a pileated in the first explosion of flight behind the tree. The white-feathered droplet was a pileated twisting its wings frantically in those first big beats of taking off, scooping huge pockets of air to skedaddle.

  It’s one thing to say that the image is just “too blurry.” It’s quite another to show, frame by frame, how much more easily one can look at each frame and see a super-common bird. It was like one of the optical illusions where you think you’ve been looking at the soft-focus image of a beautiful young woman in the nude until someone points out that tilted this way it even more perfectly forms the face of an old hag wearing a babushka. Afterward, it just becomes impossible to look at the image and see the nude anymore.

  In a single scientific article that is what happened to a lot of birders. The most famous ivory-billed woodpecker of the twenty-first century became, overnight, one more startled pileated, flying away.

  The Cornell team published their rebuttal simultaneously. For some, there was another way to dismiss Sibley as a disgruntled competitor: Sibley is a Cornell dropout, a man whose dreamy obsession with birds kept him wandering in the woods, never able to get his degree. There are stories of him going out into the woods for days on end to look at birds and never getting around to the homework. And it’s true: He is not a professional ornithologist, in the technical sense. Sibley is a working stiff, a mere painter, to a professional ornithologist, and outsiders like him live beyond the daily concerns of their esoteric and expert sphere of knowledge.

  But that distinction is also what made this paper devastating. The earlier questioning of Cornell’s proof could be easily bracketed as “part of the scientific debate.” Professional rivalry. Scientific spice. But Sibley’s paper exposed a rift between folks in the field and those in academia, between outsiders and the fortress-dwellers.

  “One of the dirty secrets of ornithology,” said Chris Elphick, the fourth author on the paper and a professor at the University of Connecticut, “is that the ornithologists in the university are not experts in identification anymore. They were a hundred years ago, but for the most part university researchers study one species or a small set of species. They spend most of their time in front of a computer rather than in the field.”

  Bird professionalism is like every other specialty. It emerged from a more hands-on world of gritty, hairy grunts in the field, but as it developed more tools for exploration and more theories, it tended to move indoors. To the academy. Sometimes to industry. But, most typically, to a desk.

  And it left behind the generalists, the mechanics, and the amateurs doing basic research. In this case, those people were the lovers of birds happy to organize group tours or whatever it took to keep them out in the field, the dreamy open field where the occasional sighting is a profound pleasure.

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sp; “The whole expertise of bird identification is not in the realm of the university anymore and hasn’t been for some time,” Elphick said. “All that expertise is out among the amateurs and the bird-watchers.”

  VII. How to See a Bird

  If you look at the history of professionalization of any kind, you’ll see that it tends to follow this route. In America and Europe, a great deal of professionalization occurred in the nineteenth century, when most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossils and wrote about botany and invented household tools and studied animals. He was an amateur anthropologist and even an amateur theologian who famously cut all the miracles out of the New Testament because he thought Jesus made a whole lot more sense without the supernatural material mucking up the good moral philosophy.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, however, different professions began to emerge. The invention of the telegraph and the railroad—a bricks-and-mortar version of our Internet—sped communication and interaction, permitting groups to form more easily, hold meetings, trade notes, and determine what was good for the field or bad. One of the earliest examples was the formation of the American Medical Association in 1847. Previously medicine had been a private guild. It was held together by little other than the Hippocratic Oath, which didn’t pledge members to “do no harm” so much as to “spill no secrets.”

  The professionalization of medicine, as with any discipline, established standards and practices. It set rules and created a cohort of insiders. In the case of doctors, it would go on to establish medical schools and then credentialed medical schools, then board tests and board examiners. For most disciplines, the grand credentialer became the academy.

  And that was the case with birding as well. It came out of a long history of amateur pursuit. Birding developed from the gentlemanly world of collecting, which was part of the hunter tradition. John J. Audubon painted his birds after shooting them. But in the course of time, that method fell into disfavor and bird-watching trended to the less intrusive, less brutal way of making distinctions. The modern birder in the field had to become good at sighting on the fly or in a matter of seconds as the bird perched. This change in identification is what led to the shift from the grand paintings of Audubon to the guidebook work of Roger Tory Peterson and David Sibley.

  Audubon was painting his work to show people the flora and fauna of the New World. His work was expeditionary and meant to enlighten the world generally about the vastness of America’s varying environments. Audubon’s paintings have a nearly British feeling when you look at them—magnificently staged birds in some fantastic tableau. They might be captured on paper in the middle of feasting, like the red-tailed hawk dining on a half-eaten bloodied rabbit. Audubon’s long-billed curlew stands in a patch of muddy marsh probing the muck with its improbable bill. I own an old engraving of this image in part because if you look at the distant horizon, you’ll see the skyline of my hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, with Fort Sumter in the harbor. But all of that is tiny imagery in the background. For Audubon, he is showing the fauna’s POV. He’s found and identified these creatures, and his paintings invite us to see the world from the bird’s and the New World’s perspective.

  Sibley’s work has a different purpose. The naming and grandeur of New World birds is a done deed. His paintings are not trying to show us the bird’s perspective but Sibley’s. He wants his readers and viewers to come away knowing how to distinguish an ivory-bill from a pileated and a red-cockaded from the hairy variety.

  If you’ve ever been in the field with a really great birder, then you know that this skill requires years of practice. Birds are identified not merely by their color and plumage but by the mastery of thousands of pieces of learned information about size, age, feet, beak formation, eye, crest, wing shape, flight path, the way they land, the company they keep, where they perch in a tree, or how they stand on the ground. After you’ve learned the boomerang curve of a swallow’s wing, then you learn the nuance differences among the nearly one hundred swallow species. Once, when I was in the Florida woods with Beau Turner, he quickly pointed out to me a tree swallow that was in the northernmost sweep of its range—a rare sighting in winter. Nothing quite convinces one of another’s bona fides than an easy intimacy with the unusual and outermost details of a field of knowledge.

  To spot such nuances and to know in your gut that you have that nailed is a deep physical pleasure. Any birder will tell you so. When people obsess about collecting their “life list” and seeing all these birds and checking them off, in a sense they are re-creating the long journeys of John J. Audubon, the first birder obsessed with his life list, only he painted his.

  When I first met Sibley, it was through a mutual friend. There were a bunch of kids with us, and Sibley offered to take us around the woods of Shelter Island at the end of Long Island to look at birds. It was a marvelous afternoon, but at one point the kids had fled. Sibley was left with just me, standing in a meadow with a distant view of water. He has a charming obsessive quality when you’re with him. Sibley is laconic, even shy. But in time, he opens up and reveals a wonderfully funny and ironic personality.

  That day, I did most of the talking (not unusual). I found out, for instance, that there were only a half dozen species of birds in this hemisphere that he had never personally seen—birds which nested on the ocean and required super-expensive boat trips in harsh environments to see. But when, during the course of this (or any) casual conversation, Sibley’s peripheral vision senses a slight speck scoring a thin black line in the sky, he immediately cuts off everyone and tunes out the rest of the world. When I was with him, he turned mechanically, instantly, and precisely in the direction of the bird. His high-powered binoculars were on his eyes and the bird was centered in his field of focus in half a second.

  “Yellow-shafted flicker,” he might say. Meanwhile I’m squinting at a distant circumflex and then struggling with my binoculars until finally I get a glimpse of a departing speck. Throughout all this, I might try to keep the conversation going, but Sibley’s body language has a way of communicating that he’s no longer there for you. He is inside the binoculars for those few seconds. It’s as if he’s gone, left his body, literally ecstatic.

  On several occasions, I didn’t even bother to look at the bird, so riveting was it to watch a man in the grip of an irresistible thing. It always seemed sacrilegious to continue talking. This was hallowed time, bird identification time, concentration time.

  On this very afternoon, Sibley was looking in one direction and I in another. And I spotted a bird first and raised my binoculars. I got it quickly in focus and could see right away what it was.

  “It’s just a seagull,” I said and lowered my binoculars. I saw that Sibley nevertheless had his gaze fixed intently on the bird. Sibley’s body language and radiant silence was telling me that, even if I didn’t think so, the bell jar of avian solemnity had descended over this entire meadow. Sibley was in the bird zone, his face tense with study. I slammed the binoculars back to my eyes and fixed my field of focus on the bird. Had I missed something? Was it a wayward albatross? But I grew up on the ocean. I know my gulls, and unquestionably that was nothing more than an everyday seagull.

  “It is just a seagull, isn’t it?” I said, again lowering my binoculars and looking at him. And then he said this simple, little thing. He didn’t say it pretentiously or ominously. I could make it sound like the Buddha talking or Yoda training his Jedis. But it wasn’t like that. Sibley has a nearly petit way of talking. And this was Sibley at his most fragile and vulnerable, as if he wanted me to understand something but lacked the words for it. So he just said this thing that has stayed with me ever since.

  “It’s a bird,” he said. Again, I got the glasses back on my eyes. But I realized there were no binoculars powerful enough to show me what he was seeing. I was furious, silently berating myself for my fatuous dismissal—so quick to see th
e tiresome seagull, the bird of landfills, the ocean pest, the flying rat, the scavenger gull of my teenage years when we all repeated the shoreline legend about what happened when you fed them Alka-Seltzer.

  Later I saw him pleasantly lost in a reverie of crows. For Sibley, he’s always looking at birds he’s seen a thousand times as if he’s seeing them for the first time. That’s a skill born of love, amateurism in the best sense. It’s an obsession, the kind that makes you drift off into the woods in college, so consumed with the unutterable pleasure of the work that you forget, ultimately, about earning a degree.

  One thing that marks the amateur, the best of them, is this talent for not seeing things according to the dominant paradigm. One of the traits Thomas S. Kuhn describes in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is this ability not to see things according to the reigning paradigm of the day. The much abused phrase “paradigm shift” is a regular feature of scientific breakthrough in part because certain people can see through the frame within which everyone else dwells and see something different.

  A 2006 Harvard Business Review article detailed the Curse of Knowledge, reporting that many breakthroughs are achieved by people who don’t know the jargon and minutiae of a field, who work outside the realm of day-to-day expertise. Lacking that detailed scaffolding of understanding, they can often see things that insiders look right past. Think of those instruction manuals that came with the computers of the 1990s. They were written by the computer programmers who had lived deep inside the vast world of alt-shift-return-F7. To them, those instructions were easy because they lived inside the paradigm. To those of us outside, their manuals were frustratingly opaque, eventually hilariously so. We had to wait for some outsiders to write those PC for Dummies books so we could find out how to work a computer.