This episode of Rumble Strip was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Bryan Pfeiffer: Lemme see if I can get him to turn towards us. No, he's happy there.
Erica Heilman: Oh, he's singing! What’s he singing about?
Bryan Pfeiffer: He’s singing for a mate. He’s singing about, "This is my turf, and I want to find a mate."
Erica Heilman: That's it?
Bryan Pfeiffer: That's basically it. He's basically thinking about, you know, getting laid and not getting killed.
Erica Heilman: That's my friend Bryan Pfeiffer at Berlin Pond in central Vermont. Bryan is a writer and an educator and a field naturalist, and this is a story I made with him back in 2021.
Bryan used to be a professional birding guide, and even though we'd been friends for a long time, he's never taken me birding, not because he wasn't willing, but because I wasn't interested at all. And then suddenly, when I turned 50, I got interested in birds, and ever since I've gotten interested in birds I've been sending Bryan phone recordings of birds and saying, "What's this?" And every time he writes back and he says, "That's a Carolina wren."
In the spring of 2021, Bryan took me birding during peak migration, and for the first time in my life, I got to see an actual singing bird up close in the telescope. And it was amazing. Bryan knows all about birds and about dragonflies and butterflies. He also knows where they live and what they eat and what it smells like and feels like where they live. And I think my sudden interest in birds has more to do with that, with some growing desire to know these places the way he does, and to be absorbed in them. Here's Bryan.
Bryan Pfeiffer: OK. Look in there. Watch him sing. Watch his throat pulse.
Erica Heilman: Oh, god. He’s such a little tough guy…
Bryan Pfeiffer: He's gonna go… watch how his tail shakes in the trill part of the song. You have to know this bird because they're everywhere. They're singing all over Montpelier, you know, you have to know this sparrow, because it's with us everywhere.
Erica Heilman: Song sparrow?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Yeah. Listen…
Bird sound…
Two introductory notes, two or three, right? So that one has three repeated introductory notes, some buzzy, hard to describe stuff, and then the trill. It ends with that trill. That's the little tail, the tail waggle. This is like the quintessential sparrow. This is like the sparrow of sparrow-ness… There's goldfinches calling overhead….
Erica Heilman: So this is, I know, anthropomorphizing, but their constant noise-making…is there anything to suggest that they are happy about it all?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Well, I mean, there's a zillion ways to look at that. We can look at it from their perspective, or we can look at it from our perspective. For them, it's instinct. But there is also an aesthetic form of evolution that they undertake, you know, that they are subject to. And so there is beauty inherent in their goings on here that they perceive, if you believe certain evolutionary biologists. Others will just attribute this to Darwinian evolution. Is it beautiful to us? Hell yes, you know, and it's more than beauty to me, you know?
Erica Heilman: What does that mean?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Well, I mean, with birds, you know, you have this blend of color, song and flight. That's a pretty good mix. I mean, it's hard to beat that in nature. So that's why we love them. And then they’re all the usual things. They embody place, and they're an expression of life. And all of that is true, you know, but I don't know. I mean, it just makes me feel really good when I see them.
Erica Heilman: Do you feel as excited to see them now as you did 20 years ago?
Bryan Pfeiffer: I think even more so. I love their annual returning. I hate that there are fewer of them. So check this out.
Erica Heilman: Isn’t that a robin?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Nope. That’s a female oriole building a nest, right. So we saw this yellow flash. And then it disappeared. She's in her nest now, she's shaping it.
Erica Heilman: And what's it made of? It looks like hair.
Bryan Pfeiffer: It's fibrous plant material that she's peeling and gathering in the wetland here. That's the male just sang. That could have been her, too. Females will sing.
Erica Heilman: What is that orange up there, is that…?
Bryan: Oh, that's gotta be the oriole. Good job, Erica! It's the male Baltimore oriole waiting for him to show up. Look in this. Oh yeah, there's some serious orange going on here. OK, look at this.
Erica Heilman: Oh, my God, that bird is so... it's so… orange.
Bryan Pfeiffer: There’s no other word for orange, right? Like, you know, birds could be ruby or crimson or scarlet or red, but I don't know that there are multiple words for orange. That's why we said "orangest."
Erica Heilman: What's that?
Bryan Pfeiffer: That's a blue jay.
Laugh…
Bryan Pfeiffer: That's OK. You know, when I first started bird watching, I was with this guy and cardinals were singing all morning long and I'd say, "What's that?" He'd say, "That's a cardinal." And then, like, you know, 10 minutes later, I'd say, "Now what's that?" He'd say, "It's a cardinal." Like 20 minutes later I'd say, "What's that?" He'd say, "It's a cardinal." He was so patient…there’s a veery calling in here, going "Peer! Peer!" That's a thrush related to our hermit thrush, our state bird. It’s this lovely, soft corduroy brown with some very gentle blotching on its breast.
You know, I started in nature with birds. I'd go to the tropics and I'd be looking at birds, and I was not seeing spectacular butterflies. And now I see everything. Now I love to see whatever is flying or slithering or hopping or crawling or growing or just sitting there around me, you know. So it's not all about birds for me anymore. For a lot of birders, it's about birds. They don't necessarily know other nature, which is OK. Learning birds is a challenge.
Erica Heilman: But this is the big reason I'm interested in this, is that you're saying that over time, you see all the context, you see how the bird is living in this particular tree, and that particular tree is home to this particular insect, right?
Bryan Pfeiffer: I like knowing that these warbling vireos use this particular habitat. I like being able to listen, to close my eyes and listen to trees rustle and having a sense of what kind of trees those are. Is that hubris? You know, I don't know. Maybe we should be Homo hubris, rather than Homo sapiens. But there is satisfaction in knowing things to me.
Erica Heilman: But there's also a patterning that you that we're attracted to. And this is the thing that I don't have, that I want. When you're looking out, you are noticing all of the interrelated qualities, right? And what does that get you, in terms of an experience?
Bryan Pfeiffer: It gets me to know places. In the same way that I could say to you, "small town" or "farm town," and you have a notion of what that place is, what makes it, what embodies it, knowing the same things in nature, helps me know places in nature. You know I can know a woodland, spruce bog, and know how it differs from a shrub spruce bog based on the trees that are growing there and the insects that are there and the birds that are nesting there and the plants that are growing there. It's a place. It's a community of living things that I can envision, and maybe that's part of the satisfaction. I know where I am.
Oh, there's a yellow warbler flying across. We're gonna go look at those. We want them with the sun at our backs so that we can see them glow like fresh highway paint. Here they are. Look at this. There's a female, there's a male. Come over this way…. "Sweet, sweet, sweet, summer, summer, sweet," and that's his call note. And I just watch for yellow flashes. Yeah. Low movement in these willows. That was him, Also these buzzy call notes. These two birds are yellow warblers. OK, here's another one right in front of us. He has these like rusty stripes down his breast and this black beady eye...
Erica Heilman: He's so yellow!
Bryan Pfeiffer: I know he is. He's the epitome of yellow. We’ll park ourselves here. We can just wait for them and be with them. There's one down low.
Erica Heilman: What are they called again?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Yellow warbler. This is, again a really common, cosmopolitan warbler. I am so glad that it's common. It’s a shockingly beautiful bird.
Erica Heilman: So what is the experience of going to bogs?
Bryan Pfeiffer: So that's love. Bogs are connected. There's something about bogs in me that's like, I belong. Those are places I belong.
Erica Heilman: In bogs?
Bryan Pfeiffer: Yeah. I mean, you know, you can think of what you really love in the world, and it could be walking into Fenway and seeing the field open in front of you, that just makes you feel right, like you belong. For me, I could be wandering in the woods bushwhacking. Usually you bushwhack to these bogs, and then you arrive at the bog and it opens. It's like a squishy mat with purple orchids growing purple flames across the bog, and certain birds singing and butterflies moving around. And it's like I get there and I say, "OK, I belong here. This is where I belong. This is right for me." All the misery I went through, including black flies and mosquitoes and my bad knee, my torn meniscus, you know, getting there, none of that matters anymore. Like I would bear far worse to get to a bog, because I just feel as if I belong in bogs, you know. Maybe that's where I'll end up. They'll find me, you know, 1,000 years from now. Here's a bog guy, the bog guy, he belonged in bogs. I think I would want to die in a bog.
Sound of geese overhead…
Erica Heilman: So you and I have had this conversation for a long time. In fact, the first time we met, what was striking to me is I'm curious about almost anything. But when we met, about, I don't know, over 10 years ago now, the only thing I couldn't care less about was birds.
Bryan Pfeiffer: Really? We were at Bar Hill. We were really at a really great spot.
Erica Heilman: So there's a reason why I am interested in this only now and not 30 years ago. And it has to do with my age. It has to do with moving, in a way, I think, into a stage of being an observer, more of an observer, instead of a participant, right? Like moving into my observation years.
Bryan Pfeiffer: Yeah…
Erica Heilman: And I also wonder if there's comfort in, if part of the reason that's comforting is that it will one day absorb me completely.
Bryan Pfeiffer: Right. I think this phrase that you've come up with, "observation years," is really a good one. I think those years are early in our life, when we're kids and we can observe, and then we move into career and productivity, and then we get through that, you know, and then we want to see. We want to go back to those observing years.
Erica Heilman: But the other thing I wonder is, I really do wonder if the later observation years or in the sort of last third of life, if part of it is about softening the blow of dying. Because it's as though your ego is trying to become absorbed in what you're observing, like, "This is going to claim me one day."
Bryan Pfeiffer: That's interesting. I don't see this as something on the way to dying. To my dying. I don't. there is a different kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing where you are and where you fit, and where everything else fits, how it all comes together with you as part of it. So it's not necessarily accumulating knowledge, particularly because you can know a place really, really well, and there will always be new things in nature for you to discover. I've been to places where I could spend a lifetime and still not know half of what is going on there. You know, knowing that you really can't know everything about a place that's…that's great. That's damn good.
For more information on Bryan Pfeiffer, visit his Substack, Chasing Nature.
Rumble Strip is a podcast produced by Erica Heilman and distributed on the radio by Vermont Public. Learn more about the show here.
