Book Review: Good Birders Don’t Wear White

For the past 2 years I’ve been telling anyone that will listen that birding is a great hobby. I say that it's peaceful, easy to start, and gives you a reason to be in beautiful places looking at beautiful things. Of course these things are all true, however I’ll admit that my passion could be mistaken for expertise, of which I have little. I decided I needed to pause my study of birds, and dive a bit deeper into birding, and maybe learn a few things from actual experts. This brings me to Good Birders Don’t Wear White: 50 Tips from North America’s Top Birders. 

This book is a collection of essays written by prominent birders, scientists, authors, and overall contributors to birding literature. You could imagine that this crowd might get a bit preachy, but the advice contained is easy to digest and welcoming in nature. You’ll find no experts warning you that this hobby needs to be taken seriously or not pursued at all. In fact one essay suggests that some of the best luck you might find birding, is simply in a lawn chair in the parking lot of your local nature trail. That is to say, birding doesn’t need to be hard, doesn’t need to be about lists, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. These lifetime birders will tell you that it really just needs to be about the birds. 

Many of the questions that I've had about birding, and that I planned on writing about on this website, were discussed in Good birders don’t wear white. For example, how grave of a sin is misidentification, what are the best practices on interacting with other birders, how should you approach birding with kids, and what are the best times and places to go birding? These are questions an amateur (like me) might already have in their mind, but I found the tongue-in-cheek essays to be even more revealing. For instance “Follow These Rules to See a Mangrove Cuckoo” gave some insight on how there are no simple rules to guarantee you’ll see a target species. However there are some rules in dealing with other people that might well be carved in stone (please see Rule 6: “If you are married to a birder, never see the Mangrove Cuckoo without your spouse”).

There were other sections about birding that had never even crossed my mind. A section called “Building a Nest Egg” has 3 essays on giving back to the birds. The first essay tackles the fact that you are inescapably linked to things that are harmful to birds, starting with the effect of cell towers on migration patterns, and ending with how the oxygen you are currently breathing means less oxygen for the birds. This reductio ad absurdum introduces the idea that since your very existence has a questionable impact on birds (and nature at large), isn’t it worth taking a few proactive steps to do something for them? Picking the right coffee and building a bird-friendly backyard were familiar steps, but buying the Federal Duck Stamp to support important conservation areas was new to me. 

All in, I loved this book because I have a few new tricks under my belt (its ok to make a “pish pish” sound to help coax hiding birds into view), but it also painted a picture of a hobby that matures with age. Sure you can run around the globe chasing new birds for your lift list, but even the most accomplished birders still enjoy the colors, patterns, and behaviors of the sparrows that show up in their own backyard. So to me Good Birders Don’t Wear White, while informative, was also confirmation that I’m on the right track. The time invested to become a better birder will pay dividends for years to come, not just in this upcoming weekends adventures.

Although I might need to buy some darker colors.

This shirt is actually a light green!