It’s Never “Just a Mallard”
Acouple of years ago my husband Andy and I went on a guided birding trip in Cape May. For non-birders, Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey, is one of the top birding sites on the east coast. It is a great bird flyway, with millions of warblers, songbirds, hawks, falcons, ducks, and seabirds migrating through in spring and fall. I normally bird on my own, occasionally with a much more knowledgeable friend, but Cape May seemed like a good place to go with a guide.
We saw some wonderful birds, including my first killdeer! But what I remember most from the trip was the guide’s reaction when someone in our group spotted a mallard. After a flurry of excitement occasioned by the flash of color on the drake’s head, the person said, in a disappointed tone, “oh, it’s just a mallard.” (Mallards are the most common ducks in our part of the world.)The guide responded immediately. “There’s no such thing as ‘just a mallard,’ or ‘just a robin, or a blue jay, or a sparrow.’” Familiarity in birding should never breed contempt, or dismissal. Birders of course all search for rare birds, birds with exotic names like the elegant trogon, a bearded tit, an avocet, a painted bunting. Indeed, the term “rare bird” has come to mean “an exceptional person or thing.” Yet every bird is a “thing with feathers,” the phrase Emily Dickinson used to describe hope, a remarkable dinosaur descendant with hollow bones and distinctive patterns, colors, and behaviors. The constant search for the new should never blind us to the value of the old, the common, the ordinary.I remind myself of that lesson often, when I see that flash of feathers or what appears to be an unusual silhouette, only to discover that it is a bird I know well. I reflect on why it is that our human attention spans are so short, that we adore the “news” because it is new, flitting from headline to headline and issue to issue faster than a hummingbird sampling flowers. So often we dismiss what we know or have seen before as “old news,” literally an oxymoron, the equivalent of “just a bird.”
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