ornithophilia 

The Geographical Review

VOLUME 100 April  NUMBER 2

ORNITHOPHILIA:
THOUGHTS ON GEOGRAPHY IN BIRDING
MARK BONTA

abstract. The deeper motives of bird-watchers have rarely been subjected to geographical
inquiry. Birders are sometimes dismissed as hobbyists bent on compensating for feelings of
inadequacy and lack of control in their personal lives. In this article, utilizing textual refer-
ences as well as experiences from my own participant-observer status as geographer-cum-
birder and bird-tour leader, I construct a geographically oriented approach to understanding
the fascinations of bird-watching. I detail ethnographically the annual Christmas Bird Count
and a bird walk in the Honduran rain forest. Then, drawing from the nest-as-home meta-
phors of Gaston Bachelard and the “becoming-bird” relationships suggested by Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, I position birding as extraordinarily intimate exploration of place, rein-
forced by anticipation, repetition, experience of beauty, and the culminating encounter of
human self, bird or bird spectacle, and landscape. Keywords: becoming-bird, birding, bird-
watching, Gilles Deleuze, geography of birding, Félix Guattari.

Strictly speaking, a difference exists: Bird-watching is a casual activity in which

millions of people engage; birding is a sport and an obsession. I was raised a bird-
watcher and nature lover prone to bouts of birding; my obsessive-compulsive di-
mension was nourished by the list making so necessary to success in the latter pursuit.
Lists were a comforting way of classifying and capturing confusing reality, their
length being their most important characteristic, although species composition was
a close second.
I never became a “hard-core birder,” as we called them in my familythose who
do little in their spare time but bird; who live and breathe birding but who only
linger in a spot long enough to get a “tick” (record the species satisfactorily); who
appear oblivious to the wider world around them; and who seem to have little knowl-
edge of anything else. Like many nature lovers, we looked slightly askance at hard-
core birdersthe ones whose eyes glazed over and whose attention wandered when
you nudged the topic of conversation away from birding. But hard-core birders
were also admirable in their single-mindedness: They were the ones with enough
persistence to scan thousands of look-alike waders or gulls at New Jersey’s Cape
May, to pick up the one rarity, and to share it with the rest of us. They were the ones

Dr. Bonta is an associate professor of geography at Delta State University, Cleveland, Mississippi
.
The Geographical Review  (): –, April 
Copyright ©  by the American Geographical Society of New York
 the geographical review

who would fly off to the Pribilof Islands, Attu Island, or Saint Lawrence Islandthose
almost mythical places at the Asian edge of the North American counting areato
tick the birds blown in from Russia, often new species for the New World.
In the birding world, stories about people with even more bizarre behavior than
one’s own are legion: life-threatening events (not infrequently associated with risky
driving habits), obsession to the point of strained credulity (lists of birds seen in
dreams, on television but not as part of nature shows, or from airplanes), yard lists
and year lists, by county and state, and liminal and hotly contested rediscovery of
the ivory-billed woodpecker every few decades. Ah, and the competitions! These
have multiplied into counting extravaganzas of every description in today’s ebird
milieu (Ebird ), with birders and bird-watchers secure in the knowledge that
they are also “citizen scientists” (nas ). All the birds you can see in a day, sitting
in one place, or in a bird-a-thon, or at your feederyou can count up every indi-
vidual bird, every time you see it, and enter the data as often as you wish, contenting
just yourself, or jetting around the country or the world trying to set the record for
most species seen in a year. Follow the pilgrimages to South Texas, southwestern
Arizona, Cape May, automobile birding trails laid out with tourist dollars in mind.
Always counting, always competing.
In my youth, the only prominent competitions were the Christmas Bird Count
(cbc) and the Big Day in May (now known as the “International Migratory Bird
Day”), in which the number of species counted, for us, was but a small part of the
whole, once-a-year experience. In my family, the cbc came before Christmas and
was, if possible, even more highly anticipated than was the latter holiday. On the
allotted Saturday we scoured our wooded home territory in Pennsylvania on foot,
in any and all weather, often for the measly total of twenty or so species and a few
hundred individuals. But the weeks before, and the day itself, were impregnated
with all sorts of extraordinary emotionsand make no mistake about it, on the cbc
we were no longer doing casual bird-watching; we were birding, competitively
(against other count circles, against teams in our own count circle, against our pre-
vious bests), so every minute of daylight counted. Every dense patch of brush was
worth exploring. It was the intimate exploration of place, in the form of a quest,
that made the day so exciting for us, because it enhanced the meanings in quotidian
landscapes. The cbc never was just about the birds. Our heightened senses on that
day were a result of our entanglement with a landscape populated by other sentient
beings. We felt drawn much closer to that domain inelegantly referred to as “non-
human.” At least in my case, experiences such as these suggest a common source for
the human urges to bird and to “do” geography.
Even if the counting is done in solitude, the social experience that follows the
daylong quest carries great significance. In our case, we had a highly anticipated
potluck Count Supper at the Grange Hall out in Sinking Valleycasseroles and more
casseroles and rich Pennsylvania German desserts, as lone birders and birding families
straggled in from the cold (or the warmth and wetness, in many years), but all of us
were mum about our species until we had consumed the food. We were the Juniata
 ornithophilia 

Valley Audubon Society, and as a group we “competed” with, and always lost to, the
State College crowd in the next count circle to the north. But it was always fun to
imagine that this would be the year we would beat them. Supper dispatched, count-
ing groups had a species of competition with each other, muted, as the count orga-
nizer read out the names of each possible species to record who had gotten what.
She would pause after reading each expected species, and then each party would
call out the numbers of individuals it had recorded. In this way the mystery was
unraveled, and a feeling of deep satisfaction settled on the group. I remember feel-
ing particularly proud of the ones no one else but our family tickedI still remem-
ber “catbird,” a particularly notable straggler picked up deep in a bush, deep in a
hollow, one year. This was one of the early records that garnered our family count-
ing effort respect in the group. In later years we could be relied on to pick up the
deep woods and mountaintop species that others missed: common raven, wild tur-
key, pileated woodpecker.
Congratulatory exclamations and banter would continue until the phylogenetic
sequence exhausted itself. And then the inevitable half-awkward question, Does
anyone have anything else on your list? Sometimes something exotic would be half-
apologetically announced, and a thrill would go through the group. Nevertheless, a
party would sometimes have to go track the rarity down the next day and docu-
ment it for the regional editors to accept it. Eventually the compiler would produce
a tentative number of total species for the group, pending reports from the feeder
watchers and confirmations of rare species. Then we would shuffle exhaustedly off
to our cars and our beds, save a few diehards off to do some “owling” and try for a
few more species before midnight. Perhaps this helped mitigate the inevitable post-
cbc letdown.
I was six or seven at the first of these rituals and, year to year since then, have
rarely missed a cbc, no matter where I am living or traveling. But my limit of toler-
ance for hard-core birding is one day, or two or three at most. I quickly lapse into
other pursuits, and my lifelistthe master list of birds I have recorded in my
lifetimeis in disarray as a result. I do not have a yard list or a year list, and I am
perfectly capable of going to a new country and never looking at a bird. But the old
malady always consumes me when I am with other birders or when time for a cbc
is approaching. Again, though, it is never just about birds; the fact is, birds make any
landscape far more interesting than it would be otherwise. I am not sure that a
“dull” landscape even exists for a dedicated birder. For example, in the Sierra de
Agalta National Park, a Honduran montane rain forest where I spent much of my
time working on biodiversity conservation in the s, nonbirders would remark
on the fact that the birders on our research expeditions never seemed to become
bored. On several occasions, nonbirders who returned would come equipped with
a pair of “bins”binocularsand one of the bulky field guides that partially cov-
ered the region, admitting to having been infected by the birding bug. They reveled
in the attunement of the senses and the necessary constant alertness that birding in
a multilayered forest with a -foot-high canopy entailed.
 the geographical review

Ornithophilia Redux
Little in the literature explicitly ties birding and bird-watching to place and land-
scape, as this article attempts to do. However, a wealth of birding books exists, most
of them written by birders, including James Vardaman (), whose work is an
early example of a first-person birding marathon account, in this case a North Ameri-
can year); Stephen Moss () and Scott Weidensaul (), who provide histori-
cal accounts on birding in both the United States and the United Kingdom; and
Dan Koeppel (), who examines the phenomenon of “hard-core” birding from
a quasi-psychological standpoint. A scattering of critical articles delve into the so-
cial contexts of birding and attempt to give greater depth to our understanding of it
that is, beyond a mere activity with substantial economic impact that is important
inasmuch as it generates revenue for conservation or brings attention to the plight
of wild species (see, for example, Kellert ; Law and Lynch ; McFarlane ).
As a conceptual framework for this article, I would like to suggest that “ornitho-
philia”love of birdsrather than the obsessive need to categorize be the jumping-
off point for a more nuanced approach to birding that will allow us to tie birding
with landscape.
As I have written elsewhere, ornithophilia can infect anyoneit is not just a
disease of the foreigner in the rain forest, nor is it something to which local people
are immune (Bonta ). Casual bird-watching, if not hard-core birding, particu-
larly within the context of the bird-count–cum–bird-education workshop, is in-
triguing, if only for a few hours, even for those who are already familiar with their
own landscapes. Fascination with birds is noticeable in urbanites, farmers, hunters,
children, men, and women alike. Although it is not an affliction reserved only for
the elite or the privileged, it is often associated with higher income levels and enough
leisure time to pursue species in expensive or hard-to-reach destinations. But for
the purposes of delving deeper into the affective dimension of birding-qua-land-
scape exploration, I will limit the remainder of my narrative to the experiences of a
rather stereotyped set: hard-core birders in Honduras. The major common objec-
tive of these outsider ecotourists is, understandably, to record as many species as
possible in a limited period. In two customized tours that I co-led in  and 
I was, for the first time, in the position of expert and leader of a nonscientific group
for a period longer than an afternoon, for we lived and breathed birds for eight days
straight. I took the opportunity to observe and take ethnographic field notes on
these birders’ relationships with the Honduran landscape because it struck me that
perhaps what they said and did could inform a more nuanced and deeper under-
standing of the relationship between birding and space.
My coleader, the best birder I have ever known personally, is now a professional
leader for one of the world’s major bird-tour groups. Neither of us was prepared
for the intensity of several clients who started birding at the airport, were alert to
every bush, every telephone wire, every movement and song, from : a.m. until
: p.m. in the field, hiking or driving, maximizing our exposure to the gamut of
Honduran ecosystems, from cloud forest to semidesert, rain forest to beach. Our
 ornithophilia 

attunement to the landscape was pitched at a level and intensity that I have never
experienced elsewhere for such a protracted period. Every place we visited was of
paramount importance because it contained birds, but all the landscape in be-
tween was also noteworthy for the same reason. Because I had no opportunity to
turn to other pursuitseven waking hours of darkness were spent driving on back
roads and calling for owls and nightjarsmy participant-observer role as birder-
geographer was strengthened as the week wore on.
I have interacted with and critiqued a wide range of landscape visions of Hon-
duras held by Hondurans and by outsiders. Particularly relevant in this case, out-
siders can be blinded by their preconceived notions: They think they should be
seeing “virgin rain forest” and instead find a “trashed” landscape containing “trash
birds.” We do not want to see anything but the “pristine,” or the “quaint.” We are
annoyed by all the pine trees in what we have deluded ourselves into believing is
a “tropical rain-forest country” ( percent of Honduras is covered by pine and
pine/oak forests and savannas). Perhaps needless to say, for many ecotourists, towns
and cities are indescribable blots or “holes” that should be avoided at all costs.
Birders on the two tours, however, voiced their preconceptions and described
their experiences of Honduran landscapes in a much different way. Yes, they were
concerned about deforestation and poverty and made passing comments about
aesthetically unpleasing views. But they also were intrigued by the avian diversity
in the towns and even in Tegucigalpa, one of the best places to see several rather
unique species, including the rufous-naped wren. The only landscapes that most
participants seemed to judge negatively were those that appeared to have no birds
whatsoever.
Each tour was like doing a Christmas Bird Count every day for a week. The
emotional charge inside the van changed noticeably from hour to hour, a function
of caffeine levels and fatigue but also of our luck with species on our possible and
probable lists. We talked of little else but birds, although I do remember particularly
well a seemingly interminable discussion of optics on the drive back from the Aguan
Valley. We experienced stressful moments as well: personality conflicts between and
among participants and guides; conflicts over nonbirding-related activities and how
long they would take; or how long we might have to spend trying to call up a new
bird for someone’s lifelist, a type of rail (a secretive species of the Rallidae family
that generally inhabits reed beds and other aquatic habitats), for one participant
(about an hour, and unsuccessfully, it turned out) while others, less competitive,
were content to move on to other prey.
What I have described so far would seem stereotypical and not extraordinary
a group of paying clients riveted to the landscape, ticking off one species after an-
other, swelling their lifelists and their satisfaction in whatever the lists meant to
them. So I must relate something more primal, something that happened every
time we hiked but was crystallized in my consciousness on a certain sortie during
the  tour, that reveals a more profound dimension of birding and demonstrates
a veritable “becoming-bird,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it
 the geographical review

( []): an entangling with the avian landscape as intense as that experienced
by hunters and others who revel in searching for and approaching wild species.

Becoming–Bird
The coastal rain forest of Pico Bonito National Park in northern Honduras is a
fringe of accessible woods, appropriately wet and biodiversity rich, backed by the
,-foot-high wall of the Cordillera Nombre de Dios, one of the highest coastal
mountain ranges in tropical America (Figure ). Birding, ecotourism, and scientific
research take place only on its fringes, along a few trails that straggle a mile or two
from posh lodges and potholed tracks to the base of slopes appropriate for alpine
climbers. Beyond the trails’ ends are , acres of montane rain forest that con-
tains many of the rarer Central American fauna (eagles, tapirs, and jaguars, for ex-
ample) as a consequence of the minimal hunting pressure. Unlike most accessible
Honduran parks, extremely scarce and seldom-seen bird species are always a possi-
bility, almost as if one were in the depths of the roadless Honduran Moskitia or the
Peruvian Amazon, rather than a few minutes from the modern city of La Ceiba,
with its , people, international airport, upscale malls, and burgeoning hous-
ing developments.
From the parking area on the main road, our birding group is swung on a manu-
ally operated cable car well above and across the torrents of a boulder-filled river
and a boisterous group of white-water rafters. We are deposited on the other side at
the entrance to a mile-long foot trail through deep rain forest, recommended by an
ornithologist colleague who has told us to watch for anything and everything along
it. Expectations are highthe “anything-is-possible” mind-set is infrequently a fac-
tor in most temperate-zone birding, but in countries like Honduras, where the avi-
fauna are still relatively little known, it electrifies even casual walks in the countryside.
After all, new species for the country are logged every year, and ranges are extended
from observations made by experienced birders virtually every time they conduct
an in-depth survey or visit a new area.
Timing is crucial in rain-forest birding, for the majority of avian activity takes
place in the early and mid-morning. The experience of time is highly subjective for
the birder, who must become attuned to the timing of the circadian rhythms inside
the forest. The wristwatch’s sole and tyrannical purpose is to keep the tour on sched-
ule. Time as a function of human incremental measurement is rapidly pushed aside
as the body reorients itself phenomenologically to the enclosing forest.
Our heads almost sprout antennae as we swivel them to and fro, straining
toward the calls and songs that may require recording and playback. Tension al-
ways exists between trying to call something into view and moving up the trail
toward other, more promising signs of activity. Our senses are ultraheightened
before the real danger of venomous snakes and the annoyance of army-ant swarms
and stinging plants, but also in order to meld our bodies to our surroundings,
“becoming-forest” (Deleuze and Guattari  []). Ears alert, eyes scanning
undergrowth, canopy, limbs, trunks, forest floor; binoculars going up and down;
 ornithophilia 

F. Location of the Pico Bonito National Park in north-central Honduras, site of bird-group
tours in  and . Other places named in the text are also shown. (Cartography by the author
and Clifford Duplechin)

trying to move our limbs and torsos in ways that are not threatening, an almost
choreographed interplay of people and vegetation, and an overwhelming tension
bred by expectation, with frequent wish fulfillment: “Empidonax at eleven o’clock!
See the tree, there, the forklook through that and beyond to the horizontal limb
about  feet up! Now move left, slowly; he’s sitting right there, right there.” Some-
one else spots a woodcreeper, and all of a sudden cognitive confusion as a mixed
flock moves through the canopy and mid-levels. One birder is hooting like a pygmy
owl while another is making a noise known as “pishing”; these imitative sounds
serve to agitate small birds that often fly close to scold a presumed predator. Spe-
cies multiply, but some individuals are tantalizingly liminal, escaping without being
satisfactorily identified. The guides are trying to identify as many birds as pos-
sible, calling their names and pointing them outperhaps the trees are “drip-
ping” with hummingbirds, or we come upon an ant swarm, and foliage gleaners
and antbirds are popping into view for a second or two, the only sight of a given
species that we may have on this trip or in our lifetime. We hear far more birds
than we seesome of the resonant hoots and whistles seem to have coevolved
with the soundspace of the forestbut eventually our reticence to leave the path
and the inexorable push of the mixed feeding flock in another direction force us
to part ways.
At another juncture we spot a toucan flock, and also a sole buff-throated foliage
gleaner, and about where we have to turn around the trail parallels a vine tangle and
some sort of fruit-bearing tree. Suddenly a wave of tanagers and other frugivores
moves in close to us, feeding, fighting. This goes on for half an hour, and all of us are
 the geographical review

“racking up” new species, an unexpected bonanza, the moments of which excellent
days in the field are madeand which compensate for the inevitable slow, hot ve-
hicle-bound hours later in the day). To top it off, a white hawk is sighted in a low
snag right along the trail; we approach slowly and it swivels its head to watch us,
 feet up. We walk to the base of the snag and past it, but the hawk never evinces
fear, never even the urge to fly. A gorgeous bird, observing us observing itwe are
the ones that eventually have to leave it. All the while the mixed flock is producing
new birds, species that one cannot see elsewhere, that most people never see.
Far more was going on during this timeand I have given only a rough sketch
of what happenedthan simply seven people counting birds in the rain forest. As
the group discussed later, how we saw what we saw made the differencethese were
not just elements of a list, they were unparalleled encounters with the Other. Not
only did we see a white hawk up close, but it watched us. We locked eyes with it.
How many people can say that? What did this do to us as people? How were we
enriched, or changed? And the mixed frugivorous flockso much beauty, existing
among beings to which humans are insignificant and unimportant. For a time we
inhabited an alien space, except for the trail itself, one completely devoid of human
traces. We were swept up in and by the nonhuman phenomena of the forest. Then,
back and out and over and on to a dusty pasture, where we stopped to observe
groove-billed anisa species of cuckooseen many times before but endlessly in-
teresting to watch, enlivening a pasture, magnifying the importance of a barbed-
wire fence: preferential ani perch.

The Spatiality of Entanglement

In To See Every Bird on the Earth Dan Koeppel asks, “Why does obsession exist? Is it
to fill our empty spaces? Does it work?” His answer: “Birds show us what nature is.
Not just physically, but as an idea. As something we love, something we value. . . .
But in the listing, in the categorizing, in the identifyingwhether at the backyard
feeder or deep in the rain forests of Brazilwe untangle the web of creation. We
don’t name birds, we don’t number birds, for birds; we do it for each other. When
we do, we get, just briefly, to soar alongside them” (, –). I would add, to
creep in among them, to anthropomorphize to our hearts’ content, almost to take
on the forms and functions of birds. And beyond the birds themselves, as an excuse
to get out there and into it, to remake the world as something charged with mean-
ing, something interesting, never dull, never boring. Birding is an ecstatically inti-
mate exploration of place. Through the search for birds we gather much, much
morewhether only through the gaze from afar, scanning with a ’scope, or the sweaty,
insect-bitten tramping in the mud, among the vines or rushes. Only to a birder,
I suppose, can a garbage dump or a sewage pond be a place of beautyI remember
how Sundays at the sewage ponds became a sort of occasional ritual in my graduate-
school days in Austin, Texas. It seemed strange, at first, to devote the morning to the
worship of vile-smelling sludge, but, as any birder knows, the scarcest of migrant
shorebirds from the Canadian prairies can best be found there, wading in the ooze
 ornithophilia 

that is in transition from raw human waste to fertilizer. The place became sacred in
the way that only bird-rich sites can. Indeed, for birders, garbage dumps and sewage
ponds are rain forests of another type.
My earlier reference to ornithophilia hearkens to the phenomenological term
“topophilia” as originally used by Gaston Bachelard in . In The Poetics of Space
( []) Bachelard was concerned primarily with birds’ nests as metaphors,
but he was nevertheless sensitive to the nontrivial connections between people and
birdsand this is in at least a small way relevant to the subject of this essay.
Birds became significant phenomena for Bachelard in the comforting parallel
between nests and human homes: “An intimate component of faithful loyalty re-
acts upon the related image of nest and house” ( [], ); and “for the world
is a nest, and an immense power holds the inhabitants of the world in this nest”
(p. ). The very fragility of the nest inspires human yearnings toward the safe
place, the zone of refuge: “If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon en-
counter a sort of paradox of sensibility. A nestand this we understand right away
is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security” (p. ). The key
to this is what the nest represents: “And so when we examine a nest, we place our-
selves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence,
an urge toward cosmic confidence” (p. ).
Yet beyond the obvious, if elegantly worded, nest-as-home metaphor, we also find
Bachelard commenting on the ways in which birds enrich places and, thus, as factors
in the phenomenology of topos: “the fact is that, in a garden, we grow more attached
to a tree inhabited by birds” ( [], ). Even without a nest, the presence of a
bird can have emotional effects on the human subject. Bachelard himself admitted
that “the woodpecker enters my sound world and I make a salutary image of him for
my own use. . . . This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me” (p. ).
Bachelard’s birds and their nests served his purpose as philosophical topogra-
pher interweaving the world of the intimate with the immensity of the cosmos (“in-
timate immensity”), and they serve my purpose here of showing that birds are an
integral component of topophiliathis alone means that birding can achieve some-
thing of a privileged status in our thinking about the interrelationships of people
and nature. But it is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming” that can take us
to another level, not of abstraction but of sensitivity to what we may call “entangle-
ment,” a material and not just psychological connectedness that is not so easily
explained away as daydreaming or the consciousness of safety ( []).
Deleuze and Guattari employed birds nonmetaphorically in the chapters en-
titled “: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” and “: Of the Refrain” in
A Thousand Plateaus ( []), through the lenses of ethology and musicology,
to illustrate their immanentist approach to the understanding of human and natu-
ral existence. Deleuze and Guattari subscribed to an ontology and epistemology of
the intertwined nonlinear systems that they called “rhizomes”among many other
termsthat may be thought of as complex, emergent networks characterized by
connectedness and constant motion. The normalization of individuality, being, and
 the geographical review

stasis is replaced in the Deleuzian-Guattarian world by the neo-Heraclitean asser-

tion that what is normalbut not necessarily ethically “good”is flux; what ap-
pears to be stable is at best metastable, only temporarily “frozen” or congealed,
perhaps as a human body at a point in time, or indeed anything to which we can
assign a label and categorize. Thus much of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical
project involved sensitizing us to the comparative rates of movement of interlinked
and entangled network systems and particularly to the “interbeing”; that is, the
symbiosis wherein the difference of things that are already different work together
to create and sustain living “machines.” Their term for the evolution of heteroge-
neous groupings of speciesfor example, birds and plantswas “involution.”
But Deleuze and Guattari went beyond pointing out that philosophers should
consider the meaning of heterogeneous assemblies and nonhierarchical assemblages,
employing “becoming” as the central concept for a world that includes human be-
ings and what happens to them as they approach nonhumans: “All of music is per-
vaded by bird songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen”
( [], ), and “Marcel More shows that the music of Mozart is permeated
by . . . becomings-bird” (p. ). This is not to say that Mozart was in danger of
turning into a bird, but rather that the music of Mozart, and others such as Messiaen,
is a direct result of a human attunement to birdsong at an extremely profound level
that, in essence, ends up making (some of) us “part bird.” Indeed, “it is not certain
whether we can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: Are there
not, as Messiaen believes, musician birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird’s re-
frain necessarily territorial?” (pp. –), by which Deleuze and Guattari were
suggesting that birds may sing repetitive phrases for reasons other than the defense
of territoryan idea that has better support now than it did when Deleuze and
Guattari were writing about itreasons that in an affective dimension make them
similar to human musicians. This, Deleuze and Guattari stressed, is neither anthropo-
morphization nor simply imitation.
Although little is happening in the other directionanimals that “become-
human” being limited, perhaps, to those in captivity, which is an obvious and rather
poor example“the human musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a bird
that is itself deterritorialized, “transfigured,” a celestial bird that has just as much of
a becoming as that which becomes with it” (p. ). The flesh-and-blood bird, in
this case, entangled with the human musician, are perhaps both altered by the
otheror the bird remains immunebut, in addition, this melding results in an-
other figure, perhaps an archetype or a symbol of the cosmos. More opaquely, “sup-
pose a painter ‘represents’ a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only
to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure
line and pure color” (p. ). To clarify, “the painter and the musician do not imi-
tate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal becomes what
they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with Nature” (p. ).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, then, humans obviously are part animal, or
at least have that potential, even if the animals do not respond to this. I would like to
 ornithophilia 

extend this to suggest that “becoming-bird” characterizes the birder, wherein the
birder becomes ecstatically entangled with the other and at a certain level stops
“being human,” though also stopping short of the degree of “becoming-animal”
that characterizes shamans, for example.
But we are concerned with more than the birds here. Above, I suggested that the
human attunement to birds is part and parcel of the attunement to landscapein the
Deleuzian-Guattarian conceptual universe, it is a veritable becoming-landscape. As
far as I can tell, this melding of human-as-birder with landscape-with-birds com-
prises four essential components: anticipation; repetition; aesthetics; and fulfillment.
In birding the period of anticipation not only serves to prepare the mind and
the body for the event itself but also involves a mental projection into the landscape
through some use of the imagination but mostly through careful planning, as if one
were the leader of a stealth campaign in guerrilla warfare. Almost innumerable cal-
culi are used in planning routes to maximize overall numbers of species, possibili-
ties for encountering target birds, and other key criteria. These have to do with ease
of access, weather, time of day, travel time, and so forth. Other factors must also be
minimized: perhaps monetary expense, time spent, time “wasted” in nontarget ar-
eas, and many more. In highly contested events such as bird-a-thons, slight miscal-
culations can be as damaging as bad luck or poor weather.
Beyond careful planning is the thrill of waiting, illustrated in the almost Christ-
mas-like quality of the cbc I experienced as a youth. The understanding is that the
event makes the day transcend an ordinary day, even as the ordinary space will be
transformed into the extraordinary. The imagination is given a considerable boost.
Despite the impression that birders are after diversity and difference, this is in
reality subsumed in the dominant experience of repetitionof species, of events, of
routes, of certain patterns of behavior. Indeed, the cbc as a unique, once-in-a-life-
time event would be of slight significance. It is the cbc-as-tradition (counting on
overwhelming anticipation from year to year) that has given the event such iconic
value in American bird-watching, and now conservation and biology. But at the
scale of the individual bird and the individual watcher, the fact that the cardinal
comes back to the feeder again and again; the fact that tourist after tourist sees a
quetzal; that fact that the return of the same ordinary migratory birds thrill viewers
year after yearthese are the stuff of becoming-bird. Mozart, no doubt, listened to
the same birdsongs over and over again. Variety is provided by the fact that each
time is a little differentit is not the same bird, or it is not the same as last year, or it
is doing something different todaybut, nevertheless, the repetitiveness and repeat-
ability inherent in birding is what gives it permanence.
Perhaps needless to say, much of the anticipation and repetition are caused by the
human attraction to things of beauty, and birds are certainly that, though some more
obviously than others. The aesthetics in birding involves the experience of beauty (the
sublime) inherent in the colors, flight, songs, calls, and other, less often noted charac-
teristics of the avifauna. In Honduras, one exclaims “¡Qué bonito! ,” a simple phrase
charged with significance; the birder pursues this beauty endlessly, even in the aes-
 the geographical review

thetically least pleasing of landscapes. The examination at times is of minuscule niches,

among endless canopy foliage or in mudflats stretching away limitlesslythe reward
is an aesthetic moment; one is transported to the plane of the indescribable. We should
never underestimate the importance of aesthetical considerations in the becoming-
bird of human beings, even of those people who do not readily voice “pretty” senti-
ments. Also, I cannot recall being with a birder who did not evince some fascination
with aesthetic considerations; that is, who was interested in and impressed by some-
thing more than recording the bird on a tally sheet.
Fulfillment comes only through the three-way encounter of self, bird[s], and
landscape. The experience of watching a bird is always in a place, it is always geo-
graphically charged. Place matters deeply in this entanglement, though in ways quite
different from other modes of human interconnection with the nonhuman. Indeed,
few human endeavors exist in which place is as important, in itself, as it is in birding:
I can think of few outdoor activities that involve as much attunement to the land-
scape as does hard-core birding in the rain forest (birding from a car window is
another matter altogether, of course).
What does all this mean for geography? I hope I have succeeded in making the
case for the profundity of birding as landscape exploration. I have suggested that
philosophical support exists for the idea that birding involves the entanglement of
humans, birds, and landscape and that birding is worthy of being thought about, if
not theorized upon, as something more than an economic activity. This would sug-
gest that birding be paid attention to by cultural geographers, for the reasons given
above and because the “landscapes of birding” or “birding spaces” that are encoun-
tered should be the focus of scrutiny. The rising popularity of interstate, themed
birding trails, for example, is an intriguing case of the construction or enshrine-
ment of sacred places linked by pilgrimage routes, part of a whole imaginative car-
tography and place-making effort that fuses online and out-there landscapes into a
world-as-birding-destination.
Finally, I would suggest that the geographer-as-birder is explained by the con-
vergence of birder and geographer in a relatively broad-minded appreciation for,
and fascination with, place. I could even go one step farther and intimate that birders
and geographers share a certain often-criticized tendency to gaze out the window at
landscapes and scan them from afar, rather than going out into them and engaging
senses other than the ocular. But for myself, this has never been the style I favor; it
doesn’t seem to lead to a becoming-bird, or the “path to entanglement,” if you will.

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