Pausing To Observe

One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and releases them where they won’t end life spattered against a jet. The trapping is quite humane and the birds surprisingly docile once he puts a hood over their eyes.

Viewing a Red-tailed hawk from a distance is fine, but it’s sort of like enjoying a supermodel from a quarter-mile away. To see its complex plumage, coiled muscles, gaping tongue, and brilliant eyes when in hand is an enormous privilege, reminding those of us who squat in our hives just how magnificent the outdoor world is.

Bud’s class is great fun but challenging. To make sense of bird behavior you first have to identify the bird. There are fourteen species of hawks in western Washington, male and female feathers differ (the females are also bigger, because they carry the eggs) and plumage changes again from youth to maturity. Add in the unusual, like the hawk equivalent of an albino, and we probably saw slides of sixty or so varieties that ideally we’d master.

Thank goodness there was no test. Some locals have taken the class a dozen times. So far I’ve managed to identify Red-tails and Harriers in the wild along with the usual eagles and osprey, meaning I have a long way to go.

But birding isn’t really about memorization, it’s about observation, and that is where Anderson grabbed my writerly attention with his skill.

First of all, he’s a collector of bird poetry and narrative description, and read us several works that made me envious, requiring that we shut our eyes and concentrate as the words were recited. We humans rarely look up, but he gave us a peek at an aerial world as new and complex as if we were underwater amphibians who finally crawled out onto land.

Second, he’s carved out a life by watching, something most people just don’t do. He’ll stop and spend hours observing a single hawk, watching it hunt, fight, mate and roost. In our frenetic Twitter world, he approaches the outdoors with the stately rhythm of the Downton Abbey series on Masterpiece Theater, understanding the wild through the patience required of a 19^th Century novel.

He views a bird’s life not as romantic but frantic, as edgy as working the floor of a stock exchange. The medieval dictum about life being “nasty, brutish, and short” could apply to raptors. Not only must they kill pretty savagely, hawks and falcons are constantly harassed by other birds seeking to steal their food or take over their hunting territory. We’ve learned raptors can live in the wild an astonishingly long time – up to 30 years, for eagles – but the mortality of young hawks can be as high as 90 percent.

To see this requires paying attention, and birds show us how. Raptors hunt by ceaselessly and patiently watching for prey. Bud gave us moderns the briefest of tastes by having us try to concentrate on a single spot on the blackboard for a single minute, not looking away and not thinking of something else.

Hard to do. Try it.

So a good writer has some of the attributes of a good birder, or painter, or photographer. We pay attention. We become aware of detail. When I travel to research my novels I’m searching for smells, tastes, and textures as well as sights, but it’s work to stop to do this. Our habit is to rush by.

So, new resolution: Don’t just watch hawks, become as watchful as a hawk. Paying attention leads to truth, and writing that rings true is what makes stories come alive.