Searching For A Rock Wren

Birding and More Thoughts on Being in the Present

For the past month and a half or so I’ve been heading out to some choice spots, binoculars or not, to slowly walk and look out for birds. It’s been a peaceful return of this activity, birding, a nice excuse usually at the end or middle of my day to bring me back into the world after being stuck at home, emailing, endlessly researching, constantly looking for more work, finding it, then looking again.

But with birding it’s not just about the birds. It’s really an excuse to leave my phone in my car and walk, aimlessly stare out at water, rocks, small brush or groves of tall bay and eucalyptus trees, wondering what might be hiding right in front of my eyes. In a way it’s sort of an active meditation, something I can do with intent and curiosity that easily takes me away from all my brooding about the world and its problems, my issues, my town, and returning myself firmly to the place where I am standing.

This past month has been a cloud of distractions—every thought in my head pilling over and onto another lingering thought. I hold onto fear, some anxiety about some unknown outcome folding into itself like kneaded dough ready to be set into an oven and hardened in place by my own panicked psyche. Every additional piece of information from the news or anywhere else online, as well, gets tacked into the mess of half-thoughts and words and phrases in my head, ready to bake. In other words, the stress of the world today has invaded every one of my thoughts.

But then there is birding.

And I mean just the birding. I don’t mean what some call listing, where you try and write down how many species you have seen throughout your life like some real world game of Pokémon. I mean the act of going outside, anywhere, to listen for the birds that surround you and what they’re calling about. There is nothing wrong with listing what you’ve seen, I just know for myself I become too obsessed with the listing rather than the world in front of me and it becomes more so a game, rather than an observation of the world that surrounds me.

Once or twice a week I leave my apartment, head for a hillside or a forest or a marsh, binoculars or not, and start walking. I look at the world around me, listen for the calls and songs hidden in the shrubs and grass, and look. That’s it, just look. Sometimes I see only a few birds, sometimes I see many. What I see is unimportant. What matters is that I’m away from my phone, away from my computer, looking at the world in front of me, experiencing it and seeing the birds, plants, and other animals that share this place I call home.

In this small way, I remain grounded. The world outside of where I stand is assuredly real, and is assuredly in pain, but what good can I do by wallowing in my fear of that pain? How can I help when I am fixated on potential problems? So, I try to step outside as much as I can afford, letting go of problems in the hopes that the quiet might leave me room to make my own solutions.

To be rooted in the present is something that is always a task of accepting and becoming comfortable with failure. Hardly ever will you, or I, be able to fully remain here in this moment, undistracted by whatever drama happened to us today, yesterday, last week, last month, last year—in the news or in our lives. There often will be a time in the day, no matter how close we are to recognizing our present, where we completely forget that this is where we are always standing.

I get lost this way easily. Just sitting in my bed in the morning, I sometimes forget that I don’t live in the scenario that I made up for myself, or in the dream I just woke from, no matter how good or bad it may be. I am not on some odd race track with trap doors that lead to dining table sized breakfast burritos (a dream I had last night). What’s more, if I add reading the news, devoid of so much of the historical context that is left out from it, or scrolling on Instagram, the information, it feels, becomes inflamed in my head, a sickness of sorts to my thoughts, to my being as a whole. The only thing to do, really, is take space from it, even for a moment.

Two weeks ago, on a walk near the Berkeley marina I saw, for the first time, a rock wren. It’s a small bird, drab brown with a slightly long and curved beak for getting into cracks in rocks to eat what grubs hide there in little shadows. The marina isn’t a typical place for a rock wren. They prefer dry hillsides, and cliff edges. But, remaining true to its name, the rock wren was on top of a lone boulder, hopping from its perch into the dry grass as I watched. Knowing so little about this bird at that moment, just gathering its shape and the lightly speckled sides of its feathers, I stood there enjoying how it erratically hopped from rock to ground, rock to ground, until eventually spotting me and flying away into the smaller rocks at the edge of the water.

Since then, I have come back to this spot maybe three times in the hopes that I’ll see this rare bird again. I’m not sure if this desire to see it again goes against my desire to just be out there walking and looking. I’m not even sure if that is something to be concerned about either way. But still, I am curious if this rock wren oddly calls the marina its home, or if it was just passing through. And I likely won’t get an answer. But the lighthearted curiosity of seeing if it’s still there brings me out to the open grassy hillsides, the waters of the Bay, and most importantly, for a brief moment, away from the world I inhabit like many of us, on my phone.