In the beginning of my freshman year of high school, my history teacher gave us an anthropological study of the Nacimera people detailing their strange behaviors and customs. One section explained how “the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client.”
For those of us of the puzzle-solving persuasion, it was readily apparent that Nacirema is merely American spelled backwards. I didn’t see it at the time, and am unsure whether I could spot it on my own now, but it eventually became clear that the above section is referring, albeit obtusely, to a dentist. The point of the piece is that every culture is different, and even our own customs appear strange to outsiders, so we should all be tolerant and understanding of everyone. Thank you, we get it.
As blunt and heavy-handed as the piece is, I couldn’t help but think of it this summer. There were long stretches during my job as a park ranger for the National Park Service when I felt like little more than a cultural anthropologist, studying the small but fervent American subculture known as birders.
I didn’t know it before I took the job, but the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge where I worked sees 325 different species of birds throughout the year. As a result, it’s a world-famous birding site, drawing visitors from allover the globe. Late spring though August is the prime time for migratory birds, and the number of birders following them made it feel similar to what I imagine it must be like to work in Mecca during the Hajj (that is, if Mecca were visited primarily by upper-middle-class, middle-aged white couples).
My initiation occurred on my first day of work, when my boss grabbed binoculars and led me onto the trail with the other avian pilgrims. In the South Garden, a husband and wife looked through binoculars while bickering about the call that a yellow warbler makes. She claimed that the bird sang, “See-see-see-titi-see.” The husband disagreed, insisting that the bird sings, “See-see-ti-see-see.”
I’m not doubting that these people belong in some form of marital counseling for problems that are in no way related to birding, but this level of intensity and attentiveness to detail was pervasive among nearly everyone I met. The argument cemented what I was beginning to suspect: this was the hobby of strict perfectionists. I saw people turn up their noses when the specifications of someone’s binoculars weren’t up to snuff.
Early on, I was occasionally the object of scorn for serious birders. While working at the visitor’s desk, I would receive looks of contempt if I didn’t know where the black-necked stilt had been spotted or couldn’t describe the plumage of a juvenile semi-palminated plover. I have no interest whatsoever in ornithology or even biology in general, and I’d be lucky to be able to identify a bald eagle on my own. Then why would I work there, you ask? Because knowing my scientific limitations, they were still willing to pay me $16 an hour. There is no way that I could say no to that.
It would’ve been easy to have simply stewed in a pool of my own ignorance and accepted the scorn of the birders while making a nice bit of money. For reasons I still don’t understand, as I’m normally quite lazy, I decided to try and become knowledgeable to gain acceptance from the birders.
I tried to make small talk when they came into the visitor center, realizing that this late in the game, my greatest asset would be my ability to bullshit. I nodded along and learned the right questions to ask, just enough to get them talking without exposing my ignorance. Every conversation I had left me with a little more to talk about next time, and that much less that I would have to fake.
I began to decode many of the words that they bandied about so casually in conversation, such as “lifers,” the bird equivalents of a “bucket list” that should be seen before someone dies. I was finally able to figure out some of the jokes they told, though most still go right over my head.
A week after I finished the job for the summer, I was walking my dog near an open field by my house, and saw a bird fly out of his path. In my head I recorded the bird’s shape, size, and coloration. After a few minutes of looking in my book, I ascertained that it was a northern bobwhite quail, and I realized that the birders had brought me along on their pilgrimage after all.
