Spencer Schaffner: Binocular Vision

Spencer Schaffner’s Binocular Vision starts from the simple and important observation that field guides—like all texts—“do cultural work.” Behind and beyond their stated purposes, field guides affirm assumptions and create expectations in their users; Binocular Vision is a critical exploration of those assumptions and expectations, and many of the conclusions the book offers will be an unsettling surprise to many of its birding readers.

In five short chapters, Schaffner argues that modern birdwatching as practiced in the United States—and as reflected and, simultaneously, formed by its central texts—is not conservationist and environmentalist at all, but rather serves to efface the huge problems facing our birds and their habitats. Schaffner finds that most field guides and most birding neutralize our awareness of environmental challenges by constructing birds as separate from their physical settings and by presenting even the most toxic of artificial landscapes as benign. Along the way, the author serves up an indictment of some of North American birding’s most prominent and cherished institutions and practices; at times badly overstated, the book’s criticisms should nevertheless make all of us into more carefully self-aware birders.

Schaffner begins with a historical overview of the foundations of American birdwatching and its explicit link to forms of conservation at the end of the nineteenth century; he demonstrates well how the popular texts of the day joined sentiment, anthropomorphism, and moral judgment to enlist readers on the side of the birds. Schaffner contrasts these early works, chief among them guides written by Florence Merriam (later Bailey) and Mabel Osgood Wright, with the more strictly “technical,” soi-disant scientific approach taken starting in the 1920s.

The review is a welcome one, but what I miss in this chapter is a discussion of the evolution of the cultural gendering of birdwatching. It is no accident that these early writers were women or that so many of their books are addressed to children; and it is no coincidence that the re-gendering of serious birding as male, a status it still occupies today, was accomplished by stripping the field guide of its “feminine” features, replacing tales of bird family life with measurements and complex terminologies.

Schaffner goes on in Chapter 2 to explore the disconnect between the idea of birdwatching as biophily and the “management” required to sustain many species. Many birders will describe their hobby as a celebration of life; in fact, though, as the author points out, many of the birder’s most beloved objects are saved only at the expense of a great deal of death. For example, gulls are culled—killed—to protect plovers and terns (Schaffner misses the bitter irony that the abundance of the large gulls today is due in large part to the cessation of human persecution in the nineteenth century). Mute Swans have gone from icons of feathered beauty to a menace requiring control. Perhaps the most eloquent example of all goes almost unmentioned here: we poison thousands of blackbirds to keep them from eating the sunflower seed we’ll feed to our backyard birds in the winter. I wish, too, that Schaffner had enlarged his discussion of crow hunting and crow control to include the eradication two decades ago of Western Jackdaws from Canada, the perfect illustration of the tension between the birder’s desire to observe and the birdwatcher’s need to protect “good” birds from the potentially bad.

The most fascinating section of Binocular Vision is the discussion in Chapter 3 of efforts in field guides and in fine art to reverse the isolation of birds from their settings. Schaffner’s prime example here is American Bird Conservancy’s All the Birds, which intentionally places many of its bird portraits against such sadly realistic backgrounds as landfills and airports. The author discovers an ambiguity in many such scenes—are the birds shown as threatened by encroaching development or as adapting to it?—but their import remains clear: birds belong to places, and too many places have been altered by human activities.

The plate from All the Birds that Schaffner selects for close examination in this chapter is perhaps even more interesting than his discussion recognizes. The painter, Jack Griggs, places his American Pipits and Horned Larks on what looks like pavement, with urban San Francisco in the background and a large plane in the air above. Oddly, and possibly in contradiction of Schaffner’s larger argument about the book, single Sprague’s and Red-throated Pipits and a Sky Lark—all in classic “technical” field guide poses—float at the top of the plate, disassociated from any habitat context and from each other. Surely this says something about the painter’s or the designer’s attitudes to rarity and difficulty, and it may well also reflect some of that ancient eastern bias that lingers still in so many field guides. Here and occasionally elsewhere in Binocular Vision, the reader is left wanting to learn more.

Given the author’s expertise in the study of new media, Chapter 4, “Technojumping into Electronic Field Guides,” should have been the book’s best. Schaffner notes the tendency in some of the new e-guides to simply reproduce book pages on a computer screen, at best with the addition of sound files. He also hints at the new types of birderly socialization incipient in some online guides. What the author does not point out is that the navigation required to use these guides in many cases reverts, ironically, to the key structures at the base of some of the earliest technical field guides; in this sense, the e-guide, for all its technological pride, in fact represents a step back a hundred years or more.

Schaffner saves his most controversial points for last. In “Birding on Toxic Land,” he implicates competitive birding and listing in the perpetuation of a conservative conservation ethic and the cover-up of some of this country’s most screaming environmental problems. Eagerly birding sewage ponds, landfills, and toxic waste sites “overwrites those sites as healthy”; Schaffner contrasts the near-complacence of such behavior with the “radical image events” staged by more focused environmentalist groups. He finds that the strategies favored by moderate conservation organizations, especially fund-raising, are in fact readily co-opted by industry and its friends to perpetuate rather than to combat environmental degradation—a serious charge, and one leveled here squarely at such influential groups as New Jersey Audubon and such successful events as the World Series of Birding. Overstatement is one of my favorite rhetorical tools, too, but I believe that Schaffner ignores a number of examples where local birding groups have in fact pressed hard for the improvement of toxic environments, sometimes (as in the case of Tucson Audubon and the Avra Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant) at a clear cost to the birding opportunities those sites had offered before their clean-up.

I encourage every birder to read and to ponder this important book. A word to the wise: though Schaffner carefully avoids much of the critical jargon available to him, his prose here (surprisingly, to those of us who have read other of his writings) is more than a bit of a slog, full of repetition and infelicity. But stick with it. You’ll find yourself alternately fascinated and infuriated, and continually inspired to think through these issues yourself. 

 

Comments

[Birder's Library]

I've been looking forward to your take on this one; I had a feeling you'd be reviewing it. :)

I was incredulous - and yes, borderline infuriated - at parts of this book. I did not agree with all of the author's conclusions, but realized that didn't matter. As you eloquently (as usual) state, it forces birders to think about field guides in a way that we are not used to. And that's a good thing.

Grant

[Morgan Churchill]

It seems that criticizing a field guide for taking a taxonomical approach is like criticizing a horror novel for being scary, or dictionary for lacking a plot.

[Rick Wright]

Yes, Morgan, but a large part of Spencer's point (and I agree fully with this) is that field guides didn't necessarily have to take that direction. They are "technical" and "taxonomical" and "terminological" for historical and cultural reasons, not because they h a v e to be.

[Rick Wright]

PS: It could be argued that dictionaries used to be, and could be again, written with plot; at least many medieval vocabularies are embedded in narratives.

[Ted Floyd]

Thanks, Rick, for a brilliant review of what appears to be an important, if imperfect, new book about birders and bird books.

Everybody: An earlier version of Spencer Shaffner's core premise (namely, that bird books "do cultural work") is to be found in Birding magazine. Check out "Birding with the First American Field Guides to Birds," Birding, January/February 2005, pp. 90-93.

[Morgan Churchill]

I believe that the article is also available online at Spencer Shaffner's website, in the bird related articles

[Ted Floyd]

Morgan, that's the essential point, in my opinion. Or rather, it raises the essential question: Does a field guide, in fact, have to be chiefly taxonomical?

Bear with me here for an analogy. Consider, for a moment, the broader legacy of nature writing in America. Many of greats have assumed that a key of nature appreciation is to discern the handiwork of the Divine. You see that assumption in a fair bit of Emerson; you certainly see it in Muir and Burroughs; and it's in some contemporary writers like Dillard.

Yet some nature writers have discarded that approach, that assumption, that starting point. (And not just the moderns; think about Thoreau.)

There can be more to nature writing, many would say, than appreciating and affirming the Divine in nature. Similarly, I would say that there can be more to writing field guides than teaching folks how to put names on organisms. Indeed, that's how it was with those field guides--highly popular and great commercial successes, I hasten to point out--from the early 20th century. Spencer Schaffner puts it well in the closing paragraph of his article in the January/February 2005 Birding:

"Using [Florence Merriam's] Birds Through an Opera Glass in the field, I wondered if my entire view of birds might change, if I might come to see the kinglet differently, perhaps even stop worrying so much about whether it was a Ruby-crowned or Golden-crowned flitting about at the other end of my 8x40 binocular. But this hasn't happened. I'm still a product of the Peterson era and a consumer of the many modern guides in print today. Birding with the first American field guides to birds, I find myself rethinking but still hanging on to my impulse to identify each species of bird correctly and quickly. I'm no nineteenth-century birder and I don't think I could become one. What using Merriam's first field guide can allow one to realize, however, is that birding is a pastime with a history, and that history has in part been made by the texts that we use."

[Birder's Library]

Does a field guide, in fact, have to be chiefly taxonomical?

Before reading this book, my answer to that question would have leaned toward the affirmative. Now, I see that there is room for more than the taxonomical in field guides, and I'm thankful to Shaffner for prodding me to question my assumptions.

However - and I'm not saying that anyone here espouses such a view - I still don't think it's wrong for a field guide to be concerned solely with the taxonomical, just as appreciating the Divine in nature is still a valid form of nature writing today (I would hate to have missed out on Rosen's The Life of the Skies if it weren't).

But still, should we as birders be looking for more in our field guides?

[Morgan Churchill]

I guess the issue I have is that I consider "Nature Writing" distinct from "Field Guide Writing". When I evaluate a field guide, I generally don't look at prose, I look at completeness of coverage, accuracy of illustration, ease of use, etc. I think we all do, and that is in part why books like Birds Through an Opera Glass (with a huge whopping 70 species) have largely been replaced by the books with a taxonomical approach. Because when I am trying to id a gull, sparrow, or sandpiper, I don't want to deal with poor non-comparative illustrations or wade through pages of flowery text. In the same light you don't get a lot of prose in scientific papers, or technical instructions. Please bear in mind this is a personal opinion, although I don't believe it is an unusual one.

[Rick Wright]

"Trying to id"--Morgan puts her finger right on the issue. Birding for the last near-century has been exclusively about identification, but it didn't have to be.

[Morgan Churchill]

"His" finger :P

[Rick Wright]

Sorry, Morgan! r.

[Robert Kyse]

I think my first field guide was by Aristotle.
It helped to have an intelligent person lend some order to things.

Robert Kyse