Saturday 17 August 1996
- The rain was pretty well over by 8 p.m. yesterday, although
I think we had a few showers in the night. Total ppt 0.30".
Foggy morning,burning off fairly early. Lots of clouds but lots
of blue, no rain through the day. Low 57F, high 77F.
We spent most of the day indoors. I was refereeing two bird manuscripts
and editing Sara's book. Shawn and I made a quick trip down the
hill to call Leo, wish Sara a happy birthday, and get the mail.
7:10 to 8:10 p.m., Shawn and I walked out the logging road to
the Cedar Brook sideroad, and back. Quiet evening.
Because I am an "expert" on certain
species of birds, I regularly get asked to referee (jargon, for
review) papers submitted for publication in scientific journals.
I like to do it; it keeps me in touch with what is going on in
my profession, and some of the papers are quite interesting. Watching
moose walk by while reading about vultures in Africa or terns
on a Mexican beach is not bad duty. As the years go by, however,
I find it harder and harder to comment meaningfully on a lot of
the papers sent for my review. I can point out errors in facts,
and can question the reasoning leading to some of the conclusions,
but the "science" has become too technical for me. I've
been gone from school far too long to understand a lot of the
math and statistics that make up the bulk of scientific papers
nowadays. Also, despite what I said about the subject matter often
being interesting, most of the manuscripts themselves are really
boring.
A typical journal manuscript in 2006 consists
of maybe twenty paragraphs of narrative, four or five statistical
charts, maybe a table of data, and a whole bunch of mathematical
equations. If the paper has a good introduction and a good conclusion,
and if the subject matter isn't too arcane, it can be a "good
read." But, as a whole, scientific journals have about as
much reader appeal as the stock market listings from your local
newspaper, or your family doctor's prescription for your latest
medicinal need.
Some of this blandness is because of the combined pressures of
money and time. It costs money to print journals, and most scientific
organizations don't have a lot of it. Therefore, we are severely
pressured by editors to cut out those extra words, be succinct,
replace an explanation with an equation -- in other words, reduce
the presentation to as small a space as possible. This is also
supposed to be a time saver: there is so much to read nowadays
that we mustn't waste our time wading through ten pages of text
if the same story can be told in a paragraph and a table. Finally,
there seems to be an unspoken rule that real scientific information
can't be presented as enjoyable reading.
I understand -- and I guess I mostly agree
-- with the cost and time concerns. But I also know we've lost
something very important and very precious in our perceived need
for fiscal, spatial and temporal economies -- and in our need
to make science reporting "scientific." For me personally,
if I hadn't been exposed to that lost "something" when
I was young, I might never have become a naturalist, wildlife
biologist, and ornithologist. My training started with nature
stories, like those of Thornton Burgess and Henry Williamson,
where birds and mammals had personalities and even names. Clearly,
those were fiction -- some were so much fictional that they were
fantasy -- but some were very good at showing animals at home:
where they lived, who lived near them, what they ate, and -- sometimes
-- who ate them. Even though the stories were unreal, they helped
to make Nature real to me. Later, I graduated to the real life
adventures and observations of explorers and naturalists. Thoreau's
lengthy description in "Walden" of the work and war
activities of red and black ants was attention-riveting. Arthur
Cleveland Bent's "Life Histories" of North American
birds sometimes spent ten or more precious pages on a discussion
of a subspecies of bird -- the coverage for the entire species
sometimes ran to 50 pages. But 50 pages might be needed to make
the bird and its habitat really come alive. When I read in Bent
about Colorado great horned owl habitat "where diminutive
junipers struggle for existence among the limestone hillsides,
and whose branches, unlike those of the giant sycamores, sweep
the ground rather than the sky," I'm ready to be out in those
rocky reaches. When I read in a recent ornithological journal
that a certain bird's habitat is "a dry, open woodland"
dominated by two species of shrubs, one of which is about nine
times as abundant as the other, and both of which grow up to about
four meters high -- well, it may be important information, but
had I read it in the 1950s, I don't think it would have started
me wishing that I could be out there in the brush with them.
I'm not against boring scientific literature
-- I've written plenty of it, myself -- and, as I said above,
I do see justification for it. I'm just sad that there is no longer
an outlet for the broad-brush, larger than life nature writing
that meant so much to me as I was growing up. And I don't think
the loss is just in nostalgia; I think of some of my ornithological
peers who have studied one species of bird for twenty, thirty,
or even forty years. They know their species intimately - often
to a degree that no one else will ever have an opportunity of
knowing them -- yet when those researchers retire and/or die (both
of which we all eventually do), all the world may ever have of
those decades of in-depth knowledge are a few pages of text, a
table, a graph, and a mathematical formula. No matter how good
the science, surely a bird is more than that.
When I was studying the California condor
in the 1970s, I had an opportunity to correspond with Giles Dawson,
the son of William Leon Dawson who was the writer of some of the
best bird descriptions ever put in print. Giles shared some boyhood
remembrances of trips taken with his father in pre-1920 California,
and he asked me a question: "If you have a few minutes
to spare I should much appreciate your giving me a candid appraisal
of my father's chief ornithological work ("The Birds of California").
My impression is, of course, that my father was a true scientist
and rendered valuable service in his scientific observations and
descriptions. But he was also a lover of birds, and scientists
ought not to love the objects of their study. His descriptions
reveal his love and much more about his character. Doubtless he
is too ecstatic, too fond of pouring out his feelings about birds
and wildlife in general."
I was happy to give him my critique of his father's book: "The
Birds of California is, in my opinion, a unique contribution to
the ornithology of this state. While your father was obviously
a poet and lover of birds, his information is sound and he provides
considerable historical and life history information not readily
available elsewhere. His writing style is a regular source of
pleasure to me, in that he reaches beyond the obvious and gets
down to the nature of the beast. My favorite condor quote is:
'And who are we that we should sit in Judgment upon a brother
who takes his meat a bit rarer than our own? A dead cow is, after
all, a dead cow, is it not?'"
To Dawson and his generation of naturalists, a bird could never be just a statistic. I miss him and his kind of Science.