Birding Aesthetics
Rene Magritte, Homme au chapeau melon 2.
Birding, or birdwatching, is a common outdoor hobby whose form of activity can be succinctly encapsulated in two words – bipedal and binoculars. It can be a stroll or hike, in urban or naturalistic environments, but walking on foot is necessary to detect visual and auditory cues of birds, frequently pausing to appreciate them. Binoculars are a necessity for obtaining a clear view of these almost always minuscule objects in your field of vision. Among outdoor hobbies, birding is a special one, since it prioritizes not relaxation, physical exercise, or mindfulness, but an aesthetics, in its disinterestedness to the self. Birding is an unusual human activity in its motives. Birders go out to watch birds and listen to them, learn about them and intellectually engage with them, not based on any scientific investigation but out of leisure, of finding personal satisfaction in these little creatures. Such motives cannot be categorized as science, or adventure, but it is indeed based on an informed detection and appreciation of beauty in the winged creatures.
The affinity to bird as an aesthetic object can be traced to the history of western environmental aesthetics, which arose in reaction to the 18th-century European philosophy of arts, in which an art object was perceived as an artifact. Paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts constituted people’s aesthetic experience, and when birds in nature were appreciated for their feathers, they became artifacts – numerous birds were killed and made into specimen, shipped overseas and collected in the private and public archives alike. Many birds were pushed to the brink of extinction by connoisseurs’ zeal.
The concept of the picturesque was more governing than either the beautiful or the sublime. The aesthetics experience of any naturalistic scenery was based on its resemblance to a painting, and the beauty evoked by birds was akin to the appreciation evoked by jewelry or gemstones. The appreciator often took the role of a hunter or a collector.
Aesthetics of birds parted ways with aesthetics of artifact in the 19th century. An influential and controversial figure in nature conservation, John Muir brought change to the cultural construct of nature aesthetics and for the first time, engaged a holistic appreciation with nature in its pristine form, including parts of its not-so-picturesque metabolism, natural disasters, and creatures that were conventionally considered hideous. He wrote essays that had a formative influence on American people, who were delighted in a new view of beauty and ugliness founded on the duality between pristine nature and human intrusion. Bird appreciators began to be interested more in birds’ behavior and ecology more than their objectification.
With advancement in science and a renewed concern for environmental degradation, knowledge about birds as the object of appreciation became central to the aesthetic experience. The artifact approach was long gone, replaced by cognitive views led by E. O. Wilson, and conscientious views led by Aldo Leopold. Knowledge about a species informs appreciation and amplifies the pleasure in appreciation. Ethics and conservation complement the appreciation of creatures, rather than a duality framework or self-interest.
The cognitive approach that knowledge is positively correlated with beauty is exemplified in the birders’ community. Birders’ specialty is in identification and detection. A typical birder is easily knowledgeable about over 300 local bird species; a regular birder for 10+ years can possibly equal an ornithologist in the amount of field work. Just as in astronomy, many orinithological discoveries are made by birding hobbyists. If you only enjoy looking at birds but know little about them, it would be difficult to integrate into their close-knit community. This marks the difference between birding aesthetics and artifact aesthetics: the former is a cognitive aesthetics strongly motivated by an outward curiosity and sensitivity, whereas the latter detects beauty though a much narrower scope, considering creatures based off man-made definitions, such as cute.
Birds are undoubtedly beautiful creatures, but the appreciation of birds must involve the intellectual interest in the reality of their life apart from human depiction, which makes birding aesthetics surprisingly related to a modern philosophy of arts. Instead of all science and no feeling, or all feeling and no science, birders naturally lean toward a balance. Birders are the purest lovers.
Reference:
Carlson, Allen. “Environmental Aesthetics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, April 9, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/.