Look Up

Christine Fischer Guy Interviews Julia Zarankin

Julia Zarankin is a writer, birder, (occasional) birdsplainer, lecturer, and culture-tour-leader based in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Audubon, Canadian Geographic, The Walrus, Hazlitt, The Letters Page, Cottage Life, Orion Magazine, Threepenny Review, Prism International, Antioch Review, Birding Magazine, Maisonneuve, The New Quarterly, Ontario Nature and The Globe and Mail. She was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize (2020), won the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival nonfiction prize and has been first runner-up for PRISM International’s nonfiction prize, a finalist for the TNQ Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and twice longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Julia’s birding/life aspirations: “To sport the hairdo of a Cedar Waxwing, acquire the wardrobe of a Northern Flicker and develop the confidence of a Ross’s Goose.”

Julia Zarankin. Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder. Douglas & McIntyre. $24.95, 256pp., ISBN: 9781771622486

Recently divorced and newly relocated, Julia Zarankin was auditioning hobbies when she saw her first red-winged blackbird. Although the common birds existed in her environment long before she began to look at it through a pair of binoculars, birdwatching taught the Russian literature scholar and writer to look at the natural world in a different way: to pay attention. Ten years later, although she’s now written a memoir about her birding life, she describes herself as a beginner, and that’s an undeniable part of the attraction for her.

Julia’s writing has appeared in magazines and journals including The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and Threepenny Review. She has been a finalist for the CBC Short Story prize and the TNQ Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and won the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival prize for creative nonfiction.

Christine Fischer Guy: I loved your distinction between “birdwatcher” and “birder.” Let’s start there. 

Julia Zarankin: Initially I thought they were the same thing, but they’re totally different. A birdwatcher is somebody who loves their backyard birds and will go for a walk and say, Oh! That’s a lovely bird. Somebody who loves birds but without the obsessive drive, perhaps. Birdwatching is more contemplative. Birders, on the other hand, like to keep a list and they’re really on the hunt for birds. Christian Cooper in New York calls birders hunters, but without the blood. I love that definition. It is a bit more obsessive: they will drive to wherever it takes to get that bird! It’s more of a quest, really. Birdwatchers are happy with whatever they get, but birders are hunting for something.

CFG: Do you graduate to birding? Do most people start off as birdwatchers and gradually become more obsessed?

JZ: I think so. That’s what happened to me. Although it goes in waves for me. Sometimes I go to the park and think, whatever happens, happens. Some birders really need to get the numbers for their lists. But for most people, it’s up and down, depending on what the bird is, and depending on the season. It fluctuates. 

CFG: You list your “spark bird” (the Red-Winged Blackbird) in your Birding CV. What was the spark essay for this memoir?

JZ: I think it really did start with the Red-Winged Blackbird. That’s what led me to write about birds, this gorgeous bird that I thought was a rare migrant from Peru, and it turns out it was incredibly common. That led me to wonder, what else have I been missing all this time? So slowly I started writing and thinking more analytically about my relationship to birds and what I found so fascinating about them.

I think the moment that really set the book in motion was when I was out in BC about five years ago visiting friends on Denman Island. Somebody was selling a dozen semi-retired hens and suddenly I wanted them because I saw myself in them. Here I am, trying to figure out my life, and figure out what matters to me. I saw myself as a semi-retired hen. What does a semi-retired hen do to make sense of her life? She birds! That was the moment that I decided to write a book, not a series of jokey blog posts, that everything was more deeply connected with my life story.

People always say don’t anthropomorphize. But that was how I fell in love with birds. I started to see myself in them, in their migratory journeys, their resilience. 

CFG: Do you think one needs to be able to imagine oneself as a bird to see birds properly?

JZ: Not necessarily. I think a lot of people don’t. But that’s how my mind works. I need to radically empathize. A lot of the birders I’ve met, birds have been with them their entire lives. Their parents were really into the natural world, it was just part of the way they see the world.

I came to the birding world very late. I was 35 when I saw my first red-winged blackbird. I was a late-bloomer in the bird scene. The way I process the world is the way I process literature: seeing myself in various character situations. People who grew up spending time in the natural world don’t have to do that. 

CFG: Put us on the scene of a birding day. You’ve set your alarm, dressed, grabbed coffee, driven for an hour before dawn and now you’re at the planned spot for this weekend’s watch. What happens next?

JZ: I’m standing there with my binoculars. Miracle scenario: we see what we want to see, there, right in front of us. We scream, have our aha moment, and we move on. The more likely scenario is we wait, and we wait a long time. This happened to me with a Tufted Duck, which I went out to see five or six times. In order to see the Tufted Duck you have to scope through thousands of Greater Scaup, because it might be among them. That’s what we did the first four or five times, me and my friend Martha. We scoped the Greater Scaup for hours, we froze, and went home with a bunch of duck sightings, but not the Tufted Duck. And then a week later, I was in Hamilton in a cemetery because there are Eastern Screech Owls in that cemetery. I got my little screechies, then ran into a guy who said, You gotta get over to Windemere Basin right now! A Tufted Duck is there! I hopped in my car, drive to Windemere Basin, and boom, Voila! It was there. You never know when that moment is going to happen. If I hadn’t gone to see the Eastern Screech Owls, I would not have seen that Tufted Duck.

CFG: Do you generally meet up with people, or go out by yourself?

JZ: Both. There are some friends that I bird with semi-regularly, and lately I’ve been going out by myself. Especially now during the pandemic, I try to go out every day to local parks. If I go further afield, I go with someone because I feel more comfortable. If I’m going to go to a secluded area, I’m not going to go by myself. 

CFG: Yeah, of course. You mentioned Christian Cooper, the Black birder we all met through Amy Cooper’s false police report on his birding activities in Central Park back in May, and who has published a comic called “It’s a Bird.” I imagine you watched that story with interest. Did it change anything about the way you or anyone else you know birds?

JZ: I think it’s changing the birding community. What that incident sparked was a whole movement on social media called Black Birder’s Week that really took off. What they’re raising awareness about is the inequities in access to nature and who can do it safely and who can’t. To me that was tremendously eye-opening. What they’ve also raised a lot of awareness about, and this is where birding organizations are showing that change can happen, is that a few bird names have been changed. Namely, the McCown’s Longspur (McCown, the confederate general)—that name has been changed by the American Ornithological Society, the ones who are in charge of birding taxonomies. They’ve changed it to Thick-Billed Longspur. That’s a really interesting moment where the birding community is responding and change is happening. 

People’s perceptions of birders is of older white men, and there’s a lot of that, but the community is changing, becoming much more open and aware and willing to have all sorts of conversations.

CFG: That’s really encouraging to hear. I also read Drew Lanham’s Birding While Black and found it both shocking and eye-opening.

JZ: I was listening to an interview with Christian Cooper and he said, I’d love to bird in Texas. There are so many birds I want to see there, and I can never go there as a Black, non-Christian, gay man. That’s the reality. I don’t feel safe birding there. Crazy. Obviously that’s not my experience, but now it’s something I’m cognizant of and want to do something about. There’s a group in Toronto called the Feminist Bird Club and they did a birdathon in May for racial justice. They raised more than $28,000 in support of the Black Legal Action Centre as a response to Black Birder’s Week. So it is changing the birding world and causing everyone to think about accessibility.

CFG: I’d like to talk about your birding CV that’s a coda to your book and includes things like spark bird, nemesis bird, power animal. I see one notable omission I’ve named the humility bird. That is, which bird taught you to bring humility to the practice of birdwatching? Asking for a friend (*cough*) who blithely signed up for the Backyard Bird Count this year without realizing that she’d have to be able to tell the difference between Little Brown Jobs (LBJs) to do it properly—and there are SO MANY OF THEM. So LBJs are my humility bird. All of them. How about you?

JZ: Honestly, I think LBJs are everybody’s humility bird! Gulls, shore birds… so hard! Every time I think I know a shore bird, I’ll see it in non-breeding plumage, and I’ll be totally stumped. It’s one thing to know them in the field guide, but size is so hard to tell in the field. How do you tell a Greater Yellowlegs from a Lesser Yellowlegs? Unless they’re standing next to each other. Shore birds are extremely difficult. My big humility bird moment was when I misidentified a green heron for a hummingbird.

CFG: That’s so awesome. That sounds like something I would do. 

JZ: I have bird humility moments pretty much every day. I don’t have them so much when I’m out on my own because there’s no one there to contradict me. But when I’m out with my friends, they’re like, Uh, actually…

CFG: The Backyard Bird Count referred to watchers as “citizen scientists.” As a birder, do you consider yourself a citizen scientist?

JZ: A little bit. I participate in the Christmas Bird Count, which is probably the biggest citizen bird count. There’s this program called e-Bird, which is a listserv where people contribute all of their sightings. That’s a practice I’ll eventually get more into. There’s a summer bird count I do. I love bird counts! And I volunteer at a bird banding station in Tom Thompson Park, which isn’t really open now. So yeah, I do help out where I can.

CFG: You emigrated from Russia and tenure-track professorship, and you write that birding helped you find a sense of home. How has it accomplished what geography and career failed to do?

JZ: Throughout my life, until I started birding, I was on a quest to find a home. Things weren’t really working out. When I started birding, I kind of re-discovered Toronto. The city transformed from a place I used to run away from to a place of parks and ravines, and a lake, and suddenly these pockets of nature emerged. I fell in love with Toronto and southern Ontario in a way I’d never expected. Birds anchored me to this place. Birds have site fidelity. They’ll come back to the exact same trees! Once I figured that out, the city came alive for me in a totally different way and I started seeing where I live as an incredible network of wilderness. Strangely, that’s what made me feel “at home” here.

CFG: You write, “In birding, failures count as much as successes,” and “Not having a nemesis bird is the saddest thing in the world.” Can you say more about that? 

JZ: Often, failures to see a certain bird will lead you to a surprising sighting that you might not have expected, or they’ll  make you look closely at a different bird, which is often just as wonderful, or more wonderful, than the bird you were targeting. I feel like birding teaches you to be open to the moment, and to spontaneity. When you see your “nemesis bird” there’s a moment after that when you think, Oh my god, what now? It’s this thing you’ve wanted for so long. But most birders don’t just have one nemesis bird, they have a whole list.

CFG: A backup nemesis bird.

JZ: Yeah.

CFG: That made me think of biomedical lecturer lecturer Melanie Stefan, who had this to say: "In science and in academia we talk a lot about the things that worked out for us, but we never really talk about the failures. So I had this idea of writing a CV [of] failure that lists all the things that you fail at.” We misinterpret failure, don’t we?

JZ: Especially as writers. And there is so much failure [in the writing life]! But watching birds showed me the opportunity in failure. It often leads you to something surprising that you might not have seen on your own.

CFG: If someone is reading this and thinking that birding might be for them, what would you say is the best way for them to get started? 

JZ: Look up, whenever you’re walking. Get a pair of binoculars, not expensive ones when you’re starting out. Something from Canadian Tire is good enough to find out whether you’re passionate about it. Set up a feeder in the backyard and watch it. There will be drama, I promise you! High-school cafeteria style drama. Look out the window any chance you get. Go to any body of water. Lakes, ravines. There are tons of birds around them. For anyone starting out, don’t pay attention to the LBJs. Those brown indistinguishable ones, just block them out for now. Pay attention to the colourful ones. We have a lot of those. Learn them well. Then start to learn the birds that hang out with the colourful birds. Slowly build a repertory.

Birding is really intimidating initially. The more you’re able to pick out distinguishing characteristics, the more you train your eye to see difference and diversity. There’s so many good apps now. Field guides are indispensable, I recommend Sibley, but there are wonderful apps. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a wonderful app called Merlin where you can take a picture of your bird with your phone, and if you can’t ID it, you can send it to and they’ll ID it with 95% accuracy. But learn the common birds first.

CFG: You've spoken and written about the way that birding is attractive to backstage people (introverts like me, who are happiest offstage, or behind the curtain): birds don’t care that you’re there. Can you say more about that?

JZ: When you’re birding, you want to see the bird desperately, but the bird’s completely oblivious to you. They don’t care if you’ve been there for 5 minutes or 5 hours. They’ve got their own thing going on! I think that’s a really helpful reminder to us as humans that we’re not the centre of the world, even if we think we are. Social media makes us think we are. When you’re out birding, you realize how vastly irrelevant you are to these birds. It's a humbling and helpful reminder. That’s how I feel when I go out hiking in a majestic landscape. I feel so small. There’s so much life around us. We should be spending more time protecting that.

CFG: Do you think of birding as a thing you’ll ever finish or perfect?

JZ: No. It’s absolutely inexhaustible. The more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn. Ten years in, I’m still a beginner. Even when you go out with seasoned birders or ornithologists, they’ll say, Whoa, I’ve never seen a bird do that before. They can still be surprised years and years in. Bird science is constantly evolving too. There’s so much to learn.

You know, there are 10,000 species of birds in the world, roughly, and they’re all different! There’s so much there. That’s part of what I love about birding. It feels inexhaustible. It’s always new and exciting, and it’s always hard. 

CFG: It reminds me a bit of yoga. For the first 5 or 6 years, I was thinking I’d be able to master it. Twenty years in, I know I was missing the point. It’s a practice. That’s the entire point of it. It’s not meant to perfect. That’s a relief, but it’s something you have to be faithful to and keep showing up on the mat. Is that true about birding, too?

JZ: Absolutely. I’m glad you brought up that comparison. Birding is very much a practice. It’s something I do regularly. If you don’t do it, the birds aren’t going to come to you. You have to go out with an open mind and see what’s there. Accept that you’re looking at what’s there instead of seeing what you hoped to see. Birders have lists of target birds. It’s so easy to go out and say, Oh my god, that’s a Connecticut Warbler. But it’s not, it’s a Nashville. Look closely. And really pay attention to what’s in front of you.

Christine Fischer Guy is a novelist and award-winning journalist who has lived and worked in London, England. Her debut novel, The Umbrella Mender, appeared in September 2014 with Wolsak & Wynn (Buckrider Books). Her fiction has appeared in Descant, Prairie Fire, The Austin Review and Five Dials and has been nominated for the Writer’s Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and the Pushcart Prize. She won a National Magazine Award in 2013 for her profile of Métis blogger Chelsea Vowel. In 2020, she was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (delayed due to Covid-19). She is a fiction critic and contributor to The Globe and Mail and also contributes to the LA Review of Books, The Millions, Hazlitt and Ryeberg.com. She teaches creative writing at the School for Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto. Her second novel is underway.