The Friends We Never Meet and the Ones That We Neglect

The other day my Facebook newsfeed blew up with remembrances of someone who I never met, or even "friended," but who clearly mattered to all my associates in the birding community. People who watch birds take it seriously, but empathy for one another runs deep among them. When one of them passes it reverberates like the the call of a raven throughout their circle. It got me thinking, long and hard, about who in my world might be slipping away.

One of the friends of the deceased shared a poem by her departed friend. The poem was about how we frame mental illness as it relates to artists. I suspect that this women suffered herself from depression and was frustrated by how society sees that anguish as somehow necessary in producing masterpiece paintings, novels, and other works, yet a self-imposed weakness in everybody else. It was a powerful piece of writing.

I clearly missed out by not having known this lady. I feel anger and guilt that I had never even heard of her until she was gone, and I no longer had any options. This is the one aspect of social media that I find excruciating, a "so close yet so far" phenomenon. I mean, I suppose I could "friend" her still, and have the archive of her posts to look back on, but it would be somehow empty, you know? One cannot be everywhere at once, even in the digital age. So many people will still not connect with you, nor you with them.

The irony is that social media isn't about you, nor is it about the next person you connect to, it is about we, and making more "we" as it were. It is about moments of clarity, like that poem, moments of sorrow like that day, and moments of joy, which is of course what all artists leave us with regardless of their medium.

Meanwhile, the flip side of all your friends on social media are the ones neglected because they don't do Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever the next new platform will be. They are left in digital dust when we fail to pick up the phone, or a pen, and call or write like we know we should. Inertia kicks in, along with its best buddy guilt, and then we never get around to it, despite our own nagging impulses. Right?

Well, today I did it. I e-mailed my best friend (aside from my wife), and just flat-out apologized. I did not beg forgiveness, but granted permission for him to hate me for my abandonment of him. Of course I got an immediate reply whereby he essentially expressed that he was no better at reaching out, and that we should indeed talk soon. I had expected as much but also do not take the let's-pick-up-where-we-left-off shrug of let-bygones-be-bygones for granted, either. Life is short, complicated, conflicted, and otherwise tumultuous, prone to sudden finalities. No, I will leave him no doubt that I love him like the brother I never had.

Carl is a generous, dependable gentleman, with a wit and sense of humor that would make him a great stand-up comic if he ever wanted to be. The stories I could tell. Mostly, he just makes everyone around him comfortable and happy. I cannot imagine a greater legacy or example. He was like a second son to my mother, too, and looked in on her in my out-of-state absence, which was from 1988 to when she passed in 2014. Yet, here I have been, going on about my "business" daily and, albeit several states away, not paying him near the respect that he deserves. That changes now and changes permanently. It also gets me thinking about who else I have ignored who deserves better.

Some people are artists with brushes, pens, chisels, cameras, or even computers, but the raw medium is still life itself, and it is those rare individuals who sculpt our personal realities that matter most to us. We cannot let them fall by the wayside because their comfort zone is still where it probably should be for all of us, grounded in the tangible and not in the "cloud." Someday we will look up from our devices and find them vanished because we haven't been paying proper attention. Someday we ourselves will draw the line at the next big thing, fearing for our privacy or unable to afford the technology, or whatever other roadblock clips us neatly from society as we know it, like a feather molted from a bird.

A Birder's Death List

I don’t have a “life list” like some birdwatchers keep, but it occurs to me that between museum taxidermy mounts, roadkill, window-collision fatalities, fallen nestlings, and the holiday turkey, I have probably seen more species dead than alive. Couple that with captive birds at the zoo and the pet store, and the total far surpasses their living counterparts as species I have seen in the wild, flying freely and behaving naturally. What troubles me more than my own observations is that I would bet this sums up the experience of many other people as well.

The worst case scenario, of course, is viewing the taxidermy mount of a species that has gone extinct. I worked two years at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, and one of the most vivid memories I have is of “Martha,” the last known individual passenger pigeon, now mounted and displayed in a special exhibit there. That I, and anyone born after Martha’s death in 1914, should be deprived of even the opportunity to see wild passenger pigeons is a true travesty that should not be visited on any more species, or any more human beings.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues in ways we pay little mind to. Daily totals of road-killed birds in the U.S. probably run into the thousands, judging by mortality studies and estimates conducted previously. Collisions of migratory birds with windows, towers, cables, and other obstacles take a great annual toll. One objection to wind farms is that the spinning blades of windmills will spell death for many more birds. Oh, and look what the cat dragged in! Much as I love cats, feral felines and outdoor cats stalk and kill untold numbers of songbirds each year.

Introducing our children, and their parents, to the world of birdwatching will help cultivate an awareness of bird life and nature in general. It might be a good idea, however, to also remind folks that birds face many obstacles erected by Homo sapiens, and instruct them on ways to mitigate these problems. No one’s “death list” should exceed their life list.