Birding on TV

When I was a kid, my parents would take me to the library on a weekly basis. Not only for the books, as I was a pretty voracious reader, but also for the tapes. Our local library had a comprehensive collection of National Geographic and Nature documentaries and there was scarcely a week that I didn’t take a couple of them home and wear the tape down to the nubs (such that tapes have nubs).

In addition to the traditional documentaries, the library had a set of videos called the Audubon VideoGuide to Birds of North America, which is just what it sounds like, an attempt to present video of all the commonly occurring species on the continent, over 500 in all, as a video field guide. Its shortcomings were legion. It was overlong, it was monotonous, and it wasn’t particularly good at showing that which it claimed to present. As it turns out, some birds are incredibly difficult to videotape (I’m looking at you, Oporornis warblers), living their lives at speeds the scale of which is far beyond that which we can reasonably account for. Even the common ones love ducking behind trees and grasses far too quickly to be followed by operators of even modern technologically advanced video cameras. Half the passerines just showed a still image of a bird, no different than a field guide. In short, I loved it. Every hypnotic second.

I bring all of this up make clear the parameters by which I would accept birding on my television. They’re broad. So it was with no small bit of interest that I looked to the most recent attempt to bring birders to the small screen (not that the big screen would be any less notable) with Fox Sports newest venture, Birding Adventures!

Extreme!!! *hott guitar lixx*

I’ve watched three episodes of the show so far (well, I DVR’ed it, the show has the unfortunate time slot of 7:30am on a Saturday morning. Not exactly the best time to appeal to birders). Enough, I think, to get a feel for it, and I have some thoughts about not only the show but about the attempt to portray birding on television.

Each episode is based around our intrepid host, South African James Currie, as he travels to a unique location to seek out a certain specialty bird, his “golden bird”, typically some charismatic or colorful species of local importance. If the bird is photogenic, well, all’s the better. Currie isn’t a bad host, he’s enthusiastic and knowledgeable even if he could stand to improve his cue card reading skills (Hey James, the camera’s over here!), and the show itself is pretty low rent, but well-produced. Often it focuses as much on the area’s other interesting life forms as it does on birds, sometimes it’s too much for my taste, but it’s something most of us would do in the field as well. It’s pretty fun, but I can’t help feeling as though Currie is being put in an impossible position here.

Birding, you see, at its very core is about discovery, and our response to that is intensely personal. We all, to an individual, take some measure of joy and pride in the sight of something new, it’s undoubtedly part of what draws us all to birding. But each of us responds to a new bird in a different way, some with great celebration, some in quiet reflection, sometimes both depending on the situation. Currie’s exuberance, while at times endearing, occasionally strikes me as inauthentic, something ginned up for the cameras rather than the real wonder we’re all familiar with as birders. Which, admittedly, is as difficult a thing to impart through the television as capturing a video of a Connecticut Warbler.

I’m likely giving Currie an unnecessarily hard time here. It’s his job to be excited about these birds in an attempt to get us excited. And maybe the show isn’t aimed at someone like me as much as it is at someone interested in giving this birding thing a try. From that perspective, I suppose it works. Perhaps my real problem (and it’s less a problem than a pet peeve), is the artificial extreme rhetoric used in an attempt to make birding seem hip, at least, as hip as Fox Sports needs it to be.

We’re all aware of the reputation birding has for attracting people who, for lack of a better term, may be considered by the general public to be “geeks”. Perhaps it’s to dissuade this perceived notion that we see the sort of over-compensation in a show like Birding Adventures, where birding is interspersed with extreme sports like rock-climbing and some sort of standing on a surfboard paddling thingy (as in Episode 2). I’d like to think we’re beyond the self-flagellation that comes with being involved in a slightly eccentric activity, or at least unaffected by words ascribed to us that are hardly meant to be pejorative outside of the halls of a middle school. After all, why does the word “geek” have so much power anyway? Frankly, who cares what other people find geeky? And why do we have to deny our true nature to avoid a label that means nothing? I don’t know, and I certainly don’t think we do.

Birding ultimately is a quiet, contemplative activity. That’s just what it is. It requires concentration, intense observation and a perhaps unnatural love of the outdoors, and it’s as much about what you could discover as it is about what you will. For an outsider, it could definitely be perceived as dull. At the very least, I think it would generally make for pretty bad television. In the end that’s probably the real reason Birding Adventures glams up the birding experience. Even the comparative high excitement of something like a pelagic trip, if condensed into a half hour program, would be three minutes of all-out adrenaline pumping madness, and 27 minutes of staring at the open ocean. But it’s that three minutes of discovery that makes everything worth it. That’s birding, at least to me.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop watching Birding Adventures, though. Quite the opposite. I enjoy it, and as I said before, I’m a sucker for any birds on the TV. Besides, it’s still far better than the Audubon VideoGuides.