In a country where it seems almost impossible not to be out of touch with each other, we’ve grown increasingly out of touch with our natural world.
Burton Guttman, a retired biology professor at The Evergreen State College, felt so strongly about the issue that he wrote a book, “Finding Your Wings” ($15, Houghton Mifflin).
He recalls a Doonesbury cartoon that tackles the out-of-touch issue. Doonesbury is taking his daughter to computer camp when they see a family of raccoons. When the counselor is told about it, the response was, “That’s nice. What’s a raccoon?”
“One of the major motivations for writing the book is that we’re so isolated from the natural world. A large part of that is the electronic isolation,” Guttman said, referring to the time we spend on cell phones, computers, BlackBerries and iPods.
“People are trying to live in this artificial electronic world … and they’re simply not in contact with the real world. It’s a worrisome business. One of major reasons for writing the book was to encourage people to get out into the natural world.”
Guttman says his grandchildren play indoors as well as participate in soccer and other organized activities. But when he was young in Minneapolis, “much of my free time was spent running around like crazy in the woods.”
“Today everybody seems to be so scared to let kids out that they never have a chance to enjoy the natural world. All our (grandchildren’s) lives, we take them out in the woods, see everything, pick the berries, notice the birds.
“Our kids have had that experience and you can see it. Most kids don’t and I’m afraid people are so worried about letting kids out that they don’t allow them to do the natural things.”
I don’t have a bird book on my shelves (yes, shelves) that is remotely similar to “Finding Your Wings.” It’s full of exercises, quizzes, illustrations, flash cards and bird-ID information in 17 chapters.
The most important lesson from the book is seeing, said the author, who recently went birding in Spain and saw birds that weren’t on his life list, many of them raptors and storks preparing to migrate to Africa. He had taken his own advice on preparation, learning as much as he could about local birds from books.
“But I realized as I was trying to see the features, that it required a certain level of concentration. It requires that you will yourself to concentrate on seeing something on the wings of the bird, or a particular feature to identify it.
“That’s one of things we’re doing as we’re looking at with ordinary birds, that we learn to focus on the essential things, flashing white outer tail feather, all the little things that an experienced birder sees automatically.
“That’s the kind of thing readers would ideally acquire when they come to the end of the book. You learn over years and gradually get better and better at it.
“All I can hope is that someone using the book will be well on their path to doing these things, seeing the world as a birder sees the world.”
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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