Born Again Bird Watcher

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, an award-winning collection of essays both personal and bryological, is this week’s featured book on The Well-read Naturalist.

“If you love birds as much as I know you do, how can you possibly eat them?” That was the question I was recently asked by a friend for whom I have great respect and whose interest in the answer I trusted to be wholly sincere. Truth be told, this is not the first time this inquiry has been made of me, sometimes in earnest and other times in sarcasm. The first time it was asked was by a colleague who was a life-long hunter from a family of life-long hunters and who worked for a hunting product manufacturing company. Even though his tone was somewhat challenging (my non-hunting ways made him a bit suspicious of me), I could sense that he was genuinely confused at what he saw as a contradiction in my activities. His hunting of wild animals was the perfect correlation (as he understood it) for his belief that those proclaiming “animal rights” (among hunters a phrase synonymous with “anti-hunting” and therefor “anti-gun”) were wrong in their beliefs; therefore as I watched birds with the same intensity as he watched the animals he stalked on hunts, my not killing them must have meant that I was against eating them as well. (more…)