Chance of Kingfishers

I get shy around real birders, being a member only of the Bad Birders of Cambodia, which has three proud members, plus a shy Khmer kid who likes birds and hasn’t yet been informed that we’re roping in him to our weird foreign hobby. Bad Birders is going to be hard to translate—it would literally translate as Evil Bird-Searchers and will probably have to be glossed as People Who Aren’t Very Good at Finding Birds But Want To Look at Them, which isn’t going to be anywhere near as cool on the T-shirts. But sometimes I get on the website of the Birding Society of Edinburgh, which advertises Events. These events are walks or sometimes a drive and then a walk, to where the birds live. The descriptions of these events are shockingly tender, even in their brevity. Here is one: Walk by the Waters of Leith. Chance of kingfishers.

How do I say this? A birder is the kind of person I want to be. The kind of person who lives in anticipation, in hope, who will take a long walk over rough terrain for the chance of kingfishers. I want to be like my friend Janet’s new husband, who knows each tree by name. To know each tree. To know each bird. To know every creature in the sea and how its waters rise and fall. To me such knowledge is a kind of tenderness, almost a kind of holiness.

Our great and terrible neglect, the damage we have done and keep doing to our world, the world I believe we are meant to treasure and protect, staggers me. The lists of the dead break my heart. It would be easiest to turn away from it all and pin my hopes on an apocalyptic Christianity that consigns all this marvellous materiality to fire. But to me that seems like sin. It seems to me what is required is a fierce hope and a strong will and, if all else fails, the promise to bear witness. To say, no matter what befalls us, I will learn each bird by name. I will watch for them. And even if the seas rise and the sky burns and the forests fall and the deserts spread and their bright brief lives flicker and go out one by one, I will mourn them. Name by lovely name.