Getting over not fitting in (Jinx bird) — High Country News – Know the West

I start birding by chance. I’m 16 and at a Waldenbooks on the Eastridge Mall. I’ve gone there to learn magazines — to flip via Seventeen and perhaps purchase a Harlequin romance, if I can get previous the embarrassment of shopping for one. Propped up close to the money register, below a banner marked LOCAL INTEREST, is A Area Information to Western Birds by Roger Tory Peterson. I skim via it, admiring the images. Within the index, I lookup the American robin, one of many solely birds I do know. There, in easy prose, is an outline of a chicken I see day by day in Casper, Wyoming. I examine its habitat, its tune, its plumage, its vary. 

I’ve all the time liked a taxonomy, any type of categorization. Once I was 13 and in 4-H, I studied botany and entered the county truthful with a home made flower press. I purchased a photograph album on the mall and lovingly organized the flowers I had pressed beneath flimsy plastic. Sego lily. Indian paintbrush. Cow parsnip. Arrowleaf balsamroot. I wrote their frequent names and Latin names on scraps of paper, figuring out each flower. I received a blue ribbon on the truthful. 

So, naturally, I purchase the chicken guide. At evening, after homework, I examine every plate fastidiously. The guide offers me consolation. I begin with songbirds and see that in our yard are mountain chickadees, sparrows, glints and blue jays. There are quite a lot of small grayish birds I’m no good at figuring out. What are you? I look out into the yard, flipping pages shortly, attempting to ID them earlier than they fly away. 

What are you? 

When I’m 16, my reply for this query is cocky. A human, I’ll say. 

No, however what are you? And I do know the reply they need. They need to know why my pores and skin is brown, and they also’ll attempt a distinct method. The place are you from? 

Wyoming. I’m from right here. Being biracial, I don’t have a greater reply. I’ve by no means been to India, the place my mother is from. I’ve solely been to Eire, the place my dad is from, as soon as. 

That winter, I join a discipline ornithology class on the neighborhood faculty. It’s a persevering with schooling class that meets as soon as per week, with discipline journeys on the weekends. Once I go to the primary class, pocket book and discipline information in hand, I’m the one individual below 50. My classmates all have binoculars and scopes. They inform me the place to see owls. And after I inform them I’ve seen nearly no waterbirds, they direct me to Soda Lake, north of Casper. Initially a repository constructed by Amoco for refinery waste, it’s change into a haven for waterfowl and shorebirds. 

The teacher fingers us a duplicate of the Wyoming Chicken Guidelines. Once I scan the checklist, I feel it’s a joke. There can’t probably be that many birds round right here. I’ve all the time considered Wyoming as missing — folks, eating places, rock live shows, cool garments. Yellowstone and the Tetons have numerous animals and birds, however not right here. Casper is firmly an oil and gasoline city. 

My classmates, all seasoned birders, guarantee me that a lot of the birds on the checklist might be seen round right here. I simply must look laborious — to learn to acknowledge a silhouette within the sky, to listen to birdsong, to remain nonetheless and sit with binoculars in hand. 

I search for the toughest ones first. Higher sage grouse. Ross’ goose. Philadelphia vireo. I spend weeks checking birds off. Mountain bluebird. Cedar waxwing. Crimson-naped sapsucker. I look upward and mark red-tailed hawk, American kestrel, ferruginous hawk. I see a peregrine falcon on a fence whereas strolling. I search the unusual. Large birds are straightforward; I can inform what they’re from afar. I work my method via the corvidae: ravens, magpies and blue jays. With each tick of my checklist, I really feel a type of lightness. I can determine them. I do know what they’re. I even start to see that the little grey birds have names: home sparrows, catbirds, finches, juncos and towhees. 

It’s the straightforward birds that I’ve bother with. The primary few come shortly. American robin, test. Band-tailed pigeon, test. California gull, test. However there are such a lot of frequent birds I appear to overlook. After which there’s my jinx chicken. A jinx chicken is a comparatively frequent chicken that manages to elude you regardless of your finest efforts. A standard factor that isn’t seen. Mine is the western meadowlark, the state chicken of Wyoming. I see it in all places however within the wild — in my Wyoming historical past guide, in work and on murals. On T-shirts. I do know its tune. I scan fences for a flash of yellow, for the black V on their chest. 

With each tick of my checklist, I really feel a type of lightness. I can determine them. I do know what they’re.

GROWING UP, I appreciated to look at the maps hanging in my dad’s workplace. He’s a petroleum geologist, and I needed to see the place he was when he would head out to a rig for lengthy stretches at a time. Many of the maps used “township and vary,” a mapping system created from a land survey. It’s generally known as the Public Land Survey System, nevertheless it consists of all land, each private and non-private. It’s an extremely particular grid system, developed after the Revolutionary Warfare as a method of legally recording land. Recording appropriated land, that’s. Following that violent and illegitimate appropriation, the entire of Wyoming, and the West, was damaged up into squares. Every sq. has extra little squares in them. They’re known as sections, and there are even littler squares inside every part. Every part is one sq. mile and accommodates 640 acres. A quantity for the township marks the situation of the part north to south, whereas a quantity for the vary marks the situation east to west. 

I used to be drawn to this technique as a method of framing order on one thing as wild as land. I used to play a recreation the place I’d determine the township and vary of locations I liked. Casper was T33N R79W. Later, I’d get these numbers on my first tattoo throughout my again, below a lined wagon to mark that we had been immigrants — that we had migrated right here to the West.

This can be why I recognized with birds. They’re migrants. They depart their houses. They’ve a powerful sense of path; they’ve unmatched fortitude on the subject of making a journey. 

Years after I’ve given up on chicken checklists, I’m at a relaxation cease within the Shirley Basin, attempting to keep away from an early storm. It has begun to snow, and visibility is already blurry, and I hear a meadowlark: the clear whistles, then warble of its tune. I hear the tune once more. I’ve stopped to make use of the pay cellphone as there isn’t a cell service. The flute-like tune is evident. I can not see it. However I can hear it. I didn’t need to see it to imagine it there. 

The subsequent tattoo I get is of a jackalope: Probably the most fantastical of creatures, and as I joke to folks, an emblem of all issues combined race. 

What are you? There are such a lot of methods to determine one thing. A discipline information. A map. My outdated birding checklists. As I’ve gotten older, I’m all about not categorizing. A lot of the world will not be an both/or. The maps I pored over solely inform one facet of a narrative — often a narrative of colonization and naming that doesn’t take those that appear like me under consideration. I’m Indian within the American West. I’m like a non-Native species that in migrating via, discovered a house. Folks say a jinx brings unhealthy luck to one thing, like not having the ability test off a chicken on a listing. However I can determine with not being straightforward to pin down. I’m now drawn to the unseen, to issues that don’t measure in straight traces or are simply categorized, to what can not all the time be defined. I’m drawn to the jackalope and the meadowlark. I nonetheless haven’t witnessed both.   

Nina McConigley is a professor and author residing in Laramie, Wyoming. She is the writer of Cowboys and East Indians. In her column Township and Vary, she writes in regards to the intersection of race and household within the inside rural West.

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