birds, buenos aires, bioregionalism
an interlude, un paseo
I arrived here in Buenos Aires almost four weeks ago. Compared to the several months spent reading about it, telling myself I should practice my Spanish, and talking to my friends and family about the impending journey, four weeks is hardly any time at all, and it still feels a bit surreal.1 When people — many of you reading this, I’m sure — would ask me “Why Buenos Aires?” one of the many reasons I’d offer is that it is a very green, walkable city, important for someone like me who enjoys a good stroll and does not intend to learn to drive. Although the first day of spring was only recently and I’m still wearing sweaters, I had to take the time during these first days in Argentina to wander around some of these parks and translate them from abstract to tangible.
When I first arrived, one of the first things that I noticed about the city were the birds. As a native of the northeast United States for my entire life, I have grown accustomed to knowing my avian neighbors by name, a tendency that stems from a childhood love of birds. On family vacations to Latin America as a kid, I kept a journal in which I would log different bird species that we encountered. Back in New York, I enjoyed being able to identify the native birds: vibrant goldfinches and cardinals; elegant mockingbirds and waxwings; and quotidian house wrens, sparrows, and finches.2 Since this is my first time moving abroad, it didn’t occur to me until those initial moments in unfamiliar surroundings that I was leaving behind more than just friends and family, but many of the nonhuman participants in society that I often take for granted and let fade into the background.
I must admit that birds were only part of an obsession with wildlife in general, which stemmed from the summers I spent attending nature camp in Ithaca. As a kid, I relished these opportunities to escape the city, where I attended elementary and middle school, to spend the days eating wild blackberries, hunting for salamanders and crayfish, and attempting to make fires and shelters in the woods. It was during these summers that I developed an awareness of how I exist within, rather than separate from, the natural environment.3 Through exercises as simple as learning to distinguish between poison ivy and wild strawberry (and other look-alikes), or what a mayapple looks like once it’s deliciously ripe and no longer deadly poisonous, the ability to identify animals and plants by name developed a concrete significance.
I later channeled this interest into competition, joining Science Olympiad in middle school with a focus on ecological events like Water Quality, Forestry, Entomology, and Green Generation. Being a fount of fun facts about different species moved beyond a mere hobby — I was rewarded for knowing the difference between spruces, firs, and pines, or being able to identify different estuarine ecosystems. Nowadays I cannot recall much of this knowledge. It belongs to an earnest, competitive version of myself from a decade ago who enjoyed winning medals for doing well on timed examinations.
What I remember to this day, however, is what I was able to see with my own eyes. Yellow-poplars are also known as tulip trees, and they have unique four-lobed leaves and beautiful yellow-orange flowers that would blossom on my late spring walks to high school in Ithaca, auguring summer vacation soon to come. Sweetgum trees are common urban shade trees throughout Washington, D.C., with hard, spiky fruits and glamorous, star-shaped leaves that have a pleasant, resinous aroma when you rub them between your fingers.
As I mentioned in my introduction post, I read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell this summer; I reread it again last week as I thought out this post. Central to Odell’s personal journey with her thesis, about disconnecting from the social media–powered attention economy and redirecting that energy into the real, physical world, is her love of birdwatching. She describes how her journey with birdwatching started with buying a field guide with a checklist in the back. I was encouraged to reflect upon my competitive childhood tendencies when I came across Odell’s criticism of some fellow birdwatchers: “in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO,” considering individual species and variations as useful only insofar as they contribute to an overall “completion” goal, as if birding is a game that can be won. Naturally, Odell does not subscribe to this practice of birdwatching, but acknowledges that the checklist approach is somewhat inevitable for new birders who are still building habits of noticing variations among different kinds of birds and learning their names.
What naturally follows is an understanding of birds, and other living beings, in context. As Odell writes, “my recognition of certain species became bound up with the environments where I knew I would find them.” You may hear different ranges of birdsong in certain parts of a neighborhood or city, or you may begin to associate a certain type of tree or shrub as a bird meeting place. This context is both spatial and temporal, and includes other birds as much as it includes trees, bugs, and, yes, humans. In describing her encounters with different birds, Odell emphasizes the reciprocal nature of her interactions, that “to behold is to become beholden to.” She draws from Native American wisdom toward nonhuman inhabitants of a place, being “willing to perceive the special agency of those beings and receive their attention in turn.”
In other words, we can choose to acknowledge and celebrate the environment as comprising a web of interactions and relationships of which we humans are but one small part; we can thereby understand humanity as being fundamentally determined by these interdependent contexts.4
In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing introduces the concept of assemblages, “open-ended gatherings” of species, as a framework for understanding the matsutake mushroom, a Japanese delicacy that only flourishes in arrhythmic conditions of human (and nonhuman) disturbance. The book itself is very dense, and last year I made it through the first 100 pages before abandoning it; earlier this year I picked it back up and worked my way through it, dutifully taking notes. The book’s subtitle is On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins; by tracing the story of this mushroom that refuses to be tamed, scaled, or made productive for human consumption from Finland to the Pacific Northwest to China, Tsing paints a picture of survival amid precarity through profiles of human and nonhuman life at the margins of capitalism.
The opening chapter of Tsing’s book is titled “Arts of Noticing,” which she describes as ways to incorporate varied practices and perspectives into one’s understanding of the world, rather than relying on institutional wisdom or familiar heuristics without questioning their premises.5 Using an intimate, story-driven approach, Tsing describes the universality and inevitability of assemblages, “entangled ways of life” whose narratives may remain hidden in the underbrush if not for arts of noticing. Though meant primarily as a tool for ethnography, arts of noticing propose a break from prevalent logics of growth and progress, encouraging us to take a moment to look down at our feet rather than keeping our gaze focused on the distant horizon.
Odell also urges us to look backwards, quoting from German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the Angel of History whose face is turned toward the past, observing an unceasing catastrophe even as he is swept into the future, unable to pause and right these historical wrongs.6 Odell compares this vision to the popular imagery of manifest destiny in the United States shortly after the Civil War, in which genocide and ecological devastation were masked under the guise of technological and cultural “progress.” Her conclusory chapter is entitled “Manifest Dismantling,” and she proposes a contemplative approach to undoing structures of exploitation, including the language and logic of progress: “It asks us to stop, turn around, and then get to work.”
To draw this analysis out of the abstract and theoretical — although I enjoy toying around with it on a macro, systemic-thinking level and hope it hasn’t been too much of a bore — I latched onto Odell’s invocation of bioregionalism as “a meeting grounds for our attention,” or for practicing arts of noticing. At their core, bioregions are defined by physical and environmental features, but also possess cultural and economic components of place and identity, making them permeable, ever-evolving, and resistant to the construction of fixed boundaries. Tsing’s assemblages come in handy here. Bioregions are characterized by the various indeterminate encounters among species that make up the landscape, many of which are stable over time while others may respond to the introduction of new technologies, species, or other disturbances by altering or creating new lifeways, which in turn may have a ripple effect on the ecology of the bioregion itself.7 Although the modern conception of bioregionalism is relatively new, as a philosophical movement it embraces indigenous models of stewardship, which, as I mentioned earlier, emphasize the interdependent nature of humans’ relationships with other species and lifeways.
A few days ago I discovered One Earth, a non-profit dedicated toward catalyzing collective action around the climate crisis, and their Navigator tool that visualizes bioregions superimposed on the globe. They also include details about ecoregions, distinct units of analysis that make up bioregions and are more rigidly ordered around relatively uniform assemblages and physical features. I spent hours poring over the bioregions as mapped on the global Navigator. An insight that caught me off-guard is that the political boundaries of the state of New York span four distinct bioregions. I learned that during my childhood, I divided my time between the Northeastern American Mixed Forests (NA10) of lower New York and New England and the Appalachia & Allegheny Interior Forests (NA24) of the Appalachian socioeconomic region, of which the northern boundary lies within upstate New York.8
I’ve spent my entire life telling people that I’m “from New York” and subsequently qualifying that statement with the various places in the state that I’ve lived.9 While I could always intuit that the green in Tibbetts Brook Park was different from the green in Buttermilk Falls or Treman State Park, being able to put names to the natural abundance of my homeland(s) is a warm beam of sunlight. It also has the unfortunate effect of making me miss those forests, surrounded as I am now by mostly unfamiliar greens on the other side of the world.
Mostly. Part of my experience walking through the parks and streets here in Buenos Aires has been noticing that which is already familiar — naturally, my brain latches onto features that I recognize, with other components of the landscape falling under “other” until I learn their names. The sweetgum trees that I mentioned earlier are also common ornamental trees in Buenos Aires. It’s spring now, and the sycamore’s pollen is wreaking havoc on my allergy-prone sinuses in the same way it always would in Washington or New York.10
Buenos Aires lies within the Humid Pampas ecoregion of the Río de la Plata Grasslands (NT3) bioregion. So far, I have not left the city of Buenos Aires since arriving, so my insight into what characterizes the bioregion as a whole is quite limited. I hope to travel throughout the bioregion, including into Uruguay and Brazil, to further familiarize myself — this weekend I’m traveling to La Plata, a neighboring city, to start. In the meantime, though, I’ve been turning my gaze upward, attending to the birds, well-traveled representatives of entire bioregions (if not multiple), acquainting myself with their names and patterns of behavior.
The first birds that I snapped a photo of, on my first walk in a city park a few days after I arrived, is the zorzal colorado, or rufous-bellied thrush.11 The zorzal is a medium-sized brown bird with a burnt orange belly, hence its scientific (and English) name. It only took a few seconds of observation to realize what they reminded me of — the robin, harbinger of spring for many Americans. Indeed, the two birds are in the genus Turdus (zorzales are also known as tordos), imbuing my new neighbor with all the sentimentality I associate with robins. Notably, the zorzal holds the same significance to natives of Buenos Aires, its melodious song announcing the impending warmth of spring (to their consternation, often in the wee hours of the morning).
During the first night in my new apartment, I was awoken at around 5am. The hesitant light of dawn peeked through the curtains, and it was still outside aside from the birdsong, which I knew had to be the zorzal because of how familiar it was. It reminded me of dewy mornings, muscles achy from the night spent in a sleeping bag in a tent, or the moment during an all-nighter in the university library when I’d come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be returning to my bed until the next day. And yes, it reminded me of spring and the promise of more pleasant weather on the horizon, a welcome annunciation after a chilly September.
Another unassuming brown songbird caught my attention while I was reading on a park bench, approaching me fearlessly until it was a foot or two away from where I was sitting. I later learned that they are called horneros (ovenbird in English; horno means oven in Spanish), and they are renowned across South America for their adaptation and affinity to human-altered landscapes, both urban and farmland. A prominent example of this synanthropic tendency is their nest, which gives them their name due to its resemblance to a clay oven, which I’ve noticed in shade trees as well as manmade rooftops and bridges. The hornero is also featured on the one-thousand peso bill, along with its designation as the national bird of Argentina, an accolade that it has held for almost a century.12
Of course, I noticed other birds as well. Some parks are dominated by loud, nonstop squawking, courtesy of congregations of cotorras, or monk parakeets, gorgeous green and white birds that I’ve seen as pets in the United States. On the opposite end of the exotic spectrum are gorriones, house sparrows, perhaps the most widespread birds in the world, found wherever humans are. Seeing them in Buenos Aires for the first time elicited a sigh, both of relief at a familiar face and something like “Really? You, here?”
By opening my eyes and ears in an earnest attempt to practice arts of noticing, I was able to not only distinguish between two similar brown birds with whom I share this new home, but acknowledge how we move together in assemblages defined by varied encounters. Later, in the case of the hornero, I learned that these encounters have resonated with the Argentine populace for many years. This is part of the beauty of bioregionalism, or, at the very least, any conscious effort to conceive of oneself as but one resident of a broader ecosystem, all of whose participants are influenced by each other rather than living independently of one another.
In these first few weeks, as I’ve only just started to feel settled and situated, and making friends with other human beings has been challenging, I’ve found solace in taking walks and setting my sights on what and whom I might find in my immediate surroundings. Whether you are currently living somewhere you’ve known your whole life, or you’re beginning to explore a new place like I am, I encourage you to pay attention to the diverse residents of your bioregion, and be open to being perceived by them in turn — it may just broaden your experience of your own humanity.
For another personal meditation on Odell’s book, I’ve linked my good friend Sidd’s Substack and his post from about a month ago:
My friend Alyssa and I have just moved to our own studio apartments after sharing the same space for three weeks. Hopefully this will help to make it feel less transient.
Recently, my mom has gotten into birdwatching, setting up several bird feeders in the backyard and watching them attentively through binoculars. One day this summer, when I was home and she was traveling, she requested that I put out some peanuts (which she coats in cayenne to repel the squirrels; birds lack capsaicin receptors) for “her cardinals.” I put some peanuts on the deck and waited for a moment, and sure enough, a pair of cardinals scurried out to enjoy this bounty, and I dutifully sent my mom a photo in response.
In her pithy and trenchant manifesto Stop Saving the Planet, which I read earlier this year, Jenny Price criticizes the tendency of environmentalists to obsess over “saving ‘the environment’ as a separate world out there,” rather than acknowledging that we inhabit the environment and must focus instead on changing our shared world for the better. I may not have come to any of these profound conclusions at age 10, but the point stands.
Odell writes about “species loneliness,” described by Native American biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass as a state of sadness and isolation driven by estrangement from our nonhuman “neighbors.” According to Kimmerer, learning their names is the first step in being able to call out to them — given the environmental crises facing our shared planet, this interspecies communication and collaboration is more essential than ever.
To illustrate this phenomenon, Tsing uses the example of polyphony, music in which multiple independent melodies intertwine (Bach’s fugues, for one) and a listener is encouraged to notice moments of harmony and dissonance in the varied encounters among melodic sequences. Tsing posits that nature possesses these polyphonic assemblages in abundance, with human and nonhuman elements converging unpredictably in “indeterminate encounters” that make up the ecosystem. Arts of noticing can transfer this wisdom to our understanding of the economy, for example, revealing that many such encounters among economic actors defy capitalist logic of growth and progress.
I was reminded of the phrase “arts of noticing” by a blog post from Matthew Gutierrez a few months ago on his Substack Inner Peace, in which he described moments of natural beauty that revealed themselves to him when he took the time to notice them. In a similar sense, a key part of Odell’s thesis is that in a world dominated by the pressures of capitalist notions of efficiency and productivity, it is a revolutionary act to take control of our attention and channel it into our natural surroundings.
Walter Benjamin died by suicide in 1940 while trying to escape the advance of the Third Reich in Europe; his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was published earlier in the same year. Here is the full quote from the translation of Benjamin’s essay that Odell uses: “The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress is this storm.” [emphasis added]
I enjoyed Tsing’s use of the term “lifeway,” an anthropological term that emphasizes the various living components of a “way of life.” It first emerged in North American anthropology almost 100 years ago in studies of small-scale indigenous economies, whose emphasis on human-nonhuman interactions could be conflated with religion. Tsing takes the term a step further, to refer to symbiotic or divergent paths of life among one or more species, and she also contrasts the term with “nonliving ways of being” that also abound within assemblages.
For those curious, parts of New York State are included within the following bioregions: Northeastern American Mixed Forests (NA10), Northern Great Lakes Forests (NA11), Appalachia & Allegheny Mixed Forests (NA24), and Southeast Savannas & Riparian Forests (NA25). Within these bioregions, seven ecoregions are partially located within the state’s borders — most proximate to me and my upbringing are the Northeast US Coastal Forests and Allegheny Highlands Forests, although I’ve also spent considerable time in the Eastern Great Lakes Lowland Forests (part of NA11) as well.
Odell quotes the founder of modern bioregionalism, Peter Berg, who, when asked where he was from, responded: “I am from the confluence of the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River and San Francisco Bay, of the Shasta bioregion, of the North Pacific Rim of the Pacific Basin of Planet Earth.”
In Spanish, the sycamore tree is called plátano de sombra, or shade plantain, technically a misnomer arising from the family name Platanaceae, not to be confused with the plantain family Plantaginaceae. While plátano refers to bananas (the fruit) in much of the Spanish-speaking world, in Argentina and most of South America they are simply called bananas. Nonetheless, suffering through my allergy to the fluffy sycamore pollen here in Argentina has attained a new, bananistic quality.
Sycamore trees exemplify the tricky nature of species and assemblage, since the common shade tree that gained popularity among urban planners in the mid-1800s is a hybrid of two sycamore species, P. occidentalis and P. orientalis, native to North America and Europe respectively. It is also known as Platanus x hispanica, indicating its likely origin in Spain but also reflecting its subsequent spread across cities throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Part of the journey of learning the names of birds, trees, and other inhabitants with whom I now share the city of Buenos Aires is learning their names in Spanish. As is the case with native species in the United States, we have several names in English for the same exact plant or animal, depending on where you’re from or what your background is. The same phenomenon is true in Spanish with all sorts of things, like food or animals, so I have been diligently learning the names of everything I can absorb in Argentine Spanish, including new names for things that I learned differently in school.
The national bird of the United States is the bald eagle, symbolizing “freedom!!” all the way back to the country’s founding. One would imagine that such a bird would be treated with care and deference in its natural habitat, yet the bald eagle was critically endangered in the mid-20th century due to widespread use of the pesticide DDT, in addition to illegal hunting. Recent conservation efforts in the last 15 years have made significant progress in restoring the bald eagle population, but the reality still remains that it has only been able to thrive despite human exploitation of the landscape. Its presence as the U.S. national bird is purely symbolic, its association with certain values not based in empirical observation or even oral history (if Ben Franklin is to be believed, it was even considered a bird of “bad moral character”), but rather constructed ideals of what it represents. Even its booming cry, commonly heard in film and television, is invented: the red-tailed hawk’s call, which is considerably more forceful, has been universally co-opted to give a sense of gravitas to the bald eagle, whose actual call is squeaky and high-pitched.
By contrast, the hornero was chosen as the national bird of Argentina in a poll in 1928, due to its habitation across the diverse bioregions of Argentina (in which six distinct bioregions are partially found) and its proximity to human beings. The role of the human-hornero assemblage extends beyond mutualistic arrangements — horneros feed on pests that infest farmlands, while those same human-altered landscapes provide space for the horneros’ nests — since the hornero is commonly emblematized as a symbol of hard work and perseverance among Argentine schoolchildren. Therefore, the national bird is itself a manifestation and a reflection of Argentine cultural values, one that can be seen everywhere you look.
What a beautifully written reflection. In a job where considerations of urban biodiversity and environment remain at the 10,000 ft. level, it was very refreshing to reflect on bioregionalism as a powerful connection for placemaking. Never not incredibly proud of you.
Loved this meditation on bioregionalism! I strive to better engage with the bioregions around me, whether on a hike in a new area or just a walk around my neighborhood