Interview with a (not very serious) Birder

Author, Susan Glickman — @glickmansusan on Instagram

“An Amateur Guide to Ornithological Nomenclature” Pencil on paper.

Drawing by Lisa Kimberly Glickman, with helpful anatomical labelling by author Susan Glickman .

Susan Glickman’s impressive creative output is a reminder that human expression doesn’t move in straight lines, and that our only limitations are those we impose on ourselves. After a solid career in writing and publishing — seven books of poetry, four novels, a trilogy of children’s books, a book of essays and a work of literary history, editorial work for publishers both in Canada and abroad, and many years teaching creative writing at various schools and universities — Glickman enrolled herself into a continuing education visual arts course at Central Technical School in Toronto, added an “art” tab to her website, and now is as likely to be using a pen for drawing as for writing.

Running throughout all her work is a deep appreciation for the natural world and the flora and fauna with which we share the planet. When I began posting my bird photos on Instagram in late 2022, Susan sent me a copy of an essay she’s been writing about her own love of birds, along with a few images she’s generated (without a camera).


Your essay “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” opens with a remembrance of your birding mentors. Can you tell me that story? Who first pointed out a bird to you in such a way that you wanted to keep looking at birds?

My love of birds began when I was a small child, encouraged by my parents to watch ruby-throated hummingbirds sipping nectar from a bed of red monarda at a cottage they rented in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal. I was transfixed by those jewels with invisible wings – impossibly small and quick! Last year I was sitting on my front porch reading when one suddenly appeared, browsing a hanging pot of flowers, and it felt like such a blessing.

Another bird deeply associated with those childhood summers is the white-throated sparrow. There always seemed to be at least one singing in the pinewoods, though in that case it was their song that caught my attention; I would not have been able to identify one by sight back then, though now I see them often in Toronto. I love their jaunty yellow eyebrows! The third of my earliest bird familiars is the chickadee; we had a lot of those up north too, but I associate them more with winter and cross-country skiing. Maybe because they seemed to chatter all day long even when the snow had muffled other sounds. And because their name echoes their call, so they are always reminding you who they are.

I have always loved wandering in nature and observing creatures along the way, but never set out specifically to watch birds until I met my husband’s parents. They took us birdwatching straight from LaGuardia Airport in New York, where they met me for the first time. I was instantly hooked, even though this meant bringing binoculars and bird identification books on walks. For a few years I ardently learned which anatomical features or markings to focus on and tried to learn perching habits and summer and winter habitats and so forth. I never became really expert at any of this stuff, but there was a period – before I became a mother – when I was really into it. I even kept a life list in those days.

You write about how the many stages of life have changed your birding habit, and how the Covid pandemic seemed to bring a lot more attention to the activity. I almost feel like my recent empty-nester status (my twin boys have entered adulthood, and I see much less of them than in the intense single-parenting days of the late 2000s) pushed me into looking for full nests, if you know what I mean.

For my husband and me, birdwatching was a big part of our courtship and the early years of our marriage. That’s when we pored over books to figure out which kind of warbler flitted at the edge of our vision, or whether the black-and-white speckled woodpecker high up on a faraway tree was a downy or a hairy. As for hawks soaring overhead, we never did manage to memorize all their silhouettes! After those few ardent years, 1984-1991 to be exact, when our kids came along, there was little time for quietly standing and birdwatching. Children – at least ours – have no patience with such folderol.

I understand you’re a minimalist when it comes to birding gear. What’s your basic set-up for a ramble among the birds?

I am not a minimalist because of any profound conviction about not letting equipment get between me and nature but because I am a terrible consumer: I hate researching and buying anything (except for books and art supplies). And most of the time, these days, I just go for a walk impulsively because I need to be in nature and find myself squinting at whatever’s soaring or fluttering above me, hoping its size and behaviour and song will reveal who it is. And therefore I often fail to identify the bloody bird because I neglected to bring the bloody binos. You are making me resolve to be better prepared! 

I’m about to embark on two trips I planned long before picking up this bird-photo habit – hiking the Cotswold Way in England, followed by a week in Iceland for a writing retreat. Those two adventures speak to longstanding passions of mine, but I admit that I’m also now more than a little bit excited about adding non-North American birds to my photo files and life list. I don’t know if I will ever travel with birding as the central goal, but it’s unlikely I can ever go somewhere new to me without researching the local winged population. Do you do bird travel?

We had a fantastic time birdwatching in the Yucatan before we had kids, but it wasn’t until they were grown up that we reprised this with a trip to Costa Rica that was as lushly full of gorgeous tropical species. In between, we didn’t travel in order to discover birds, but we always brought binoculars and bird books with us wherever we went, which was mostly to visit grandparents in New York and Montreal, with trips to the Laurentians and to Jones Beach on Long Island and later to Florida as part of the family geography. Our kids grew up taking long walks to see not only birds but all kinds of critters - frogs and lizards and alligators and beavers and otters and deer as well as fossils and flowers and mushrooms; all the cool nonhuman stuff, really. When they were really little, we brought an empty aquarium on our trips and filled it each day either with water and rocks or as a terrarium with rocks and moss and twigs. We collected live specimens and studied them for a few hours before releasing them back where we found them. But of course, this nature study never included birds!

What’s your most “exotic” bird sighting?

Ha! The one I wrote about in the essay you mentioned: a purple gallinule, native to southernmost parts of the USA, which turned up to everyone’s astonishment – including his – in a bed of daylilies in a neighbour’s backyard in Toronto.

“Featuring My Fabulous Feet: Purple Gallinule.” Graphite on paper, 2022.

Susan Glickman’s graphite drawing of the Purple Gallinule that unexpectedly visited her neighbour’s garden.

I look back into my writing over many years, and I can’t help noticing how often birds wander onto the page. I’ve clearly long had a thing for crows and ravens. Did your birding inform your writing?

There is a birdwatching scene in my first novel, The Violin Lover, and in my third, Safe as Houses, the protagonist remembers how much her late father loved “twitching”, as the activity is called in England. Birds are absolutely central to my fourth novel, The Discovery of Flight, in which a major character is a red-tailed hawk. I had so much fun writing from her point of view! There is one scene in the book where a pair of hawks hunt a squirrel collaboratively -- something that really does happen – and I think it is my favourite bit of writing in the whole book.

When you picked up a paintbrush for the first time, was it inevitable a bird would end up on your canvas?

It took a while until I felt confident enough to paint a bird and then in a short span of time I attempted two. The first was a dead pigeon who was so beautiful I needed to honour it with art. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about it:

As a child, I slept on the top floor of a house whose eaves sheltered many anonymous pigeons. I fell asleep each night and woke up each morning to their cooing, a sound as familiar to me as my own breath. I have always found them beautiful, sometimes arrestingly so, with their iridescent feathers and quizzically alert gaze. One soft spring morning in my adult life, I opened the back door and found that beauty lying intact on the mat like an offering from some sardonic deity. God as a cat, purring, “Here, I brought you this!” I could study the bird more closely than I ever had and yet felt abashed, intruding on its privacy, profaning its death.

I watched it for some time, hoping for the breast to rise and fall, rise and fall. But it didn’t. In case it was just stunned, I left it lying there for a while before returning, but it never moved. Instead, the once-bright eye began to glaze over, and I had to accept that the spirit that had directed the creature to dive into my window had flown away.

And here’s the painting:

“Fallen Angel.”  Oil on canvas, 2021. Susan Glickman

The second was a living cardinal (taken from a photo, because they don’t like posing for very long) who was so full of sass he was just irresistible. I painted him during a zoom workshop run by a celebrated bird artist, Rose Tanner. Her best piece of advice was to blur the tail, because birds are never really still, and you want to suggest movement.

“How To Be Red.” Oil on canvas, 2022. Susan Glickman.

It seems likely we’ll keep talking birds, you and me, but any final bird thoughts for today? Advice for the novice? Lessons taught you by birds?

Birds are always there, encouraging us to become more capacious and open; to let our souls become attuned to the natural world. There is so much wonder and beauty and mystery beyond our noisy, cluttered, fractious human existence. But you need to slow down and be quiet to really see birds, just like you need to slow down and be quiet to really see most things of importance. So, in some ways, birdwatching is a spiritual discipline.

It’s also fun, and healthy, and for those who like such things, can even allow for friendly competition. Besides which it is inexpensive; you don’t need fancy cameras and tripods and all the doodads; you just need to LOOK!

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.”
— Emily Dickinson

More Cowbird

A Wily Survivor with a Bad Rap

Glossy brown head, fearsome beak, fond reminiscence of working with cattle… yep, must be a cowbird.

Early in the spring, walking through my still deeply frozen northern town, I heard a “new” birdcall in the very limited collection of song I’d become so used to over the winter. Not a Black-capped Chickadee, Northern Cardinal, House Sparrow, American Crow, and not evening one of the European Starlings that ventured north in late February with their amazing array of sound effects. This was new yet nostalgic. Mostly unexpected. I just hadn’t expected to hear a Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) as one of the first spring arrivals on Lake Huron’s north shore. Their range map from Cornell University’s All About Birds site certainly brings them up to the northeast, but they are mainly a central North American species.

My buddy James describes their call as a “drop of water hitting a puddle.” It’s an inviting, intriguing blip-note with an accompanying whistle and chatter. I hauled out my Merlin Bird ID app and confirmed what my brain had already figured. No cows in sight, but the cowbirds had shown up. A couple weeks later, walking my usual lakeside park in Etobicoke, I saw several Brown-headed Cowbirds, both male and female, foraging in the grass off the paths. True to their nature, they let me get quite close for photos. These birds regularly hang with bison, cattle, and horses — unpredictable tonnes of meat and hoof —and feed off the insects stirred up by the giant beasts. One husky human with a camera is nothing to a cowbird.

Thank you to Cornell’s All About Birds site for this image. A widespread species is the cowbird, but not too northerly in general.

Credit for the title of this post goes to my other buddy, Dave, who is clearly a fan of Will Ferrell, and with whom I worked on a cattle farm in southern Ontario when we were both teenagers. Well, Dave worked on the farm, and threw me a few shifts piling hay and shovelling manure before the lure of a job at Dairy Queen took me away. Ice cream or cow shit… what would you pick? My time on that farm provided me with some lasting memories, though.

  • Being pinned against the side of a cattle stall by a subtle shift of weight when one of the big animals felt I wasn’t being gentle enough applying the mechanical milkers. Cows are HEAVY, and cantankerous.

  • Arriving for my morning shift at 5 am to find one of the cows giving birth. I helped the farmer pull that calf into the world with my bare hands, and have never taken a bite of veal since.

  • And the cowbirds, hopping around the pasture, and even hitching rides on the bony backs of the herd.

Look up Brown-headed Cowbird in a news search and you’ll notice one common theme in their media coverage. The humble cowbird gets very little respect for their particular evolutionary genius.

“Cowbirds Make Other Birds Do All the Work.”

“Female Cowbirds: Notorious Nest Invaders.”

“Cowbird Endures Bad Rap as Nest Parasite.”

These little birds need a better public relations team. Yes, this species has evolved into what is known as an avian brood parasite, which simply means they take advantage of other species of bird to raise their young, sneakily dropping an egg into the nest of another bird. Or more accurately, dropping many eggs into many nests to ensure survival numbers of their offspring. And they are super smart about that work. Forbes magazine has featured their “Goldilocks Principle” strategy of making sure a cowbird chick is one of exactly three total chicks in a nest in order to maximize survival rates (umm, for the cowbird).

But what’s with all the blamey language? As though the word “parasite” itself isn’t bad enough, cowbirds are accused of being lazy, deadbeat parents. Even I just called them sneaky.

A female Brown-headed Cowbird. The fake news media would have you believe she’s looking to plant an egg in your nest (actually, that’s absolutely what she’s planning to do).

Yes, an uncontrolled population of Brown-headed Cowbirds could pose a danger to the survival of other species — Kirtland’s Warbler is often mentioned as a victim of cowbird parasitism, with the much smaller warbler chicks unable to compete against the large interloper in their nest. It’s true that trapping and moving cowbird population away from Kirtland’s territory has helped bring them back from the brink, but it could be argued they were on the brink in the first place as much because of human intervention as brood parasitism.

This is from All About Birds:

During the past century, timber rotations and fire suppression proved incompatible with the bird’s needs, and Kirtland’s Warblers spent nearly 50 years on the Endangered Species List. Intensive conservation, including suppression of Brown-headed Cowbirds, allowed the population to increase tenfold, and the species was delisted in 2019.  

Cowbirds come by their survival strategy honestly. Originally a companion species to the nomadic Plains Bison, they are in large part dependent on wandering ungulates for all their food. In their survival model, there’s not a lot of time for nest-sitting and feeding a stationary brood. It’s either depend on someone else to adopt the kids, or die out as a species. I really don’t think they’re doing it to be mean to the other birds, and in my own, stupid anthropomorphizing heart, I imagine the mother cowbird sheds a quiet tear when she leaves each egg behind. Totally unscientific assertion, there, but I make no claims to expertise. All I’m saying is… we’re all just trying to make it to tomorrow. Give the cowbird a little slack.

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
— Salvador Dali

And finally, I am sinking deep into bird literature — this is a bird and book blog after all — and will be reporting on all of these titles sometime in the future (slow reader).