Krista Tippett: You wrote a beautiful piece called “Elegy in Three Plagues” in 2020, which we are thankfully no longer in, although nothing feels that different; but still, symbolically. One of the things that happened — and it was interesting to read that even you, you spend your time in the natural world, attending to the natural world, loving the natural world, but it was still even a new experience for you, and it was an experience a lot of people had, that the travel you’d been doing or the wild excursions you’d been doing, you were sent instead into your backyard — your backyard lawn and your Adirondack chair. And that also was an experience of discovery.

Drew Lanham: And still is, in many ways. Quarantine and being sentenced to home, in a way — it’s different for so many of us, but for me it was sudden stop, because I was approaching my migratory period; that part of the year when I’m following the birds. And sitting back there in the backyard for weeks, for months, and just watching the seasons come and go and the birds with them, it’s sort of like the leftovers that get better up to a point. We don’t appreciate them when we first cook them, and then you’re like, oh, wow, that soup is really good two days later. So the backyard became that.

And there were these birds, things like rose-breasted grosbeaks, that I was hearing from my friends and seeing on social media that they were having them in their backyard, and I hadn’t gotten any rose-breasted grosbeaks yet. But then suddenly there they were, one morning. And they were sticking around for longer than I remember them, or longer than I had been at home to see them before. And it made me realize just how much on the go I had been, but also just what these birds were doing; that these were birds that had come from Central America, and many of them had come through the Caribbean. And now they were with me. And then I was gonna send some of those birds to Vermont and New Hampshire and Minnesota, and that there was no way for anyone to prove, because these birds weren’t marked, that birds that I was seeing one week weren’t the birds that they were seeing the next week. And so I began to imagine that connecting.

But sitting by my plastic pond full of little fish and frogs, and sometimes with a beverage, that was a daily saving grace, in a way.

Tippett: You even use the word “pilgrimage” — pilgrimage to your backyard.

I think you say some things that feel so helpful to me, about the importance and the beauty and the goodness of learning about the “common birds.” And this imagination you have, I don’t have to be an ornithologist to take that in; you say, to think about how important your backyard can be for birds, that it can be critical space for them to grab food, that they lift off for faraway places, and your backyard has been a place that fueled that, and that you witnessed this rest and refueling and respite in their creaturely existence. I found that something that any of us can pick up.

Lanham: Well, if you’re fortunate to — I took backyard for granted.

Tippett: Those of us who got to go to the backyard were lucky. We were the fortunate.

Lanham: But then, and seeing those grosbeaks that were exotic, I was watching those grosbeaks interact with my cardinals, my grandmother’s redbirds, that — who can ignore that? Who can ignore a red bird? So in thinking about those cardinals, I can remember seeing there would be eight or a dozen rose-breasted grosbeaks back there, but then there were eight or ten cardinals. And I began to know some of these cardinals by crest character, or a female that appeared just a little redder than another female, or even behavior, or where they liked to perch. Or watching a cardinal, watching a redbird as the sun would go down on a day, the end of a day that still had a little bit of chill in it. And watching a bird sit in the last shafts of sunlight, watching the setting sun blaze through that bird — to me, it gave me this appreciation again for the things that we often pass by: that cardinals, as common as they might be for some of us, “common” is a word that dismisses, sometimes, what we should be paying attention to.

Tippett: There’s part of me that really wants to make this confession to you, which is — it’s something I’ve thought so much about in my life — that I didn’t have a family like you did, that taught me the names of birds or really that paid attention to them. And I also, in my backyard, I don’t know, maybe I see some of those cardinals here in Minnesota that you saw in your yard. You’re right, it’s arresting. And I tend to think “redbird,” like your grandmother, rather than “cardinal.” And I’ve always wondered — I feel ashamed of this, that I don’t know the names, and I also think I’ve felt like it’s too late to start, so I will just appreciate them. I don’t know; do you have any advice for me on that? I have no idea how many people are like this, or if this is my problem.

Lanham: Well, it’s not a problem. There’s no shame in not knowing the name of a bird. If it’s a redbird to you, it’s a redbird to you. At some point, as a scientist, it’s important for me to be able to identify birds by accepted common names and Latin names and those things. But then I revert frequently to what my grandmother taught me, because, I say, the birds know who they are. They don’t need you to tell them that.

But over time, when we relax into a thing and maybe just being with a bird, then your brain kind of relaxes, it loosens, and things soak in. And I think that’s the key with a lot of learning. But not getting the name right immediately does not in any way diminish their ability to appreciate “the pretty,” as Aldo Leopold talks about. And so seeing that bird and saying, “Oh my God, what is that? Look at it,” and you’re looking at it, and you can see all of these hues, and you can watch its behavior, and you may hear it sing — well, in that moment, it’s a beautiful thing, no matter what its name is.

Sometimes, what I try to get people to do is to disconnect for a moment from that absolute need to list and name, and just see the bird. Just see that bird. And you begin to absorb it, in a way, in a part of your brain that I don’t know the name of, but I think it’s a part of your brain that’s also got some heart in it. And then, guess what? The name, when you do learn it, it sticks in a different way.

Tippett: I don’t think I can count the number of times — if I think about it, I think I almost always say the same thing, but it always feels like a huge statement, when I’ve seen some of these beautiful birds — I, like: “Oh, my, aren’t you beautiful.”

Lanham: And that’s enough.

Tippett: And again, to wander back into the realm of complexity, you’ve written so interestingly about how all the naming in science and in Western culture has been problematic as well. And even the question of what wildness is — and who gets to say that, and when it was said, and how it was acted on — is so much more complicated than might seem obvious. Again, that intersection of culture and place and land and humans.

Lanham: Well, one of the things that sticks with me from current culture — and Hamilton, even, in thinking about who gets to tell the story and the names — and so I’m intensely interested in language and what different people call things, and these names and what names mean. So that Indigenous and First Nations people, who have all of these languages, and who a raven is to one nation versus who the raven is to another nation or people within that nation. So all of that is important, I think, for us to pay attention to, and all of those are different ornithologies.

In Western science, we boil down to Latin binomial and to genotype and phenotype; and all of that is critical, and it’s important in what we do as scientists. But I think, again, broadening the scope of vision so that we see the big picture — we need to understand who birds are to others, what land is to others; that if my ancestors were forced into nature and hung from trees, I might not have the same interest in going out into the forest and naming the trees. So that is part of my mission to offer a different prism that people can maybe, maybe take a glimpse through.