• What: Sooty Fox Sparrow, Passerella (iliaca) unalaschcensis
• When: Friday, January 17, 2025
• Where: Peace Arch Provincial Park, Metro Vancouver Regional District, British Columbia

We stood at the stone obelisk marking the international boundary, the four of us. Then, with mock solemnity, we took an official step northward. But we wanted there to be absolutely no doubt about it. So we proceeded another couple hundred yards—excuse me, meters—north to the pedestrian passport checkpoint. I declined to answer truthfully the border guard’s question about the reason for our visit (“to iNat and eBird a life province”) and instead mumbled something else (“tourism…family vacation”). The guard let us through, and we were now, even according to the strictest of interpretations, most assuredly in Canada.

Our first bird in Canada was an American robin in a crabapple. Next was a bald eagle, the national emblem of the United States of America. We saw a big ole palmately lobed leaf lying on the ground, a candidate maple leaf. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the leaf of an American sycamore. What does that even mean, America/American? We’d crossed the border, yes, but we were still very much within the ABA Area, the old NAFTA free-trade zone, the continent of North America, and, for that matter, the hemispheric conglomerate known as the Americas.

Anyhow.

We came upon a steep slope with dense undergrowth and dark birds: dingy song sparrows, practically spotless spotted towhees, and this sooty fox sparrow:

Photo by © Ted Floyd.

The bird sure looked different from the fox sparrows I’d seen elsewhere in Canada, on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, in the extreme eastern part of the country. It sounded very different, too. Hannah Floyd got this quick cellphone audio of the bird:

Despite its morphological and vocal distinctiveness, the sooty fox sparrow is, for the time being anyhow, “just” a subspecies, or, to be more technical about it, a subspecies group. It’s on the same side of the species border, if you will, as the red fox sparrow.

Borders and boxes are ingrained in our Western worldview: from Adam to Plato to Augustine; from Linnaeus to Peterson to the present time. Everything has its place and purpose. The sparrow in the shrubbery on the hillside was officially across the 49th parallel, an entirely arbitrary division with no relevance to the material or even metaphysical universe. And it’s been put in a box, a “species,” denoted by the name Passerella iliaca, conferred upon the bird in pretend Latin centuries after that dead language ceased to be spoken.

Except that we birders know better. Oh sure, we play the game. Hannah and I and the rest of our family were playing the game. Which is fine. A life country for her and her brother. A life province for me. Not even a life regional district for their mother. But it’s just a game. We know that. And we know that there’s something grander, far grander, in this birding life.

We are attracted to birds and to birding not for borders and boxes but precisely for the opposite. Because birding sets us free from those things. In this regard, I think of longtime Birding Associate Editor Noah Strycker’s book Birding Without Borders. On the surface, Noah’s subject matter is the ultimate birding game: seeing as many bird species worldwide as possible during the course of a single calendar year. But the book is so much more: a kaleidoscope of learning and sharing and wonder, of beauty and adventure, of freedom and community. Those are the things birding is all about. Especially, I have come to appreciate, freedom and community.

Seeking freedom and desiring community might seem like contradictory impulses. Maybe they are in certain walks of life. But not in birding. My favorite parts of Birding Without Borders are when Noah is far away, far from home, far from familiar experiences—a modern-day Huck Finn or Jack Kerouac or, come to think of it, the Kenn Kaufman of Kingbird Highway. That’s the freedom half of the equation. At the same time, Noah finds community in those faraway places—a community that, to this reader anyhow, comes across as most affirming and authentic when the author is farthest from home.

Isn’t that the lifestory for so many of us who self-identify as birders? We were attracted to birds in the first place for the beauty and grace and freedom that they give life to. Especially freedom. The bird in flight is the instantiation of freedom. And along the way at some point, we discover other persons likewise attracted to birds. Naturally, we enter into community with them. And then later, sometimes much later, as something of an afterthought, we recognize a strange truth, except it doesn’t seem so strange anymore: The community of birders comprises persons as different from ourselves as we might ever have imagined.

Does it matter that this bird is just across the international border? Does it make a difference whether we call it a species or a subspecies? Photo by © Ted Floyd.

ooo

ooo