INTERVIEW BY

NOAH STRYCKER

A Birding Interview with

J. Drew Lanham

J Drew Lanham is a force of Southern ornithology and lore. Inspired by birds while growing up on his family’s 200-acre farm in rural Edgefield County, South Carolina, Lanham has studied songbirds and conservation throughout an illustrious career at Clemson University, where he is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology. Lately, he also reflects expansively about the issues of race, space, and place—connecting people and wildlife to their land-based roots. A former ABA Board member, Lanham has written for Orion and Audubon magazines, as well as The New York Times; his book The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature won the 2017 Southern Book Prize. In this colorful Birding interview, Lanham takes a ride on the wild side in his 1986 Ford Bronco II “Incognegro-mobile,” offering a unique view of South Carolina’s rich swamplands, lush birdlife, and bitter slave legacy—all served up with a side of pulled pork and vinegar pepper sauce.

The interviewee has seen a lot of good birds from his camouflaged 1986 Ford Bronco II, also known as “Woody the Incognegro-mobile.” Photo by © Drew Lanham.

Birding: What can a birder absorb from spending time in one place?
J. Drew Lanham: There’s an intensity to settling into one place. You can become intimate with it—in a geographically familiar kind of way. And beyond knowing the lay of the land, you can, through seasonal association, come to savor large and small differences that impact the coming and going of birds. When place becomes familiar, the birds become family and friends. And for me, family and friends are reasons to stay in South Carolina. The bitter history of enslavement and racist politics here leave much to be desired, but my human family is here. Many of my friends are here. I love the land here. It’s my ecology—cue Marvin Gaye. The birds here connect me to the Arctic and tropical rainforests and prairie and so much more. I’m hoping that by staying here I can eventually make a difference for birds and conservation where I’m grounded. I’m hoping, too, that maybe I can be a part of the human change that’s been a long time coming.

Birds? Man, there’s so much here! From our Upper Piedmont home near the Blue Ridge Escarpment, I can have breakfast—maybe some stone-ground  yellow grits with country ham and red-eye gravy—and in a relatively small area see Common Ravens, Peregrine Falcons, Ruffed Grouse, and Swainson’s and maybe even Cerulean warblers. We’ll spend lots of time in the Jocassee Gorges Wilderness Area, which feels a lot like Costa Rican lowland forest in the midst of the summer with so much green surrounding you as rushing creeks flow by with the songs of Louisiana Waterthrushes accompanying Wood Thrushes and Black-throated Green Warblers. We’ll quickly swing by Sassafras Mountain, too. It’s the highest peak in the state at a little over 3,600 feet, and there’s great birding during autumn hawk watching.

Lunchtime in the Midlands should be barbecue from some hole-in-the-wall place (not racist Maurice Bessinger’s Piggie Park®): pulled pork with vinegar pepper sauce, hash over rice, coleslaw, and banana pudding, all washed down with sweet iced tea. Right after lunch (and maybe a brief nap), we can head to some longleaf pine and find Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, Bachman’s Sparrows, Loggerhead Shrikes, some gopher tortoises, and if we’re real lucky a wild Bobwhite Quail or two. From there we’ll cruise down to the Congaree National Park and pick up Hooded Warblers and then to Audubon’s Francis Beidler Forest for dozens of Prothonotary Warblers that dart through the dark thousand-year-old cypress timber like the Golden Swamp Warblers they used to be known as. As we enter the ACE Basin (the convergence of three great South Carolina rivers—the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto), we’ll have to keep an eye out for Swallow-tailed Kites as they sail over vast tracts of swampland. Mississippi Kites will be everywhere, as they seem to be expand-ing their range. Venturing into the rice fields constructed by enslaved Africans who made the Lowcountry planters filthy rich, we will see Wood Storks and flamingo-pink Roseate Spoonbills fishing among 10- to 12-foot alligators. And, oh yeah, we’ll have shrimp ’n’ grits with a sunset view of Saint Helena Sound, and watch the Black Skimmers and Brown Pelicans head to roost on the sea islands. I even know a place that an after-dinner Black Rail might be convinced to call. You’ll have to be sworn to secrecy, though.

So you see, the birds offer some redemption. South Carolina is a tiny state, but big ecologically. In a day, you will visit two of National Geographic’s 50 Places of a Life-time in Jocassee Gorges and the ACE Basin. It’s some serious conservation cred we have here—with avian awesomeness to boot. And dietwise it’s beyond compare, though my suggestions for our dawn-to-dusk delights are pre–heart disease diagnosis. I’ll just have to concentrate on the birdfest feast!

Birding: Years ago, as an undergraduate, you gave up a mechanical engineering scholarship to study zoology, but can you still picture yourself as an engineer?
JDL: That was like a learning purgatory for me. I mean, I was doing well enough in mechanical engineering to be a junior in good standing, but I was suffering in it; passionless. No one wants a passionless professional designing cars or structures or processes that might one day cost human (or environmental) health and well-being. So I had to get out of that. And after 3½ years, I did. But I learned a great deal about things I still use. I hated calculus back then. But now I talk about the “calculus” of conservation—how changes in populations and species abundance and welfare are related to changes in the environment and human behavior. That’s a calculus of a different sort.

I’m more and more concerned with the calculus of conservation and culture these days. That is, how does who we are affect what we think and how we behave toward each other and toward other species? My ethnicity impacts how I see and perceive everything, including nature. All of this is calculus of different sorts. Stresses and strains that engineers need to understand from a materials standpoint I’ve transferred eco-psychologically to stresses of trans-gulf migration and strains of plate-glass metaphorical sky and outdoor cats. I am still engineering, I guess. It’s just that I’m seeing birds as key factors in the equation.

Birding: From your decades of research, what results have most surprised you?
JDL: The plasticity of birds and other species. How many of them, if given the chance through thoughtful conservation, can be resilient. There’s a human lesson in that. “Build it and they might come” is the mantra for wildlife management. Most recently, I’m learning just how little people consider how or why they think about nature the way they do. We make assumptions about how different folks think about birds and trees and forests and such. The differences in how we think about things can be startling. I like to say that “everyone has a bird story.” It just so happens that those stories are all different.

Birding: Why envy sparrows?
JDL: Sparrows are mostly brown; are often all lumped together in a single category of “LBJs” (“little brown jobs”); go unnoticed and unappreciated by all but the most ardent observers; and mostly skulk and remain hidden—invisible—except when they advertise themselves by song. I hold a great deal of love for all that makes sparrows birds, because in many ways I can see myself in sparrow terms. I think many people of color—especially black and brown people—can. The envy comes in because sparrows persist and sing and are no less beautiful because of their brownness. They are brown and proud. I dig that.

In his sardonic “Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” video, Drew Lanham deadpans: “Black birds are your birds.” The list includes Red-Winged Blackbirds and Black Skimmers. Photos by © Drew Lanham.

Birding: Tell us about your land ethic, and how it relates to local history and race.
JDL: My land ethic is borne of a backwoods rural upbringing in Edgefield, South Carolina, with farmer/schoolteacher/naturalist parents. There’s a lot of nature and nurture in that convergence of parenting and place. And then there was my grandmother Mamatha, who instilled in me a strong sense of story and a tie to land and legacy. In all of that, I grew a deep taproot into the clay of my Southern homeplace. I grew up with that underpinning and then came to know and love the philosophies of Aldo Leopold and George Washington Carver. Ethic to me implies a sense of caring or way of doing something. Forwarding that to conservation, it all comes together in an effort to save something for others for later, to leave things better behind us for those in front of us. That selfless act of loving nature—birds and everything else wild—is a loving act. That is my bottom-line ethic: to love the land. Everything else follows in that wake. Having ancestors who were bound to the land as enslaved means there’s a lot to overcome. Part of overcoming means we have to reclaim the land (and nature) as critical components of our free being. It amazes me how many enslaved narratives talk about birds in relation to freedom.

Birding: Years ago, as an undergraduate, you gave up a mechanical engineering scholarship to study zoology, but can you still picture yourself as an engineer?
JDL: That was like a learning purgatory for me. I mean, I was doing well enough in mechanical engineering to be a junior in good standing, but I was suffering in it; passionless. No one wants a passionless professional designing cars or structures or processes that might one day cost human (or environmental) health and well-being. So I had to get out of that. And after 3½ years, I did. But I learned a great deal about things I still use. I hated calculus back then. But now I talk about the “calculus” of conservation—how changes in populations and species abundance and welfare are related to changes in the environment and human behavior. That’s a calculus of a different sort.

I’m more and more concerned with the calculus of conservation and culture these days. That is, how does who we are affect what we think and how we behave toward each other and toward other species? My ethnicity impacts how I see and perceive everything, including nature. All of this is calculus of different sorts. Stresses and strains that engineers need to understand from a materials standpoint I’ve transferred eco-psychologically to stresses of trans-gulf migration and strains of plate-glass metaphorical sky and outdoor cats. I am still engineering, I guess. It’s just that I’m seeing birds as key factors in the equation.

In his sardonic “Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” video, Drew Lanham deadpans: “Black birds are your birds.” The list includes Red-Winged Blackbirds and Black Skimmers. Photos by © Drew Lanham.

Birding: From your decades of research, what results have most surprised you?
JDL: The plasticity of birds and other species. How many of them, if given the chance through thoughtful conservation, can be resilient. There’s a human lesson in that. “Build it and they might come” is the mantra for wildlife management. Most recently, I’m learning just how little people consider how or why they think about nature the way they do. We make assumptions about how different folks think about birds and trees and forests and such. The differences in how we think about things can be startling. I like to say that “everyone has a bird story.” It just so happens that those stories are all different.

Birding: Why envy sparrows?
JDL: Sparrows are mostly brown; are often all lumped together in a single category of “LBJs” (“little brown jobs”); go unnoticed and unappreciated by all but the most ardent observers; and mostly skulk and remain hidden—invisible—except when they advertise themselves by song. I hold a great deal of love for all that makes sparrows birds, because in many ways I can see myself in sparrow terms. I think many people of color—especially black and brown people—can. The envy comes in because sparrows persist and sing and are no less beautiful because of their brownness. They are brown and proud. I dig that.

Birding: Tell us about your land ethic, and how it relates to local history and race.
JDL: My land ethic is borne of a backwoods rural upbringing in Edgefield, South Carolina, with farmer/schoolteacher/naturalist parents. There’s a lot of nature and nurture in that convergence of parenting and place. And then there was my grandmother Mamatha, who instilled in me a strong sense of story and a tie to land and legacy. In all of that, I grew a deep taproot into the clay of my Southern homeplace. I grew up with that underpinning and then came to know and love the philosophies of Aldo Leopold and George Washington Carver. Ethic to me implies a sense of caring or way of doing something. Forwarding that to conservation, it all comes together in an effort to save something for others for later, to leave things better behind us for those in front of us. That selfless act of loving nature—birds and everything else wild—is a loving act. That is my bottom-line ethic: to love the land. Everything else follows in that wake. Having ancestors who were bound to the land as enslaved means there’s a lot to overcome. Part of overcoming means we have to reclaim the land (and nature) as critical components of our free being. It amazes me how many enslaved narratives talk about birds in relation to freedom.

Drew Lanham takes a break from birding in the Costa Rican lowland forest—a place that feels a lot like home in South Carolina in midsummer. Photo by © Scott Steedley.

The Home Place received wide praise for its lyrical beauty and personal meditations on race, family, conservation, and history.

Birding: Could you describe your birding vehicle for us?
JDL: Well, I have this camoed out 1986 Ford Bronco II that I call “Woody the Incognegro-mobile.” It’s splotched flat green, black, tan, and brown. No one sees me coming in it! I also have a 2000 white and rusting hunting/birding Chevy pickup truck I call “Snow-flake.” Those two field vehicles with almost 50 years of age between them and almost 400,000 combined miles make quite the pair. In many ways, they reflect my own middle-aged, high-mileage sensibilities. We’ve seen a lot of good birds together.

As a boy, Drew Lanham was inspired by birds on his fam-ily’s 200-acre farm in rural South Carolina. Photo cour-tesy of James H. Lanham.

Birding: Why are black Americans under-represented in today’s birding scene? How can we change that?
JDL: Birding is simply a small slice of the American wildlife conservation and outdoor avocation pie. That pie was baked by white men primarily and white women to a lesser extent, and only fairly recently have others really been invited to carve their own slices. I think much of it is a matter of exposure and education.

There’s that mantra again—“everybody has a bird story.” That includes black and brown people. There are many cultural connections to birds. That’s something we need to pay more attention to. Birding can be pretty intense sometimes, and we just expect others to be as intense as we are. By softening the edge to listen to the bird stories of others, and by understanding their relationship to nature (or lack thereof), we can begin to meet folks where they are—and not insist on dragging them to where we want them to be. So show someone a cardinal, and revel in its brilliant redness—or a mockingbird, and wonder at its song-making abilities. Don’t gloss over the common birds and by all means don’t denigrate birds into categories of good and bad. When we share the wonder of what we love lovingly, then we can begin to cross lines of difference.

I think birding is getting better. We see efforts at inclusion growing and that’s a positive. More and more, I think it’s imperative to link birds’ lives to our lives. Our ranges overlap, and we share the same air, same water, same soil. How we care for birds is how we care for ourselves and one another. Empathy goes a long way in the inclusion game.

One more thing: Please don’t tell a person of color you don’t see color. That’s insulting. After all, most birders spend lots of time seeing color—otherwise a Red-winged Blackbird and a Snow Bunting wouldn’t be so beautifully different. So, see the color. Respect the face. Get to know me inside. The rest will fall into place.

Ecologist Drew Lanham stares down another icon of South Carolina ornithology—the extinct Carolina Parakeet. Photo by © Dorinda Dallmeyer.

Birding: Should we laugh or cry at your article, “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher”—and subsequent short video produced by BirdNote and featured by National Geographic?
JDL: I hope people laugh. Then I hope they think about why they laughed. Then maybe they’ll cry about why they laughed. Then I hope in the end they think again about why they have to think about whether to laugh or cry or fall into angry cursing spasms over the whole deal. My father used to say that some things are laughable but not funny. That’s what “9 Rules” is, for the most part. It’s satire that I and many other black birders have lived. Humor is kind of like the spoonful of sugar that goes with the bitter–nasty medicine. We need medicating when it comes to issues of race and bias, but most white folks don’t want that dosage. It’s not often pleasant to discuss, but necessary for our health as a community. My hope in writing and then acting that out was to slip some truth in as people chuckled. Then, after chuckling, they might feel some kind of way about why something as serious as being profiled or in fear of one’s life because of skin color might impact how birding or any other activity can be bent through the prism of identity.

Birding: C’mon, just nine? What’s #10?
JDL: Even if that rare bird is just “over there,” a Confederate flag is an instant impediment to black-birder range expansion and list enlargement. It says you can hang around here, literally. Find your bird beyond the stars and bars.

Birding: What is your message for those just getting interested in birds?
JDL: Don’t just watch birds. Absorb birds! Take the time to observe and notice. Don’t just identify birds. Identify with birds! Find common cause in common birds and abundant joy in rare ones. Birds need us, but we need them, too. Conserve by loving what you watch. Birding has the power to inspire and inform us beyond our bipedally grounded state. Watch and wonder!

A Southerner, Drew Lanham (right) tells the stories of how bird conservation and culture connect in places often littered with the bit-ter history of enslavement and racism. Sitting with Douglas Gibson, a renowned waterfowl carver from Milford, Delaware, is a link to a legacy of the past and possibilities for the future. Photo by © Carrie Samis.

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A South Carolina Sampler

Drew Lanham’s literary sensibilities and scientific acumen combine to inform a deeply held “spirit of place.” In this selec-tion of the interviewee’s photos from his home state of South Carolina, one gets the sense of “being there”—in a land of stir-ring natural beauty but also a place not yet rehabilitated from the awful legacy of slavery. All photos by © Drew Lanham.

This interview originally appeared in Birding magazine, April 2020 issue, pp. 14-21. Join the American Birding Association to receive Birding and to support the community-building efforts of the ABA: aba.org/join.