In this issue

• Gords

• Words (about words)

• Questions (with answers?)

• Cowardly lions

Ask me things

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Gord Gadsden on birding in the Fraser Valley

My interview with the all-around good guy

There are a few kinds of people in the birding world. There are listers and chasers who go to great lengths to get high bird species counts and find rarities. There are beginners who want to be listers and chasers, and so who sometimes make careless identifications in the name of adding birds to their species lists. There are casual birders, who put up feeders and take the odd bird walk. Then there are Gords.

Gord Gadsden lives and birds in the Fraser Valley, around Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Agassiz, and Hope (the wide valley east of Vancouver, BC, for those unfamiliar with the area. Also it’s pronounced like “phaser” with an additional “r,” not like “Frasier” the show). He started birding as a teenager when there were only a few other birders around (who he apparently hounded for their knowledge). He has become one of the sharpest birders I have accompanied in the field, full of information from intimate acquaintance with the local birds and habitats. He started an online forum for Fraser Valley birders and organizes occasional group birding trips (on which I have been fortunate to meet him and others). And he is a father of six kids, two of them birders.

I caught Gord on the phone during the Fraser Valley floods in December. I asked him to share his thoughts about birding locally in the Fraser Valley. “The longer you focus on the area,” Gord said, “the more you understand it. But it’s also kind of humbling. Despite getting to know the area and what’s expected, you’re still discovering things.”

Gord described the mix of bird species in the Fraser Valley. “You’ll get a few things that are considered more prevalent in the interior, but you still get the taste of the coast. If you really need to see a Scoter [a large sea duck], you can put a little effort into seeing one at Harrison Lake.”

“A lot of birds you report to others online are rarities,” I remarked. “You have some spots that are migrant bird traps.”

“Island 22!” Gord exclaimed, naming a regional park in Chilliwack along the Fraser River. “It’s either a migrant trap or a birder trap. Unless there’s someone looking for them, you’re not going to see them. There could be places we can’t get to that could be even better than Island 22,” Gord said. “Island 22 seems to offer a variety of habitats. You have the Fraser River, but you also have the forest—a lot of deciduous forest there. You can find forest birds and a Jaeger on the same day. That only happened once!”

“Those riparian zones along rivers act as a natural corridor for movement as well,” continued Gord. “The layout of the park has a lot of trails. The accessibility is lower at some other riparian areas, like MacGillivray’s Slough or Bert Brink Wildlife Area down the river. At Island 22, the horse trail that goes through the trees give that opportunity to get deeper in the forest.” 

“We should probably give a nod to Harrison Lake,” Gord added. “It’s a bit of a corridor as well. Things come up and down the lake. They come to the lagoon there. You get the expected things, but once in a while a species that doesn’t really belong in the small trees is there.” Gord said. “It’s not Point Pelee [Ontario] by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s our version of it anyway. It’s nice and accessible, and great for the kids. That’s important with the family.”

I asked Gord about other favourite bird spots, and he mentioned birding at Cheam Lake Wetlands, another regional park in Popkum. When Gord was young, he tagged along with experienced birder Denis Knopp. “I learned so much from him. He helped guide and nurture my interest.”

“I have noticed over the years that you are very observant and detailed,” I told Gord. “You also take the time to share bird identification strategies online. Do you have practices that you’ve used for honing your identification skills over the years?”

“I was just talking to my kids about this!” exclaimed Gord. He described an organic approach of observing and studying what shows up rather than only looking for rarities. “Being interested in that Song Sparrow and getting to know it leads to recognizing when something interesting pops up in the corner of your eye,” Gord said. “I know the area very well, and what is expected in each area, so something out of place hits the radar real quick.” Gord also advocated the practice of carrying around a notebook, even when it is easy to use eBird and other birding apps. “If I’m just tapping your app then going back to birding, I miss the opportunity to jot down details I observe.”

Gord described rare birds he noticed because they looked a little different than the usual species. “The Le Conte’s Sparrow,” said Gord. “You’ve probably bumped into it in your travels.”

“Up in the prairies,” I responded. “I think I’ve only heard it.”

Gord recounted the story: “I was walking at Hope Airport, when a Shrike landed and spooked some sparrows, mostly Savannah Sparrows. But there was one that looked out of place. I zeroed in on that, and kind of circled the same little bits of bush. It kept coming out, and each time I would see a little more. Every time I thought, ‘This is going to be the last time I see this guy.’ It was one of two species, either Le Conte’s or Nelson’s Sparrow. Finally, it paused and I got a look. I was able to connect a couple dots between features I hadn’t been able to see in previous views. But I only did that because it was a little bit different from the Savannahs.”

Though Gord reassured me that he is also very content to see regular birds like Chickadees and Savannah Sparrows. “Savannah Sparrows are beautiful birds. They are not hard to look at. I’ve spent a lot of time enjoying them. But when a sparrow is not a Savannah Sparrow, you look at it a bit more.”

I reminded Gord about when I found a rare Rock Wren shortly after I moved to the Fraser Valley from Washington. Gord immediately emailed me and invited me to join the Fraser Valley Birding forum to share the sighting. I found a community of active birders from a variety of ages and experiences. I joined others on hikes on Flatiron Mountain or on local Christmas Bird Counts. “I wonder if you have anything to share about building community in the birding world,” I said.

“I love that you mention that,” responded Gord. “I think community is huge, with having family myself together doing these things. I’ve met a lot of good people, yourself included, only because of the community we’ve built together.” Sharing sightings of rarities is fun, Gord said, and he loves running into other birders when a rarity shows up. “But I really think that the day-to-day joy of birding is what I’ve always tried to focus on and encourage others to do.” Gord added, “The community is amazing. People who I consider friends, or at least good comrades in the hobby, only came from having this little place that we all could gather.”

I took the opportunity to brag that my son can do great chickadee and nuthatch imitations. With Gord being a father of six, including two who have taken up birding enthusiastically, I asked, “Could you share something about bringing up birders and naturalists?”

“Getting to be an older dad, it goes quick. One of my birder boys, Jaime, is in his early 20s now. I’ve loved sharing that with them. Some of my most rewarding outings over the years have been with them.” Gord continued, “It’s like learning birds again: seeing them learning at their pace.”

When birding with his family, he prioritizes accessible birding areas. “I can very happily do a full day Christmas Bird Count, dusk to dawn,” says Gord, but he won’t do that with kids. “It’s a bit of a stretch to take a young birder or a new birder to where birds are harder to see at the top of a 120-foot Cottonwood.” Instead, he finds accessible areas and lets is kids take the lead. “The worst is to try to force the hobby on them. It either will be or won’t be. I have six kids, and they all appreciate nature in one way or another, but two have found birding to be enjoyable. The others enjoy doing other stuff outside.”

“As you’ve been birding for decades now,” I said, “are there one or two things you’ve learned about birds and their relationship to larger habitats? Or things you’ve noticed about birds as they relate to their habitats and ecosystems—ways that birds have pointed to things beyond the birds themselves?”

“Birds are kind of an indicator species,” says Gord. “They are easier to see than creatures like small mammals. A robust bird population in a specific habitat or location probably suggests that other things are functioning as well.”

Gord mentioned changes he has seen with the increase of invasive blackberries in the Fraser Valley. “Birds that previously enjoyed it open with grass and scattered shrubs are gone,” reflected Gord. “Now the blackberries provide some habitat. But when it turns into that monoculture, you don’t find a lot of warblers and insectivores and more specialist species. The variety of habitats before blackberries offered more food sources for different insects that in turn provided a food source for birds. Since the blackberries came, there’s a lot less available food. The Song Sparrows are still pretty happy, but perhaps some of the warblers and flycatchers that were using that area a few years ago moved onto somewhere else.”

“I’ve definitely seen change in my backyard,” Gord continued. “We live in an urban setting with a lot of manicured lawns and shrubberies. But we’ve done some native planting. We’re not too worried if there’s a leaf laying on the grass; we’ll let it be. We feed the birds too. So we get a lot of birds in our small yard. They come to our yard because they don’t have a lot of other places to go. We do get species that aren’t coming for the millet and the black oil sunflower. They are there for the other habitats, like the warblers and flycatchers.”

“It wasn’t expensive,” Gord reassured me. “It depends on what your view of a beautiful yard is. It shows the power of a little bit of planting a few native shrubs. We do cut the little bit of grass we do have left. We keep the shrubs tastefully wild; we don’t have a big jungle there to annoy the neighbours. But we’ve made a travel corridor—a little place for migrant birds to work their way through.”

I asked if there are changes Gord has noticed over the last decades in the birds and habitats around.

“Marsh Wrens and Red-winged Blackbirds are the first two that came to mind that have changed. There are less of those, less breeding activity, especially Marsh Wren,” said Gord. “When birders come from the coast where they are doing a bit better and see Marsh Wren flagged [as rare on eBird] in the Fraser Valley, the say ‘Seriously?’ Yeah. They are only really at Willband Creek Park [in Abbotsford].”

On the other hand, Gord notes that some species have expanded. “I still remember seeing the first Anna’s Hummingbird show up, joining the Rufous Hummingbirds. Those visit the fringe habitat, like people’s backyards. We rarely get Rufous there any more other than the odd one,” Gord says, mentioning research that has confirmed that species’ decline.

“Of course, there are Eurasian Collared Doves,” continued Gord. “I still remember those arriving. Someone found one on a Christmas Bird Count, and Denis didn’t really know what to do with it. ‘Did it come out of a cage?’ he asked. It was sort of understood that there had been some spreading of collared doves, but we weren’t ready to accept that we had already had one here. Well, we know where that ended up.” [Note for readers: they are everywhere].

Gord continued reflecting on the increase of rare birds reports and the popularization of birding. “I wonder if there are more people birding, more knowledge, more ways of sharing knowledge. When I started we had film cameras only,” Gord says. “To send a picture anywhere, you basically had to pull it out of your wallet and show it to somebody. And it took several weeks, because you had to finish the roll of film, and develop it. Even if there is something interesting on that roll, I’m not going to rip it out of the camera and develop it. I’m going to use it all and be very careful with each snap I take, because every snap costs money.”

“Sometimes it does seem like more birds are being seen,” mused Gord, “more birds that you don’t expect to see, or at unusual numbers. Is it because there are more of us? We know what to look for, we have better ways to share or ask questions? Forty years ago you had to describe what you saw. You couldn’t pull out your phone and say, ‘This is what it sounded like, I got a recording of it, here’s a crappy picture I got.’ I think our pace of learning is faster.”

Gord mentioned the increase in Swamp Sparrow sightings in the Fraser Valley. “Swamp Sparrow is now a bird I expect to see three to four times annually in the fall or winter around here. 10-15 years ago, you were lucky to see one ever 2-3 years. Is that Swamp Sparrows increasing in numbers, or is it that you know where to look and when to look for them?” I mentioned that a similar thing happened when I lived in Creston, BC. There were few Swamp Sparrow records until they popped up in the same couple of weeks in October every year. The lack of records may have been from birders not looking in the right spot.

I asked Gord if there are other special Fraser Valley bird sightings he recalls.

“We always watch the sky for Broad-winged Hawk,” Gord said. “There’s a fairly narrow migration window, and they migrate high. This year I was huffing and puffing with the family up Flatiron Mountain. We paused, and we both looked up at the same time and... we notice when a hawk is a bit different than the usuals. This was that kind of a case. A Broad-winged Hawk we saw this fall was fun, mostly because I was there with the family. We liked that.”

“The first time seeing White-tailed Ptarmigan for my son Benny was up there too,” Gord added. “We sat down, and they were in fine form that day, walking right past all around us. Just to see how delighted he was with seeing those birds. A lot of them were already basically white. It was the first time I had seen a ptarmigan being white was, and that one sticks to mind. And having to hike four kilometres...”

“It really makes birds that you see up there more special,” I said.

“Finally,” I asked, leading into the most important question, “What’s it like to have an all-Canadian name like Gord?”

“Yeah, there’s not many of us left. I love that you asked that,” laughed Gord. “I’ve got a big smile on my face right now. When my brother who lives in the States tells his crew down there that his brother is named Gord, they love it,” Gord said. “I’m named after my grandfather, so it’s also an honour to carry that along.”

Gord added a story about his all-Canadian name. “I ran into a guy while I was hiking. I got a picture of a bear and showed him the picture. I asked if he want me to email the picture to him, and his name was Gord. I said, ‘Hey, I’m one of those too!’ It is, in my ramblings around, kind of noteworthy. But it’s definitely a bit of cliché for Canada. I do own it with pride.”

“Anything else?” I asked Gord.

“It was fun to be a part of a fun and thoughtful thing that you share with people now and again.”

Inconceivable Words I

The grammatical curmudgeon strikes

In college I kept a list of words I often confused, misused, or misspelled, organized by clusters of similar words. “Repercussions,” “ramifications,” and “implications” belonged together; I made frequent use of all of them in international politics classes. I tried to avoid confusing “complement” and “compliment”; and “imminent,” “immanent,” and “eminent.” Several times, I inexplicably wrote “emplify” in my papers, I think from mentally mashing up exemplify and employ. Thankfully, my cheat sheet kept me from repeating too many mistakes.

These days I keep a mental list of irksome words that I hear or read in the world around me. These are words that I think get overused or misused, or that obscure rather than illuminate. Communication, to me, is about clarity, getting a message across. Words are the main tools we have in this task. But they can also create sloppy semiotic ruts when repeated, defective short cuts that befuddle or confuse, or even do real harm. Some words become invested with ideological and emotional meaning—venerated abstract ideas or repulsive epithets. I like to think about how I say things to avoid getting clouded, or from taking symbolic or approximate words too seriously.

Philosophers, poets, and other writers often pick apart words and their definitions, using a loaded term to reflect on life and meaning. I am currently in a occasional book club reading a bell hooks book that gives attention to defining “love.” I’ve spent serious time reading George Grant and Jacques Ellul etymologically, philosophically, and sociologically unpack "technology” (or the slightly different French word “technique” in Ellul’s case). While I am inspired by their examples, I am not setting out to do anything so comprehensive or profound. No, I’m just annoyed at muddied waters and I’d like to clear things up. I want to see the fish!

I’m not really bothered by natural definitional drift, at least once I get used to a change. Does “begging the question” usually mean “raising the question” now? Great! Does “emo” mean about five or six different genres? Cool. “Irregardless” is just fine, regardless of its confused origins.

Instead, I’ll focus on words that I think grossly oversimplify complex things, that mean too many different things to be clear, that have drifted in ways that are conceptually unhelpful, or that are simply vague or unnecessary.

I should add that I don’t expect everyone to go around using flawless, conceptually tight grammar. It takes time and attention to focus on clarity of thought, and there are many other more important and immediate things to focus on. But I like thinking about language, and I sometimes notice fuzzy or damaging patterns in popular parlance.

The title of this column comes from a pristine moment of cinematic dialogue from The Princess Bride. Spanish swordsman Inigo Montoya, played by Many Pantinkin, delivers a riposte to Wallace Shawn’s nasal character, Sicilian criminal Vizzini, exclaiming “inconceivable!" at each surprising event.

I take Inigo Montoya’s words to be something of a life philosophy. On to the words.

“Deconstruction”

For the last decade or so, “deconstruction” has been thrown around in discussions of changing religious beliefs. The term comes from Derrida, and is used widely to parse language’s fluidity and context in philosophy and literary criticism. On a popular level, it is usually used when someone is leaving or rethinking religious belief and identity, especially from conservative forms of religion, and most especially from conservative evangelicalism.

I have two issues with this term used this way. First, it is used vaguely to mean a host of several different things, some of them overlapping, but each distinct. I think there is nearly always a better word to use. Has someone left the faith of their childhood? How about “deconversion”? Is someone unsure if they believe in God? Why not just “doubt” or “skepticism” or “disenchantment”? (This last term may come up again). Did someone just switch to a slightly different denomination? How about “change”? Did someone abandon just a few doctrines they used to hold? That just sounds like “critical thinking.” Is someone thinking critically about how their movement has treated vulnerable people or misused political influence (a very common use of the word)? “Deconstruction” could maybe work here, but I’m searching for a better term.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I think that the building metaphor of religious faith is often the wrong image, or is accurate only for a particular kind of rigid religious experience. Religious faith encompasses a lot of things, including personal and group beliefs, institutional or group belonging, morality, prayer and spiritual practice, identity. I don’t think all of these things are exactly analogous to a structure or edifice. Religious faith can include ways of life, traditions of theology and spiritual practice, and, yes, institutional or ideological structures, but also much more.

Plus the term “deconstruction” carries with it a kind of air of inevitability; that building is coming down! Do you want to move on? Sorry! You need a new building. Moving on after major religious transitions may be extremely hard and feel like building something new. Or it may be gradual, immediate, liberating, lazy, sad, neutral, or none of these.

Having gone through some kinds of religious rethinking and realigning, I don’t think the word “deconstruction” fits these experiences well. Time to try on other words.

“Liminal”

There was a time when scholars in a lot of disciplines, including in history where I did some work, were constantly talking about “liminal spaces.” This term took off in anthropology, describing situations of ambiguity and cultural spaces between or outside of defined boundaries. In most cases where I heard it, it was applied that in-between-ness in the minds or lives of historical subjects, but applied a bit liberally. I rarely found it illuminating. Does it say much that 19th-Century Methodist abolitionists exercised their agency in a liminal space? It struck me as more of a trend than a helpful turn of phrase, but perhaps I missed something.

Also, it’s all over the internet now too: pictures of dimly lit hallways and gates (or just regularly lit hallways). What a liminal time to be alive.

“Fundamentalist”

This is a case of a term with an enormous scholarly body of work becomes vague and diluted on a popular level, to the point that it causes real confusion.

Fundamentalism in scholarship describes two things:

1. A particular movement of conservative Protestants that came to prominence in the early 20th Century, centred in the US northeast and midwest, that was a fusion of theologically reactionary conservative ideas with modern innovation. The name comes from a published set of essays—The Fundamentals—that outlined what these Protestants saw as as essential doctrines against threats from modern liberalism. These “fundamentals: included biblical inerrancy, literal readings of the six-day creation in Genesis, the historical accuracy of biblical miracles, a particular end-times interpretation of the Book of Revelation, and anti-Catholicism. Fundamentalists were conservative in the sense of retrenchment to a staunch positions (some of which were more modern than classical), and some were separatists who split from less conservative denominations. But this was combined with an adaptive, mission-focused, technologically innovative, business-savvy approach to spreading the gospel. And some were not politically conservative at all (though many fundamentalists withdrew from speaking about social issues like racism and poverty, its own kind of political statement).

2. Especially after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, scholars have treated fundamentalism as a modern religious phenomenon or style that can exert influence in many different religious contexts. “Fundamentalism” in this sense often shares with the original Protestant movement that combination of modern adaptation and exaggerated conservative retrenchment. It is often tied to violent, extreme movements.

But the slow drift and accretions of a third, popular definition have eclipsed these first two more technical terms.

This picture started taking shape during the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925—the court case challenging the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. William Jennings Bryan—a fundamentalist, and one of the most left-leaning high profile US politicians of his day—gave a much-maligned defense of a literal interpretation of a six-day view of creation. Additionally, a number of Protestant denominations were split by the actions of strict, separatist fundamentalists who saw compromise with liberal ideas as intolerable. Then (in the same year as the Iranian revolution) the self-professed fundamentalist Jerry Falwell galvanized what became the new American religious right, giving the term new political weight. Overlapping pictures emerged of fundamentalists as backward, rural, ignorant, strict, moralist. judgmental, politically conservative, or many other things. Combine these with definition 2 above (violent religious extremism) and you have a recipe for a potent word, sometimes an adjective, sometimes an epithet.

Who is to know which definition someone has in mind for when they use the term? I often cannot tell. I would like to use the (definition 1) term, but it is hard when the word carries such baggage.

“Woke”

Few things prompt an involuntary internal eye-roll within me more than hearing a rant about “wokeness.”

The term arose from Black American social justice circles as a term for being aware, specifically about becoming aware of structural racism. It was adopted more widely as a kind of blanket term for being on the progressive side of a host of issues while many things were rapidly liberalizing in some circles in the US in around 2010s. And this happened, conservative media picked the term up almost right away. It became, at the time, the latest in a series of anti-liberal epithets favoured by Tucker Carlson types; think “snowflake” or “social justice warrior” (the latter sounds great to me, but I guess that sentiment isn’t shared. I also like snowflakes, but I’m ready for spring now). It didn’t take long for culture war conservatives, various other right-leaning reactionary folks, and all kinds of media pundits, to adopt it as a label to mean many things, a kind of catch-all epithet for progressive people and causes.

My issues with the word are (mainly) two-fold. First, it is the fuzzy and amorphous. Second, when it is applied, it is used to dismiss people and ideas in ways that shuts down engagement.

In the days of the ever more extreme drift rightward, a whole lot of things get called “woke.” A few uses off the top of my head: being progressive on gender and sexuality, being environmentalist, being anti-racist, being persnickety about offensive language, being sympathetic towards protests, even being Black (I’m afraid I’ve seen the term used in racist and demeaning ways). But also the term is simply applied to being moderate in an age of extremism. In a recent case, a conservative evangelical leader quoted one of the many biblical passages about welcoming sojourners and strangers, and was dismissed by those to his right as being “woke” on immigration. Needless to say, these are all very different uses of the same word.

My second problem is the implicit judgment (i.e. “woke is bad”). When so many different things, on which people may have a variety of opinions, are called “woke,” it functions as a way for the wielder of the word to not take particulars seriously. (“No point in arguing—she’s woke.”) I’ve encountered a similar line of reasoning with talk about “the system”: a big shadowy enemy that can “explain” the way things are for someone who is discontent, but is light on particular explanations.

Now, I wish there were good terms for a few things that people use “woke” to indicate. “Social progressive” is a clunky mouthful, and still overly general. I guess “virtue signalling” is a somewhat acceptable term for the kind of performative progressivism of business leaders and politicians who offer platitudes and land acknowledgements and promises that are ultimately insincere, or even provide a liberal veneer to cover over abuses. But I take issue with that term’s implication, in some cases, that virtue must be inauthentic. (Also, I much prefer this to the kind of “vice signalling” in the American Republican party right now—”outdo one another in showing cruelty,” to not quote the book of Romans).

So my plea for those inclined to call people and ideas “woke,” is to show your work. Be specific, be clear, and don’t lump so many ideas and positions into one dubious term.

“Problematic”

Turning my barbs left for the moment, I read an article somewhere once (very ethical citation of my sources, I know) arguing that “problematic” is vague as all get-out. I agree. When a scholar or reporter calls someone “problematic,” I usually imagine the worst: an abuser or a violent racist or something as extreme. But the term is also used more mundanely. Does someone have a job with a major corporation? That’s problematic. Is someone a fan of a musician with bad opinions? Also problematic. Did Simone Weil neglect to take care of herself? Problematic. Is a historical question difficult to solve? That is also problematic. It’s weird to use the same term also for someone who, say, actively supports genocide.

There are many problems in this world. I’d like to know which one someone is talking about.

And then there’s “problematize,” an even more problematic term.

“Instrumental”

If Gord Gadsden was instrumental in building the Fraser Valley birding community, it just means that he did it. This word is usually flowery excess that can be plucked away with an active voice: Gord Gadsden fostered/built/helped build community among Fraser Valley birders. No need to tell you all that he was instrumental (though maybe he plays Tenor Sax—who knows?). If you need the adjective, “vital” or “important” or “influential” or “integral” work just fine and communicate more meaning.

“Newsletter”

No news here.

Stuff of the issue

• Onomatopoeia: Slip

• Bird insult: Weebill

• Book: Anthony Bloom & Georges LeFebvre, Courage to Pray

• Highbrow takedown: “The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault” -Camille Paglia, 1992

• Lichenized fungus: Ochrolechia upsaliensis (Tundra Saucer lichen)

• Song: Jonathan Richman - “Rooming House on Venice Beach”

• Birding hotspot: Everett Sewage Lagoons, Everett, WA

-Paul