In Birding to Change the World (Ecco, Feb.), University of Vermont ornithologist O’Kane reflects on birding and instilling a love of nature in her students.
You describe running a program that pairs elementary and middle schoolers with college students, who teach the kids about birds while walking nature trails together. What makes the program so popular?
It’s the chance to connect with the natural world and the connections the younger children form with their mentors and with each other. Face-to-face relationships and time spent walking together have been devalued, yet when I take my students and the kids outside, I see how they ignite each other’s passions. Every semester, some of my college students find their courage and try something new because of the child they walk with every week. This semester, it’s a college sophomore who’s translating nature lore into Nepalese to help the little girl she mentors. The girl never said a word and often hid under the table before we took her outside. Now she’s turning into a chatterbox.
Have political attacks on education affected your belief that schooling can serve as a transformative force for social change?
When you don’t value educators and education, you don’t value children and their future. But I think these attacks will backfire, and they make me determined to teach in a way that empowers young people. I see a hunger in students for reading, learning, and real relationships with their professors. I hold office hours in the university café and nearly every week I’m surrounded. Some afternoons we don’t even talk much. They just want to be together in a community.
The book details your successful efforts to save Warner Park in Madison, Wis., from development. Were you surprised by the resistance you met?
I was. Madison has a fabulous parks system and more ecologists per capita than most cities, but the inability to see that Warner Park could be a bird nursery—not just a baseball stadium and fireworks launching pad—was a blind spot. It dates to the biblical idea of dominion and how we separate ourselves from “nature.” And that’s another reason I love birds: they are everywhere, and they defy our notions of what nature is, where it should be, and how it should behave.
You encourage humans to learn from birds. What characteristics would you most like to see humans emulate?
Birds fight, sometimes to the death, but when you depend on wings to survive, it’s a dumb idea to fight physically. Their main defense of territories is by singing. Loudly. I belong to a community choir. Four years ago, we sang music from the Baltic states and learned how hundreds of thousands of people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania raised their voices in a “singing revolution” to win independence from Soviet control. That sounds like an avian strategy to me. I’d love to see massive human sing-offs, instead of die-offs and slaughter.
