04-27: Becoming a Birder, Unintentionally, with Julia Zarankin
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The path to becoming a birder is as much as about coming to grips with what is happening to you as it is about finding increasing joy in birding. We all may end up in a similar place but our paths to that place are as individual as we are. Toronto writer and lecturer Julia Zarankin didn't mean to become a birder, but 10 years on here she is. She recounts this odd journey in a new memoir, Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, out in September in Canada and in October in the United States. She joins host Nate Swick to about how she came to call herself a birder.
Also, Nate wants you to normalize misidentifying birds.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Burning Association. |
| 0:10.0 | I am your host, Nate Swick. |
| 0:12.0 | I know that 2020 as a year has been pretty garbage for any number of reasons. |
| 0:19.0 | I mean, just pick one. For birders, the cancellation |
| 0:22.7 | of birding festivals and the inability or difficulty of traveling far beyond your immediate |
| 0:26.9 | location has to be up there. No bird club meetings, no birdwalks. They'll understand some |
| 0:32.7 | bird clubs are waiting back into that pool. For the record, I'd be curious to hear how you plan on doing it. So |
| 0:38.3 | send me an email at podcast.A.org. And that's to say nothing of everything else that is going |
| 0:44.5 | on. But for the American Birding podcast, there's a small ray of light this week, a small |
| 0:51.1 | victory, because this week is episode 27 for the year. And if you have been following |
| 0:56.9 | us in the past, you know that until spring of this year, we had a bi-weekly schedule, |
| 1:02.2 | and that 26 was the maximum number of episodes you could fit in a year with a bi-weekly schedule, |
| 1:08.7 | and we have beaten it this week. So that's pretty exciting. |
| 1:14.2 | Part of the reason we've been able to keep this schedule up is because John and I are sitting at |
| 1:17.7 | home, and once things begin to open up and festivals start happening again, fingers crossed, |
| 1:23.3 | next year, I thought I'm being honest, I think it will be summer before we get back to any |
| 1:27.7 | sort of real normalcy. We'll have to be a little bit creative about how we keep this weekly |
| 1:31.8 | schedule rolling, but I think we can do it. I've got ideas. On the show today, I have some |
| 1:38.8 | thoughts about misidentifying birds and why it is a good thing or at least not a scary thing and how people |
| 1:48.0 | got me or missed me when I tried to make this case but first from the outside the burning world |
| 1:53.9 | can be an exceptionally weird place full of odd if endearing people those of us who are in it, and I mean deeply in it, |
| 2:03.3 | are probably unaware of exactly how strange it can be. Enter writer Julia Zeranke, who has a new book |
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