Free as an Uncategorized Bird...

and the further adventures of the Taint Hammer

I enjoyed Christian Cooper’s excellent memoir, Better Living Through Birding, which taught me many things. One of which is that I am not a birder.

I love birds, don’t get me wrong. Gifted a Bird Buddy camera-enabled feeder by my friend Lynn, I have been feeding the backyard menagerie for months now. I have regular visits from a blue jay, a cardinal couple, house finches aplenty, mourning doves, five fat Philly pigeons that Sarah likens to the Goodfeathers of Animaniacs infamy, red-winged blackbirds, grackles galore, rare visits by red-bellied and downy woodpeckers. Sarah makes fun of the beatific face that I get when observing these creatures.

But I can’t imagine myself sitting beneath a tree for an hour, waiting for a warbler to show itself. I’ve been lucky enough to see multiple red-bellied woodpeckers chasing one another around a tree, crows harassing a red-tailed hawk, songbirds chasing a hawk with a bird in its talons, a sandhill crane exploding out of the reeds, nighthawks buzzing around lampposts and hunting mosquitos like bats, and bald eagles and ospreys snagging fish from the water effortlessly. I don’t have photos of any of it, but I remember it all. And I don’t need a life list to keep be interested.

I’ve always been a fox, and not a hedgehog. Recap: “A fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”¹ This can be paraphrased to mean different things, but I use it to mean that I Contain Multitudes. I dive deep, learn much, and keep that knowledge, but I usually move on to something different before I can call myself a scholar of any one subject. And that’s made life rather wonderful, in my opinion.

I’ve been paying more attention to plants, as well as animal tracks, on my hikes and explorations. At Ceres Park—where there’s a set of bike jump ramps that made my every orifice pucker in terror at the very sight of it—I came upon what I think is the shell of a turkey egg, and medicinal plant called Indian Pipe. These were both on one of the many trails, and captivated me for some time.

Ceres Park Plants and (Wild) Ramps

At Aerohaven, the abandoned Pine Barrens airport that I’ve written about in detail before, there are prickly pear cactuses in bloom. I’ve seen the cacti before, but this is the first time they’ve been in full bloom and so beautiful. Something about these spiked paddles and their yellow flowers juxtaposed with the ruins made me linger there for a long time, thinking how nature begins reclaiming the land that we take for our own the moment we walk away.

The prickly pear flowers of Aerohaven

I’ve never been good at being just one thing. Sometimes people don’t want you to be you, but their idea of you. Lauren Hough wrote a very funny post on what her dates expect her to be. In her words:

I don’t know why I can’t have a descriptor without making it my entire goddamn identity, or why I should want to.

Fun Size

Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided being a birder, or an obsessive collector, or a music fan who must categorize every band, or really, an otaku, anorak, or nerd about any one thing. I’m a nerd about nature, science, and history in general, but when it comes to encyclopedic knowledge… that’s why we have encyclopedias. I don’t need to be a walking one. If that’s your thing, VERVET—ZYZZYX, you do you. (I did love opening our Encyclopedia Brittanica to a random page and learning whatever I landed upon.)

That being said, some of my best friends have encyclopedic knowledge. One of them is Bobby Rivers, who’s been a VH1 host, and remains one of my favorite film and TV critics. I met him on Twitter, and miss him, so I Googled and found he was a guest on a podcast recently, where he talks about everything from fighting over cheese cubes with Bette Davis to showing a racist employer just how good his chops are, when he paraphrased the immortal words of Johnny Paycheck and left for much greener pastures. It’s a great listen:

I reached out to Bobby, because Arnold Schwarzenegger told me to. On his Daily Pump newsletter, he has focused on reaching out to friends you’ve lost touch with, as an act of care, self-care included. We are social animals. Apes, to be exact. When I was at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, the survivalist teacher who had been on the TV series Alone² mentioned that the solitude was one of the toughest aspects. And yet, we often crave solitude, at least in theory. We idolize the mountain man, the lone hero, the hermit, the pilgrim at tinker creek, or Thoreau in his cabin.³ But we know them because in most cases, they come seeking human contact in some form. Writing with the intention to be read counts! There’s nothing wrong with needing to be alone for a time, especially with nature. Time with nature can be healing.

So can time with other people, especially friends. Don’t neglect that.

As a former Twitter addict, I’ve embraced the manifesto of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation and have been reaching out and touching someones who I have lost touch with. I’ve also purchased print subscriptions to the Philly Inquirer, National Geographic, and Smithsonian magazine to assist in reducing my screen time and doom-scrolling news. I’ve nudhzed Sarah into a weekly drink with friends, and I’m trying to get a weekly lunchtime coffee going with another friend.

I love chatting with you in the comments, but if you’d like to correspond via postcard or letter, send one to the P.O. Box at the bottom of this email. I promise to respond if you include a return address. That’s not to say I eschew all social media. I am active on Instagram. You get the “best of” my nature photographs here, but if you need a positive follow, I’m all about nature photos, music, and putting Bird Buddy feeder camera videos to music. My latest fave is this aggressive downy woodpecker:

Tommy Salami

Tommy Salami on Instagram: “Even the littlest woodpecker has a jackhammer for a face and will fight you. LOOK AT THE FEATHER IN HIS BEAK #birdbuddy #downywoodpecker”

July 7, 2023

If you hear about a hairy goofball on a turquoise fat tire bike crashing through the Camden County woods, honking a fox horn to clear the squirrels off the trail, it might be me.

1. I jokingly called myself a “foxhog” a while back, but I know I’m all fox. Always learning.

2. Matt Corradino, of Mount Victory Camp. He was on season 8.

3. Thoreau sent his laundry home to be washed, to be fair. He was honest about it. We’ve lionized him into a false lone hero when he was merely stepping outside the crush of town life to experience nature.