Awaiting the Wood Thrush

Although I cannot recall when I first learned to recognize the song of the Wood Thrush, I think it must have been a friend who was an accomplished naturalist who taught me to do so. I am keenly aware that well into my 30s, I still had no notion that there was such a thing as a Wood Thrush, nor had I learned its lovely song. In the two decades since becoming acquainted with it, I have had the delight of hearing the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) in a variety of wooded settings, from Minnesota to New Jersey, on bluffs overlooking the Missouri River and on similar bluffs above the Shenandoah. And once—just once—I have seen one.

That was in Concord, Massachusetts, where I was visiting a wildlife refuge in the days prior to taking students there for a field exercise in natural history. How I came to be doing that belongs to the story of how my colleague John Cuddeback and I came to write an introductory textbook in zoology, Nature’s Beautiful Order.[1] My hope in sharing that story is that some of the lessons about nature that I have learned along the way will be helpful to others.

My childhood and youth were spent in an urban setting inside the Capital Beltway. Even there, nature’s attraction could be felt. Perhaps it was from my mother’s ability to turn a homely collection of weeds into a beautiful arrangement or from my grandfather’s carefully tended perennial beds that I came to have sufficient regard for nature’s beauty to sway my choice of an undergraduate major. And how thrilled I was when my professor opened his introductory botany class with the declaration: “Biology is a liberal art.” I am grateful to that professor for a teaching style that was full of wonder and also for a decisive intervention in my course of studies. I had planned to spend a summer working as a research assistant at an arboretum, and he wisely counseled me to take more coursework at biological field stations before beginning research projects. In the book of nature, it is careful reading that is repaid with lasting gains in knowledge, and he knew that I needed longer elementary studies before I would be ready for advanced ones.

After two summers of coursework at field stations, I had the blessing of an internship under the direction of an ecologist who put me to work sorting collections of specimens from the streams running off the west slope of the Rocky Mountains. With Merritt and Cummins’s Introduction to the Aquatic Insects of North America as my constant companion and with dissecting tools in my hands, I slowly learned the differences between this and that kind of Mayfly and Caddisfly. The previous summer, I had done similar work in field botany, identifying plants using the keys in Strausbaugh and Core’s Flora of West Virginia. Together, the studies of those two summers were a lasting cure for skepticism. The work of attending to minute differences and allowing barely-perceptible samenesses to declare themselves to me through the lens of a dissecting microscope—with timely pointers from those more experienced than I—brought me a vivid appreciation of the truth that nature is eminently knowable.

For another sort of learning about nature, I am indebted to a professor of English literature, Michael Aeschliman. St. John Henry Newman once wrote of one of his mentors that he had “taught me to weigh my words,”[2] and Dr. Aeschliman did something similar by introducing me to the great Classical and Christian tradition of recta ratio, as he liked to say, right reason. It was under his tutelage that I first read C. S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man and heard his stirring call for a “regenerate science” that would “not even do to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole.”[3] 

 I realized that it was nature, and not science, that my students first needed to know better. 

I did not then know what such a regenerate science could be, but I was aware that my own knowledge of nature was still woefully deficient. Perhaps it was that sense of my own ignorance that carried me through the next great crossroad in my studies. I had been accepted to a doctoral program in ecology and understood what a good opportunity it was. Yet when I visited the campus, I was shown their computer labs and heard the graduate students talk about their models and the remote sensors that fed them with data. At the tour’s end, I expressed my confusion to the program’s director. To this day, I remain grateful for his candid response: “If you want to be on the cutting edge of ecology,” he said, “this program can put you there. But if you want to get your feet wet, you should study forestry. We go into the field to calibrate our satellites.” That was all I needed to hear to choose a program in the history and philosophy of science instead.

Reading Lewis had set me free from the dogma of reductionism but not yet from the reductionist habit of mind. Classes in genetics and cell biology, among others, had inculcated the assumption that the larger and more complex body is to be understood from the perspective of the smaller and simpler one. And all of my biology courses had taken the evolutionary story to be not merely true but also primary and complete. The answer to a question such as “Why are there horses?” was simple: because there had been hippocampi before. It took years of reading and discussing the works of Aristotle to appreciate that our adventure in knowing should begin with—and never lose sight of—the naturally existing wholes that we see around us. Water as we find it is far more interesting than the hydrogen and oxygen molecules into which it can be separated, to say nothing of the lowly atomic particles into which those elements can be pulverized. Only after many years would I come to read Philip Anderson’s decisive rebuttal of reductionism, “More Is Different,”[4] but when I did, I saw that Aristotle had been there all along. Similarly, the animals and plants that we live with are better known to us than their ancestors from bygone eras. And so to say, for instance, that birds have evolved from reptiles may help us to appreciate the scales on their legs, but it does not explain why the song of the Wood Thrush should be as it is. Aristotle’s intuition was surely correct: there is indeed an explanation to be given in terms of the flourishing of the organism, but such explanations border upon the ineffable and divine: “Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in nature’s works in the highest degree, and the end for which those works are put together and produced is a form of the beautiful.”[5]

It was to Aristotle’s wisdom about nature that I sought to introduce my students when I was subsequently asked to teach a one-semester course “Introduction to Scientific Thought.” It must have been in the second or third attempt at that imposing task that I realized that it was nature, and not science, that my students first needed to know better. Thus began the outdoor exercises—“tree labs,” I called them—from which grew my appreciation for the birds of the Shenandoah Valley. And then, on one fine morning in late April, the Wood Thrush returned from his annual migration, and for the first time, I heard him. His flutelike notes spiraled upward toward his concluding trill, and my life as a knower was changed forever.

It is at the very outset of Fides et Ratio that St. John Paul II testified, “All that is the object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life.” This truth is preeminently meaningful with respect to what we know by divine faith. We may not think about it when we recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, but we surely pray that, like the early martyrs, if we were to be asked what we most firmly believe and hold to be true, we too would say, “I am a Christian.” The truth that God’s love has become the object of our knowledge through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (cf. 1 John 4:9) is indeed the very central and foundational part of our lives. Yet it is good that our lives as knowers should have various ornaments and accessories, so many glorious accidents—like the memory of a visit to Chartres Cathedral or the view from Mt. Adams—that even if seen only once we carry with us with thanksgiving throughout our lives. How much more, then, do we value our apprehension of the being of things that surround us and accompany us down through the years? What a pure and innocent joy it is to be able to recognize the American Robin (Turdus migratorius), the Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis), or their cousin the Wood Thrush, and to await their return, with their songs, every spring.

A few years after I initiated the tree labs and was rewarded with the song of the elusive Wood Thrush, I had the opportunity to design and teach an “Introduction to Natural History” for liberal arts students. It was an extended adventure in learning for me, for the benefits of which I remain grateful. Amidst those studies and labors, John Cuddeback asked me if I would like to join him in providing a curriculum for an online academy that wanted a science course that would combine an Aristotelian approach to nature with the reading of classical texts like John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography. From that labor, Nature’s Beautiful Order eventually came. It has been a consolation to hear from many of its readers over the years that the book has proven to be a friendly and encouraging introduction to the study of nature.

Surely it is a tragedy that science instruction today should be so dry and filled with rote learning, and that it should be handed down in a technical vocabulary foreign to our everyday use of the English language. Tragic, too, is its preoccupation with the knowledge of things that cannot be perceived except with the help of sophisticated instruments or known at all without the mediation of experiments and the theories they test. Are we standing on the shoulders of giants? Or are we trying to hover in midair without the necessary wings? It is not necessary for every student of physics to repeat every one of Galileo’s and Newton’s experiments: that would be an impractical pedagogy and would likely frustrate as many as it would delight. Yet the principle adduced by St. Thomas Aquinas, that the order of learning for each of us as knowers follows the order of discovery for the human race as a whole, is well worth keeping in mind. And not merely so that our ideas may be clear and rooted in experience, although that is a signal merit. But also because of the joy of learning a new truth about nature for ourselves by repeating the experience that had first taught it to its original discoverer, or the joy of recognizing an animal or plant that we had not previously known.

As I write, the Bluebirds and Robins in our neighborhood are establishing their territories and selecting their mates, and I can tell that they are because I am hearing them singing more frequently and more insistently. Their cousin, the Wood Thrush, will join them after another few weeks. I know to listen for his song as the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, another herald, approaches. To hear it is a joy worth waiting for.