The summer after my first year at university, I worked in Panama as a research assistant for an evolutionary biologist. We were based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, which was formed in 1913 when the Chagres River was dammed to help make the Panama Canal. The buildings, clustered on the edge of the reservoir, house a few dozen rotating scientists and...
Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour, the ‘nakedness of their seeking’ and ‘so-public twitching hunger’, as Jonathan Franzen, a birder himself, has put it, mysterious and, to me, somewhat off-putting.