H is for Helen Macdonald’s Binos
Photo: Aditi Kini
Truth be told, I’m not much of a birder. There’s a reason I study carnivores instead of, say, corvids—cougars and black bears are more night owls like me. When a brilliant Vermont sunrise beamed through my eyelids at 6am, however, I felt an acute case of FOMO that prompted me to reach for my phone. Was my cohort at Bread Loaf still planning to birdwatch at 7, just as we’d done the morning before? Head propped on my pillow, I read Hai-Dang’s confirmation email with enough groggy gusto to spark a supine stretch—but it was the message from Helen Macdonald that really sealed the deal.
Sorry, friends, I’m going to sleep in, said Helen in so many words, reporting that they were “made of dust and spider webs” after a rough night. In capital letters, they then wrote, I HAVE BINOCULARS, and offered them up as loaners. “They’re under the broom by the front door.”
Okay, so the acclaimed author of Vesper Flights and H is for Hawk—which has long been perched high on my list of favorite memoirs—was willing to share the very same binos they use to worship raptors and other winged beauties at home in Great Britain. If birds are their muse, I thought, then their binoculars are the magic portal. I threw on my clothes and flew up the sidewalk to the historic building that Helen aptly described as a steamboat.
And there they were, just like Helen had promised: a pair of Swarovskis (of course), nested like a chick behind the straw broom just inside the doorway. I’d found the hidden treasure! If someone had told me when I was reading H is for Hawk a decade ago that one day I’d be wearing Helen’s binoculars around my neck and sauntering into a meadow to birdwatch at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, I probably would have laughed and said sure, next I’ll be hiking the PCT in Cheryl Strayed’s boots.
Now a bit giddy, I reached down to loop the strap around my wrist—then paused to reconsider the responsibility I’d be taking on with these binoculars. What if I drop them, or lose them in the woods? Do I want to be THAT person…again? A few years back, I had borrowed my husband’s Leicas—a special graduation gift from his cousin when he earned his PhD—to scan for orcas from the shore of San Juan Island in the Salish Sea. I’d put the Leicas down on a boulder to snap a few photos, and, horribly, forgot to grab them before I walked away. I returned less than 5 minutes later to find that they had vanished.
Alas, no such trauma awaited me at Bread Loaf, and birding with Helen’s binos was everything I’d dreamed it would be. Red-winged blackbirds, winter wrens, ovenbirds, a spirited merganser in flight—all avian commoners, perhaps, but their feathers flashed fire through those enchanted field glasses, which made the rounds in our group like a golden egg.
