Twenty years of “My Bird Problem”

Plus, why photograph owls?

This year is the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Franzen’s “My Bird Problem” piece in the New Yorker. Birding was not part of pop culture in 2005, or something people were very open to talking about. It was a sort of taboo thing to talk about “being a birder” at a workplace, cocktail party, or while on a first date. When identified as a birder, there was a mix of shame and fear.

When the last Great American Novelist wrote about being a birder, it got some attention. It also might have given some people the confidence to start opening up about their affinity for birds. To give you a sense of the 2005 zeitgeist, here is an excerpt from “My Bird Problem.”

…in the year following my introduction to the veery, as I began to bird more often and stay out longer, I had a creeping sense of shame about what I was doing. Even as I was learning my gulls and sparrows, I took care, in New York, not to wear my binoculars on a strap but to carry them cupped discreetly in one hand, and if I brought a field guide to the Park I made sure to keep the front cover, which had the word “BIRDS” in large type, facing inward. On a trip to London, I mentioned to a friend there, a book editor who is a very stylish dresser, that I’d seen a green woodpecker eating ants in Hyde Park, and he made a face and said, “Oh, Christ, don’t tell me you’re a twitcher.” An American friend, the editor of a design magazine, also a sharp dresser, similarly clutched her head when I told her I’d been looking at birds. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” she said. “You are not going to be a bird-watcher.”

The New Yorker piece is quite an expansive article, the long-form kind rarely seen anymore. It ranges from birding to accounts of a few failed romantic relationships and grieving a parent. Franzen relates the story of seeing a potential Masked Duck at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge in south Texas. He then shares the sighting by telling a few birders on the same trail. This was the way to share an important sighting in 2005—word of mouth or maybe a few telephone calls. Nowadays people would be thumbing an entry into a local birding group chat and word would spread almost immediately. In 2005, it was a slower pace and you were lucky if a sighting might be mentioned on a message board a few days later. “Jonathan Franzen reported a Masked Duck, and we looked and looked but couldn’t find it,” someone might post after the fact.

Indeed, Franzen’s Masked Duck, um, led to some questions. There was quite a bit of concern that what he’d seen was a female Ruddy Duck, which also has striping on the face and is a more common bird. He encounters three guys “with good equipment” who asks if he’s seen anything interesting.

“Not much,” I said, “except a masked duck.”

All three began to talk at once.

“A masked duck!”

“Masked duck?”

“Where, exactly? Show us on the map.”

“You’re familiar with the ruddy duck You do know what a female ruddy looks like.”

“Are you sure it was a masked duck?”

I said that, yes, I’d seen female ruddies, we had them in Central Park, and this wasn’t a ruddy duck I said it was as if somebody had dipped two fingers in black ink and—

“Was it alone?”

“Were there others?”

“A masked duck!”

One of the men took out a pen, wrote down my name, and had me pinpoint the location on a map. His companions were already moving down the trail I’d come up.

“And you’re sure it was a masked duck,” the third man said.

“It wasn’t a ruddy,” I said.

Franzen went on with his birding and reported his sighting of a Masked Duck to the official tally at a nature center. It was a risky move, and any intermediate-to-beginner birder can relate to the trepidation when one really believes they’ve seen something interesting but has a tiny, persistent shred of doubt.

It may not come as a surprise to the readers of his sometimes-manic novels, but Franzen is still obsessing over the sighting the following day. He calls the nature center to ask if anyone had reported a Masked Duck. Still, the only sighting was his, the first all winter in fact.

Writing down people’s names, pinpointing on a paper map. The nature center tally. Some of these aspects of birding don’t really exist any more, and it’s a little sad. Birding was a much smaller hobby back then, and it really was startling to run into another birder in the field. Much of official birding was reported in the form of newsletters, magazines, and journals. It was a more tactile experience with paper checklists and a bound field guide.

Toward the end of the story, Franzen writes that he’d at least temporarily had enough of big-time birding. After several days in south Texas, he yearns to go back to his familiar environs of New York City. Still, we know Franzen has long since continued to be an avid birder and ornithological advocate.

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That leads me to the second portion of today’s post. I was just getting ready to write a piece titled, “Maybe owls shouldn’t be photographed at all” when I re-read “My Bird Problem” and the news came across about the Snowy Owls at Chicago’s Montrose Point.

Snowy Owls are regular visitors to Chicago’s lakefront. But something about these Snowy Owls caught on. Maybe it was that they were relatively easy to find. And that they stayed for several days. The owls drew numerous people from out of state, and many were eager to post high-res photos of the birds to social media. It seemed everyone was channeling their inner Marty Stouffer or Jim Fowler. Harry Potter fans thought they’d found a real-life Hedwig. Most were inexperienced birders.

Some of the posts on Facebook didn’t even make sense. It was becoming more and more exasperating reading statements from people who didn’t know much about owls, birding, or even science. In response to calls for caution, one poster wrote of the owls: “They look back at us, which means they like the attention.”

Enough already.

As I wrote last year about owl etiquette:

Ideally, you will keep your distance far enough that the owl will not notice you. If it looks at you with its “horns up” and eyes open then you should step away and cease any photography (Snowies don’t have horns, but you get the point).

And:

Caution should be used when publicly reporting the presence of an owl. Only share the information with a small group of trusted birders and avoid posting specific locations to social media or listservs.

These statements became moot when reports of the Snowy Owls made it into the news and were even picked up nationally by The Associated Press. It was still a very 2025 birding story in that social media created a self-perpetuating loop that fueled the frenzy. Again, back in 2005 these owls would have been seen by many fewer people.

So, back to my original idea for a post. Owl etiquette suggests keeping sightings quiet, meaning avoiding eBird and social media. What if we take this a step further and avoid photographing owls altogether? There are plenty of photos of owls already out in the world. Is there any need to photograph them any more? If you see an owl, take a look through binoculars or a scope and enjoy it for a few moments—at a distance. Then make yourself scarce.

Am I naive to think that people could see an owl and NOT photograph it—or for that matter, post it to social media—in 2025? If we can make standards about not disturbing owls generally, why not expand it to a new norm around not photographing them at all? This may be impossible at scale, but perhaps it’s an approach I will utilize moving forward.