The Audubon Name Problem
6FPS V5#12: December 11, 2023
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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.
Happy Holidays to all of you!
As I write this, the sun is coming up well after I wake up in the morning, I’m about to go get the tree and trimmings out of storage, and I’m starting at the end of the year and pondering both how I’ve gotten to today, and what I see as I peer into the mists hiding the future.
November was a pretty quiet month for me. The vertigo challenges continue; I have some specialized tests scheduled shortly and waiting for those has slowed down my work with the specialist, but he strongly encouraged me to experiment with my medication dosages to see if I could improve things. I’ve learned a lot doing that, but the side effects have not always been great. I must say I’m glad I waited until I retired to start this process, because it would have been difficult at times to be productive. At other times, things have been a lot better than they were, too. I think I’m starting to figure out what the dosages should be, but this last month has confirmed to me I was right to engage with the specialist on this.
As a result, November was a fairly slow month. I did get some work done organizing the shop and garage, but not as much as I’d hoped. On the less fun days, things were a lot more sedentary, but I have put a good number of hours into Starfield, which I continue to enjoy playing. Diablo IV has complete fallen off my playlist, and I did decide to try out Baldur’s Gate via Steam on my Macbook Pro laptop, and on a technical and game design level, it worked well and I’m impressed with the game — but after about 30 hours I realized it just wasn’t clicking and I didn’t care what happened next, so I’ve put it on hold for now. I’ll probably give it a fresh start in a month or so and try again. It’s a fascinating setup, and I honestly can’t tell you why it just doesn’t generate any enthusiasm from me. But it does, so I’ll do something else instead for now.
For those wondering about the case I was called in for jury duty on (and dismissed from), here’s a news piece on it. It took them over a month to select the jury, and they expect the trial to go into at least February, and it includes multiple murders, drugs, a local biker gang, and more fun than a person could hope for. I’m glad to not be on that jury, to be honest.
We’ve settled in with the winter bird, I think. The varied thrushes are regular visitors now; they are insect eaters most of the year, but will shift to seeds and nuts when it gets cold enough for the insects to go dormant, so they don’t visit the feeders in warmer months. we have our flocks of juncos, Stellar’s Jays, Spotted Towhees, a few Song Sparrows, and the Mourning Doves. We’re seeing both Sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper’s Hawks visiting at times, and every once in a while we find the feathers indicating they caught a mourning dove, and the Barred Owl is around. I haven’t seen any of the special winter sparrows yet: no Fox, and no White-Throated.
General birding has been slow, other than the trip to Ridgefield, while I try to make the vertigo a bit more consistantly good. I do have hopes that investing the energy into this now will make it easier to get out and about later, but I’m not pushing to run around and explore at the moment.
Thinking about Photography
One thing I have been doing is pondering my photography a lot. The trip to Olympic National Park and my lack of any enthusiasm for pulling out the camera bothered me, but then my trip to Ridgefield NWR with the cranes and geese and the winter birds just made me happy for days afterwards.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least for right now, I need to stop trying to force myself to go shoot landscape images. I’ve fallen into a trap (again) I call “should vs want” — I keep trying to make myself look for landscape images because “I should do this”, not because “I want to do this”. And the results tend to be poor and frustrating, which discourages me from grabbing the camera.
Going out on my refuge bird trip, though, reignited the aspects of photography I love and really made me start actively planning future trips — laurie and I will day trip out to Ridgefield together sometime in the next few weeks, and while longer trips are on hold while I work on the vertigo, I have a few I’m planning out.
It took taking these two trips close to each other to really put in focus to me that it’s okay for me to not “have” to be a landscape photographer. Going into 2024 mostly with a focus on bird photography will help me get back to enjoying photography and using it as a relaxation tool, rather than viewing it as yet another chore I “should” be doing.
And the thing is — there have been times when I have taken some landscape shots I’m pretty happy with this last year. But when I’ve tried to force it to happen, of course, the results haven’t been there.
There are still aspects of wide angle imaging I want to explore, but for 2024, I’ve given myself permission to make that an area to experiment and play in and not one to set expectations and goals for. We’ll see how that goes, and where (if anywhere) it leads me.
The local Audubon Chapter that I support, Kitsap Audubon, has announced it’s considering a name change to move away from the negative history associated with the Audubon Name. I’ve written about this in the past, and I’ve cut off financial donations to the Audubon National organization because of their decision to stick with the name (among other reasons, to be honest. It’s a troubled organization and the funds are better used supporting local and regional groups).
The local chapter is currently soliciting feedback from members on the idea of the name change. I wrote the following and submitted it to them, and I thought I’d share it here:
Thanks for considering a name change for the organization. It’s a tough, complicated choice ahead of you, and no matter which way you choose, you’ll upset people.
I wanted to write and offer my thought this is something the organization should do. Especially in light of the AOS decision to change bird names (something I also support) National Audubon’s choice to NOT change the name increasingly looks like a disaster for them. For naming, I’ll suggest considering the “Alliance” naming being adopted by a number of chapters as opposed to Seattle’s “Connect”; I just don’t think the latter resonates with people as well.
The short version of why I encourage this change: as long as the organization is named after Audubon, who was a fraud and a nasty man and a slave owner, we exclude large groups of people from even considering becoming members. If we want birding and the organization to be open to all and a diverse and welcoming organization we need to put this past behind us. Words matter and we are judged by the words we choose to use and define ourselves by.
The longer version: Before moving here to Kitsap a couple of years ago, I lived in Silicon Valley working in high tech. For a number of years I was involved with Santa Clara Valley Audubon in many ways, founding their outreach committee and running the birdathons for a couple of years as well as leading group outings. One of the things I’d always do out birding was stop and talk to others I saw while out, and often, I’d bring up SCVAS and suggest they look into memberships.
On a couple of occasions, the response was blunt — I was asked why they should join a group that honors someone who enslaved their ancestors. There’s no good answer to that question.
It’s easy, if you are white, to not see just how offensive that name is to some people. Once it’s burned into your head as clearly as it was for me, it’s impossible to not see why it’s important we do this. I regret it took having those conversations for me to see just how important this change is to help make Audubon organizations welcoming to all.
The last few years I was involved with SCVAS diversity and outreach were big issues we were grappling with. The name change was one of the things we started grappling with even then; I saw a couple of months ago SCVAS has also chosen to explore a name change as well.
The change will be hard. It’ll upset people. But until it happens, there are groups of people we aren’t serving and we are telling aren’t welcome in the group, and to some degree, aren’t welcome in birding. It’s a tough choice, but as the AOS showed in their decision to fix bird naming, it’s a necessary one.
(BTW, Alvaro Jaramillo, who was on the committee that made the recommendations that AOS considered and approved, did a deep dive into the complexity and challenges they faced getting to this decision on his “Birdling Life” podcast. I recommend listening to it, as I think it fleshes out the choices and challenges decisions like this have. I am thrilled (and honestly a bit surprised) that AOS went all in on this change, but Alvaro does a good job of showing that a partial fix was worse than doing nothing at all.)
Happy to talk further on this if you wish, just grab me.
From seeing what people are saying about the growing number of chapters looking into (or choosing to change) their name to get away from the bad legacy of the Audubon name, older birders tend to prefer leaving things as is, and younger birders are more likely to support the change. This doesn’t surprise me at all. For me I have always felt the name change was a good idea, but once I ran into that first black birder for whom the name meant nothing but anger and pain by its use, it’s been impossible for me to not continue to advocate for this change. It can be easy to not see the importance of things like this when it doesn’t impact your directly, but that conversation galvanized my worldview on just how critical these changes are for not just the organizations, but birding in general, given that to many outside the activity, the name Audubon defines birdwatching — and to the large non-white populations, can often make even considering getting involved in birdwatching a non-starter.
I personally wish every birder could have a chance to sit down and have that chat with that black birder the way I did. If you do and come away from it still feeling like the status quo is okay, I’ll respect your opinion (but disagree with it), but I do believe that very few people would walk away from that chat not feeling that it is time for the Audubon name to fade into the dust of history.
As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday.
I’ve finished processing my images from my trip to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, and I’m pretty happy with the results. Take a look at the blog post for more details.
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