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Episode 86—Noah Strycker on his Big Year in Birding, Community, and What to Leave Out
131 Plays7 years ago
"My best advice to people who want to write in any capacity is just do it. Get started. It doesn't matter where you publish," says Noah Strycker, author of Birding Without Borders.
My guest today for Episode 86 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is Noah Strycker, author of Birding without Borders: An Obsession, A Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bird-Related Discussions
00:00:00
Speaker
It's an interesting question, isn't it? What kind of bird you would be if you could be a bird or what your favorite bird is? It's awfully revealing as Noah Stricker, author of Birding Without Borders, can attest. Well, there's two separate questions here. There is what is your favorite bird? And there is if you were to be a bird, which bird would you most like to be? And I have two different answers to that. My favorite bird, first of all,
00:00:30
Speaker
is the turkey vulture i think that turkey vultures are awesome they have an amazing sense of smell they're incredibly elegant the way they fly you know it's the classic like cartoon vulture with no feathers on its head that sticks on a cactus waiting for things to die that's a turkey vulture they
00:00:48
Speaker
have an amazing digestive system. They can apparently process even things like anthrax spores in their gut. And by the time it goes out the back end, it's completely sterilized. You could use turkey vulture excrement as hand sanitizer if you really wanted to. And they kind of do, they excrete down their own legs to disinfect them after they've walked around on rotting carcasses to get the bacteria off. Anyway, I think the turkey vultures are amazing, but
00:01:18
Speaker
If I were to come back as a bird in another life, I don't think I would want to be a turkey vulture.
Noah's Fascination with Birds
00:01:25
Speaker
I think I would actually most rather be some type of albatross. And for me, the wandering albatross is probably my, I don't want to say like spirit animal. That sounds a little touchy feely, but
00:01:40
Speaker
If I were to be a bird, I'd love to be a wandering albatross. They live a long time. They live maybe even up to 100 years, at least 60 years or so as far as we could tell so far from research. They fly millions of miles over the course of their lifetime because they just drift on the breeze around the Southern Ocean. You see them.
00:01:59
Speaker
crossing the Drake Passage between Argentina and Antarctica. There's always wandering albatrosses circling the ship. They have the biggest wingspan of any bird in the world. It's about 12 feet from wingtip to wingtip. And they just seem to live this incredibly romantic lifestyle in the sweeping sense of the word, where the whole world is there, you know, available to them. They live mostly on the ocean. And so they're
00:02:30
Speaker
sometimes spending years at a time far from the site of land. They're the most monogamous birds in the world, as far as we can tell, at least socially. They have a divorce rate, if you will, as low as 0.1%.
00:02:46
Speaker
I got to visit Wandering Albatrosses at their nesting colony on South Georgia Island last year for the first time and I was just blown away. When you get up close to them they have no fear of people because they don't have land predators and so you can literally stand right next to one and it's nest and how much physical presence they have up close like that and the way they take care of their chicks and their mates is just very inspiring to me.
00:03:16
Speaker
Taking a page at a Jeopardy!s Playbook. Hey, my guest today, as you have already heard, is Noah Stricker for episode 86 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. He's the author of Birding Without Borders, An Obsession, A Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World, published by Putin, Mifflin, Harcourt,
00:03:39
Speaker
this is the show where I speak to the best artists about creating works of non-fiction leaders in the worlds of narrative journalism memoir essay radio and documentary film where I tease out origins habits and routines so that you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work you've already heard how Noah connects with these lovely little critters
00:04:06
Speaker
and knowledge of them runs real deep. His quest to see the most birds in a single year yielded a world record of over 6,000 birds while traversing every continent.
Noah's Journey into Birding and Writing
00:04:19
Speaker
In this episode, he talks about how he got so obsessed with birds, how he chose which scene stayed in the book versus which ones got cut. It's a fairly lean book, so you can imagine that he had to make a lot of tough decisions.
00:04:33
Speaker
and not being a very fast writer, and not overthinking the process of writing, sort of lowering that barrier of entry. So the bookstore I work at, Tsunami Books in Eugene, Oregon, has several signed first printings of Birding Without Borders, because Noah is actually a Eugene native.
00:04:54
Speaker
visit tsunamibooks.org, click on shop in the toolbar, and add as many birding without borders in your cart as you like. Free shipping anywhere in America. Not bad for a sign first printing if you ask me.
00:05:09
Speaker
The link will also be in the show notes, and no, I don't get any kickbacks. This is just a good thing, a good way to support an independent bookstore and get yourself a rare copy of the book. Signed, first, printing. I had some goodies to offer, but I'll wait until the end of the show. Please enjoy episode 86 with Noah Stricker.
00:05:39
Speaker
You know, how did you get into birding on such a deep and almost like sort of like deep emotional level? When did you first have those connections with the hobby that turned into really like a vocation too? I got into birds in fifth grade. I went to Oak Hill Elementary School in Eugene and my teacher put a bird feeder on our classroom window.
00:06:07
Speaker
and she'd stop class every time a new bird showed up and make us try to identify it. And I thought it was super cool. We had evening growth peaks and purple finches and western bluebirds around the school. And so I kind of started trying to figure out how to identify them. And I don't think any of the other kids in my class thought it was very interesting at all. You never know where that spark is going to come from. And for me, I was that teacher.
00:06:33
Speaker
I went home and told my mom and dad, hey, we have to build some birdhouses and put them up in our yard. And they were like, what? And it kind of went from there. It's a slippery slope. Right. Yeah. And what was it? What do you think it was about about the species itself that just really resonated with you at such a young age that and carried you through your adolescence and into your early adulthood?
00:07:00
Speaker
Well, I've always been a collector of things. When I was younger, I collected coins and stamps and rocks and business cards and anything else I could make a collection of. And I more recently asked some of my birder friends whether they were collectors when they were younger too, and most of them say yes. And so I think birding somehow appeals to that collection and sorting instinct that some of us have.
00:07:26
Speaker
And so that may be what got me into it initially, because it's almost like you're collecting different species of birds when you try to figure out how to identify them. More recently, I'm interested in birds because of their behavior and their vocalizations and how they connect us with different parts of the environment and nature. And there's all these different aspects to birding that I think keeps you interested at different points in your lifetime. And I like that about it. There's all these different ways to approach it.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And do you remember early on, like a particular bird that like truly captivated your imagination? Like, you know, one of those truly charismatic ones that was like, oh, wow, that's kind of like a trophy sighting.
Memorable Birding Experiences
00:08:12
Speaker
One of the first bird sightings I can remember is when I was 13 or 14.
00:08:20
Speaker
My dad took me over to Malheer Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon, which is still one of my favorite bird spots ever. I'm going there this weekend, in fact. And we went to the refuge headquarters, which is a famous birding spot. This was in the fall, in early October, I think, and there were
00:08:43
Speaker
some birders milling around the headquarters when I got there and they saw me walk up and they said, oh, have you seen the barred owl? And I said, no, I've never seen a barred owl in my life. And they said, well, let me show you where it is. And they took me over and sure enough in a hedge in the corner, there was a barred owl, which is pretty big. It's at least a foot tall. It's got these watery black eyes and it was not a bird that
00:09:10
Speaker
anybody would ever expect to see it now here but it's just that kind of place that attracts rare species and just as I walked up a great horned owl swooped in and in broad daylight these two big owls started fighting over a snake that the barred owl had just caught and the great horned owl basically beat up this barred owl right in front of my
00:09:33
Speaker
young, amazed eyes stole the snake from it and absconded with the snake and the barred owl sat there looking like it was needing to recover for a while. I just thought this fight between these two big owls was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.
00:09:50
Speaker
That's amazing. Speaking of great horned owls, I'm actually drinking my coffee out of a great horned owl coffee mug made by our mutual acquaintance, Emily Poole from Tsunami Books. Oh, nice. That's great. Yeah. She's an amazing illustrator and she also just dabbles in throwing clay and she makes these great bird mugs too. So I thought this was a fitting mug for our conversation. That's perfect. Birding for me is
00:10:20
Speaker
almost a way of marking time and remembering things instead of remembering, oh yeah, that certain thing happened in 2006. I say, oh yeah, that was around the time that I saw the Lewis' woodpecker at Fern Ridge. So you can mark the passage of time by the birds you see.
00:10:41
Speaker
So with the book, early on, you wrote that you had, here, this is an exact line from it. I also had a growing, slightly uneasy sense that even if I kept it up for the rest of my life, there were just too many birds in too little time.
00:10:59
Speaker
And I wonder how did you balance a need to see these birds? And you can also translate that into like reading books because it's kind of like there's so many books out there. Do you reread things or do you keep reading as much as you can? And similarly with birds, like do you try to see as many as you can or try to see the ones you can really well? So how do you not get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it?
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's impossible to see every bird in the world, even in the lifetime. I think the top life lister in the world now, that represents a lifetime of bird. I think he's now.
00:11:38
Speaker
but there's 10,500 total species in the world. So even the top life Lister is still missing a thousand birds. I just, it's impossible to track them all down because there's birds out there that are maybe even extinct and nobody really knows or live in war zones that are completely inaccessible and that kind of thing. And so I guess my goal is not to see every bird in the world in my lifetime, but to pursue interesting projects with birds. And I like that.
00:12:07
Speaker
there are these completely different ways to approach it there's either trying to go out and see new birds and go to new places which is what this big year was all about the fun of birding and then there's also developing expertise which is more where you watch one bird over and over or bird in one small area for an extended period and really get to know the birds in that area so
00:12:36
Speaker
It's kind of a fallacy to say that the person who has seen the most birds is the greatest expert. It's sort of the opposite actually. If you see thousands of species, it means you spend a tiny amount of time with each one and you don't really get to know any of them. Whereas if you spend your whole life and only ever see one bird, then you would pretty much be an expert on that bird by the end of your life. So this big year was
00:13:06
Speaker
more about the fun of birding and connecting birders and finding other bird lovers and bird nerds in all of these different places. And so in the end, it became as much about the people as it was about the birds. That's a big takeaway I took from the book, too, that it was an ode and a sort of a tribute to the community of birding as much as it was about the birds themselves. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:35
Speaker
When I set out, of course, I was amazingly excited to see all these birds that I knew I'd find during the year, however many I ended up with. In the end, the memories that I came away from this trip the most were all of the people and the new connections and the friendships and characters you meet along the way. Those are the memories that stick with you the most when you travel.
00:13:57
Speaker
yen and as you were approaching the the world record and even though the five thousand bird on your way to over six thousand you know you got a sense of the the people who were with their with you at those moments where every bit is excited for you to
00:14:15
Speaker
to tally off those final numbers as you were. So that just further illustrates that it's really about this bond among birders, even when you're trying to hit as big a number as you can. Yeah, it's almost as fun to show someone a new bird for them as it is to see one yourself.
00:14:38
Speaker
So it's pretty cool. You can call up a birder halfway around the world and say, hey, I'm going to visit your area on these certain dates. You want to do some birding? And like is not, they'll say, yeah, sounds good, but let's meet up. And so.
00:14:50
Speaker
Birding really is a community that way. Are birders kind of like photographers, like gear heads in a lot of ways, comparing various tools of the trade? Some of them are. Yeah, you get a fine appreciation for good optics as a birder. It's very helpful to have a
00:15:14
Speaker
high quality parabenoculars particularly but also spotting scopes and cameras and you can go down the rabbit hole of gear for sure.
00:15:26
Speaker
And you mentioned that you're at a point where you've done a giant survey of birds across the world, but then there's also a chance to go an inch wide and a mile deep, so to speak. And what species resonate with you in such a way that you do want to become more of a targeted expert to one versus trying to see as many as possible?
00:15:56
Speaker
For the past five years now, I've been working as a onboard bird guy on expedition trips to the Antarctic and the
Impactful Research Trips
00:16:06
Speaker
Arctic. So I just got back from Antarctica this season. I'm heading back down there. I'm going back up to the Norwegian Arctic in June and July in a place called Svalbard. It'll be my fifth summer up there. I don't know. For me, for some reason, a lot of places you go
00:16:22
Speaker
You finish your trip and then you're like, well, okay, next time I go somewhere, I want to go someplace new and see something I haven't seen before. But the polar regions are a big exception. I can just go back and back. I think I've been to Antarctica more than 20 times now and the same in the Arctic. And it just gets better and better. And I think partly that's because in the polar areas, there's not that many species. There's only about 20 birds in all of Antarctica.
00:16:50
Speaker
So it's less about checking things off on a list anyway and more about just embracing the experience of being there and the changing conditions from day to day and the different encounters that you have with the wildlife and how this landscape is so barren and remote that it just seems to amplify everything within it. I love that feeling. I love going to remote areas and Antarctica is like the epitome of a wilderness.
00:17:20
Speaker
What do you think it is about those polar extremes that, that draws you to, to them like, you know, several, several times. The first time I went to Antarctica was as a researcher. So I went down after I graduated from Oregon state with my undergraduate degree, got on a Air Force cargo jet, flew down from Christchurch, New Zealand, landed on the ice runway outside of McMurdo station on the Ross sea side of Antarctica.
00:17:50
Speaker
and then geared up for a couple of days there. And then got on a helicopter with two other researchers and was flown out to a field camp at a place called Cape Crozier, where the three of us spent the next two and a half months living in tents in 20 degrees below zero with no shower and no fresh food and about 300,000 Adelie penguins just outside. And that summer,
00:18:15
Speaker
just blew my mind. It was kind of a life-changing experience for me and ever since then I've wanted to go back to Antarctica and so more recently have been going down on these expedition trips from Argentina.
00:18:28
Speaker
with uh... with the book to because you you know it's it's a pretty lean book given that the scope of your overall experience in every bit is important for what a writer puts into a book is what a writer chooses to leave out what was the the challenge for you in writing burning without borders of what to leave in verses what you what you ultimately had to leave out in to keep it is as lean as possible but also to tell the story you wanted to tell
00:18:59
Speaker
That was a big challenge actually. I kept a daily blog during my big year while I was traveling. Just a couple paragraphs every day about where I'd been and what birds I'd seen that day. And at the end, I added up all of those blog entries in one Word document just to see how long it was. And that was twice the length of a book. So obviously there's no way I could get all of my experience of this year into one book.
00:19:27
Speaker
and it would be foolish to even try because then it would just end up being a long list of bird names and place names and it would be pretty boring after a while to read that. Even if I had one chapter for every country I visited, it would be 41 chapters. It would be like three times as long as it is now. So I had to be pretty brutal about picking out the things that I thought were the highlights from the whole thing, focusing on those
00:19:57
Speaker
and weaving together those stories in a way that made sense into a narrative rather than trying to get everything in there. And that meant that some things like
00:20:05
Speaker
three and a half weeks in Columbia, for instance, was distilled down to, I think, one or two sentences in the book. And people read it and they go, how could you leave that out? And, well, I could write two or three more books, I suppose, with everything that got left out of this one. But I hope the stories that are in there capture the experience of what it meant to me to be on this amazing adventure and some of the diversity of things that I saw along the way.
00:20:33
Speaker
And do you have any, do any examples come to mind of ones that you're like, I kind of want to leave this in, but it ultimately serves the reader and the story if I just cut out this particular scene with this particular experience in region. I can't remember any particular, I don't think I ever wrote any chapters that eventually got completely cut, but
00:21:00
Speaker
things certainly got tightened down here and there even after I'd written the first draft of it. It was an interesting process. I had one gear to travel to do the big gear and then I gave myself one more full year afterwards to
Reflections on Writing About Birding
00:21:15
Speaker
write the book. So I was literally reflecting on the big gear in real time in a way when I was writing about it.
00:21:21
Speaker
And so what was the process like to sift through the notes and the blog posts, the photographs and everything? How did you first start to organize everything from your big year and to try to make a coherent narrative reflecting on what happened? It was extremely helpful to have the blog posts that I had been writing along the way as this document just of
00:21:50
Speaker
where I was and what I was doing every day throughout the year. Otherwise, it just becomes this big blur after a while. The blog and the book were completely different writing projects though because the blog was so focused on immediacy and reporting what was actually happening and the book is much more reflective and takes a broader view of the whole thing.
00:22:14
Speaker
It was like starting over from scratch when I was writing the book about it. But having the blog was very useful. I also took notes along the way whenever I could just on my laptop about interesting conversations I'd had or experiences I had that I couldn't really fit the whole thing into one little blog post. And then I also along the way.
00:22:34
Speaker
recorded some conversations even using the voice app feature on my phone. I just turned that on and have it sitting on the table when I was having dinner with somebody interesting or in a taxi with somebody interesting. Just so I could listen to those conversations again later and remember what we were actually talking about. Those details fade really quickly. So some of the dialogues in the book is actually word for word exactly what was said.
00:23:02
Speaker
How were you able to pace yourself and also just allow some room for improvisation across the globe? It was kind of like doing a marathon of birding. And I had to tell myself that sometimes. This isn't a sprint. It's an endurance run. But at the same time, I had to fit as much as I could in every day. There wasn't really any room to take time off during the year. And I was worried.
00:23:31
Speaker
My biggest fear when I first set out was that I get burned out on this whole adventure and just hate birds by the end of doing nothing else for an entire year. That would be the worst possible outcome. But in the end, it was kind of the opposite. I built such momentum by doing this all day, every day and never quitting that the momentum
00:23:54
Speaker
generated its own momentum, I guess. And so by the end of the year, it was hard to stop, actually. It was hard to think about doing anything else and going back to reality. So when the year was over on December 31st, I set my alarm for five o'clock a.m. on January 1st the next morning and went birding because I didn't know what else to do that day. Then I had to kind of step myself back down to reality over the next couple of months after I got home.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah, and that's something I wanted to touch upon was the burnout aspect. You surfaced from this project, if anything, more invigorated and passionate about it. So were you surprised that that happened? And how did you avoid that burnout? For me, burning is not a job so much as it is a lifestyle. People have made fun of me in the past for working on field work projects with birds in different places.
00:24:52
Speaker
And at the end of the day at five o'clock when you're officially off work, then I'll go birding for fun. So it's something that I really enjoy doing. I think in some ways you kind of have to treat bird watching like a type of addiction.
00:25:07
Speaker
But if you feed any kind of addiction, it's not going to make it go away. It's going to just mess you up even worse than you were before. So I think the big year for me kind of did that. When you're out in the field having these kind of adventures and knowing you might be writing about it afterwards, do you
00:25:30
Speaker
the kind of are you kind of processing that in the moment for how you're going to write about it later or do you just try to experience the current moment and then worry about the crafting of the story later? Are things going concurrently or do you compartmentalize each part of the process? It was helpful that this whole big year was set up as a book project. That's what made it possible. I proposed to write a book about burning the world and then
00:25:57
Speaker
getting the advance for the book up front is what made it possible to do the trip and then come back and write about it. And so at the same time, I was not able to do any writing on the road at all, except for the daily blog posts and some notes here and there. I didn't start writing the book at all until I got back home afterward. So I was thinking about it, but I was kind of putting off
00:26:27
Speaker
any kind of real structured start on writing the book until I finished the whole year and I could look back at it as a whole and kind of start fresh with writing the book, I guess.
00:26:44
Speaker
Was it an exciting experience to write the book and relive the year you just had or or did it or was there a feeling of how do you get your head around everything you just experienced? What was that like as you sat down with the the cursor blinking in front of you? It was a little overwhelming at first. Again, have you distilled this gigantic worldwide adventure into one linear story?
00:27:14
Speaker
But it was exciting and I ended up doing a couple of artist residencies at a place called Playa in a desert in Eastern Oregon out by Summer Lake for a month at a time and then two weeks I went back for later in the year when I was finishing up the book.
00:27:31
Speaker
And that was really helpful for me. You're essentially locked in your own cabin with no internet access for a month, and all you've got is your story that you're trying to put into a book form. And I got a lot of work done on the book at that residency. And while you were globe trotting, how did you balance the need to stop and smell the roses with, I gotta go and smell as many roses as possible?
Prioritizing Birdwatching Over Tourism
00:27:58
Speaker
Well, I knew when I set out that this was a bird adventure. And so anything else would just have to wait for another trip. So I had to consciously tell myself before I started, this is not a time to be looking at the sites. And so.
00:28:14
Speaker
When I went to Peru, I went right past Machu Picchu and didn't stop to look at it. And when I was in India, I drove right by the Taj Mahal and I didn't even stop because I had birds to see that afternoon. It's impossible to see everything in one year, much less even all the birds in the world in one year. So I had to be pretty focused about how I was approaching things.
00:28:35
Speaker
if there were there were moments to when you were even trying to see a particular bird and it's like you can almost get a sense like you know look at your looking at your watch like you know i as much as i want to see this golden mast owl uh... is it worth seeing this one bird when i could be out seeing thirty more so that that you know that must have been a challenge for you
00:28:56
Speaker
To get to 5,000 birds, I think I needed to average 13.7 new birds every day for the whole year. That's like one new bird every waking hour. So that kind of defined where I went, actually, because if I couldn't see 14 new birds in a day, then it wasn't even worth going to that place. So that's why I didn't go to some places like the Galapagos, which are amazing for birding, but
00:29:23
Speaker
There's only about 50 birds in the Galapagos of which a few of them are endemic. Compare that to like the mainland of Ecuador has 1800 bird species. And so I had to go where the numbers of species were, but it wasn't all just about the numbers either for me. So that's why I threw in some other places like Antarctica and Myanmar and Cameroon, where
00:29:49
Speaker
I might not have averaged the same pace, but it was more of the adventure of going to these places while I was there. So I did break down in a couple of spots and throw in places that I probably could have swapped out for maybe a couple other spots where I might have averaged a few more birds. But there were some things I really wanted to see along the way. And there's a part too where it sort of surfaces that you almost have like this this rival from Europe. I think it's Anjar is from Denmark or something, is that right?
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah, this guy named Arjan, I think is how you pronounce it, is from the Netherlands. He's about my age. He contacted me in March, I think, first when I was out traveling and basically said, well, I'm going to try to break your record next year. And I thought, I haven't even set a record yet. Who is this guy?
00:30:42
Speaker
But it sounds like he's like my Dutch twin. I'm sure we'd get along great if we went birding together, which I hope we get a chance to do sometime. He went out the next year, 2016, went back to most of the same places that I'd visited and ended up seeing even a couple hundred more birds than I did. So right away, my world record was broken.
00:31:00
Speaker
Oh, man. I didn't realize that he had actually broken that record. I mean, in a moment of honesty and self-reflection, did that really annoy you that that happened? It was a little annoying while I was traveling sometimes because it felt like already some other birder is like breathing down my neck. Nobody's really done a big year like this before. And all of a sudden, maybe I'm inspiring other people. I don't know.
00:31:30
Speaker
It was also motivating and kept me going in the latter stages of the year to see more birds than maybe I'd even first set out to see. And then it became a race to try to get to 6,000 for my own personal list. So that was kind of a cool way to finish up the year. But no, it's great. Records are meant to be broken. I always knew someone else would eventually go out and
00:31:54
Speaker
probably see more birds and so I'm glad it happened the very next year so now the pressure's off and I can enjoy having once held the world big year record. Right. And so with the writing of the book too, how did you
00:32:12
Speaker
set up your days and develop some sort of a writing practice so you could hit word goals and finish this book in a timely manner. How did you set up your day so you were able to do that? I'm not a very fast writer. If I write 500 words in a day, I'm pretty happy. The key is just to be consistent. So I would try to sit down
00:32:37
Speaker
every day for at least half the day or so. I'm also not somebody who can just stare at a screen for eight hours a day. I got to do something else, get outside, go birding that afternoon. But if I get a good session of three or four hours of really solid writing time in the morning, then I consider that a pretty successful day. Who are you?
00:32:59
Speaker
maybe modeling or who have you tried to model yourself after as a writer or who do you draw inspiration from as your as you know when you're reading but also when you're writing and developing your own voice like who are some of those writers are like you tap into that vein so to speak these days I pretty much read nonfiction I enjoy all kinds of books I've
00:33:23
Speaker
There's a very literary tradition in the birding world of people who have done similar types of adventures in the past. People like Roger Torrey Peterson and Ken Kaufman went out and did a big year in the 1970s and wrote a book called Kingbird Highway, which I've read many times and has always been an inspiration for me. I also like general outdoor adventure stuff, mountaineering books, John Krakauer is one of my favorite writers.
00:33:51
Speaker
Anything that tells a good story. It doesn't have to be a bird book exactly. In fact, there's a lot of bird books out there that are actually pretty boring unless you're really into birds like I am. I guess my own voice I've just found by...
00:34:07
Speaker
doing when I really considered myself a writer so much as a birder. I seem to be doing more and more writing these days. So it's a fun way to make a career out of it. Yeah. What was that moment like when you decided to not only just pursue birding as the hobby and the passion that it is for you, but to actually try to distill it for a reader? Do you remember a particular time you were like, oh yeah, this is the experience I want to start writing about?
Solitude and the Analog Birding Experience
00:34:38
Speaker
I guess just by being passionate about birding, it's easy to want to share that passion with other people. And so I've done that as long as I can remember. I started writing for newsletters and things when I was a teenager. And then I had a column in wild bird magazine for many years called bird boy, which is still my license plate, by the way, it says B R D space B O Y, which if you squint a little bit, kind of looks like it says bad boy. But
00:35:07
Speaker
wild bird magazine went under a few years ago. And so then I suppose I graduated to Birdman at some point and have just kept going with it. It's one project seems to lead naturally into the next. It's not like one day I sat down and said, okay, I'm going to write an amazing book about birds out of nowhere. It just seems like things follow each other naturally. And so my best advice to people who want to write in any capacity is to just
00:35:36
Speaker
do it, get started. It doesn't even matter where you're published or what you're writing about, those things will come along. It's more about finding your voice and things you're interested in. When you were first starting as a writer, what were some early experiences you had with rejections and how did you overcome those? Oh, I'm still rejected all the time. It actually seems to be
00:36:05
Speaker
increasing and when you get to the bigger publications it doesn't matter how good you are they're just always bouncing around more ideas than they can handle and so rejection is a big part of being a writer or any kind of creative person but yeah
00:36:23
Speaker
I remember when I first started trying to send in queries and article ideas to magazines, most of them would come back and they'd save for various reasons, you know, we're not interested. Or the worst rejection is to just never hear back at all, which happens quite often as well. That's the worst. And that's just part of the process of being a writer.
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah. And do you have a system where you keep track of what you send out and then what comes back and then that way you know how to follow up with things or just to straight up move on to the next market? Do you have a way of keeping track of those things?
00:37:03
Speaker
I used to have spreadsheets and things with articles. These days I generally just keep track of it in my email. Gmail is like my life. If I lost my Gmail account, I don't know what I'd do these days. But yeah, I try to stay pretty on top of things and follow up and all the rest.
00:37:23
Speaker
pursuing, pursuing writing and the craft too. You can also have a great deal of loneliness and self-doubt. I know that's something I deal with routinely. And I wonder how you fight that off and maybe what kind of self-talk you use to talk you off is those sort of self-doubt type of ledges, if you will. Writing is a very isolating activity. It's really just you and your
00:37:53
Speaker
laptop or whatever you're writing on, I guess. I saw it described once in an article as igloo isolation. I think that's the perfect phrase to describe being a writer. It's long days by yourself. And I think for me personally, I grew up as an only child on 20 acres of forest outside of town. So I'm pretty comfortable with my own company. And I've done various adventures that
00:38:18
Speaker
involved being alone for long periods of time, like hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which I did in 2011, was a 2,650 mile long hiking route where I did a lot of it by myself. I met other hikers along the way, of course, but I thought it was funny when I was hiking that trail that when I finished, the one question that people would ask me most often was,
00:38:45
Speaker
Oh, did you do it on your own or by yourself rather than like being worried about bears or falling off cliffs or snow storms or anything else that could go wrong in the mountains. People seem to be more afraid of their own company than anything else. So I think some of that distills into being a writer and who's attracted to that sort of activity.
00:39:09
Speaker
it's yet piggybacking right off we said you you made a you made note of that in in in your latest book about uh... the millennial generation of which you're a part of and that your sort of children of the internet and naturally there's almost uh... a pathologic need to be connected in broadcast every every little moment
00:39:30
Speaker
and document every tiny moment and share that and broadcast that and you know it's it's kind of what you're saying like maybe there's this this almost fear of one's own company and how have you um fought against that current of your own generation i think it's funny that bird watching is this very analog activity at its core it's really
00:39:57
Speaker
the most anti-internet thing you can do. You're outside breathing birds. None of that had anything to do with being digitally online, really. Somewhat ironically, the internet has made bird watching a lot more popular by connecting birders to each other and making it a lot more easy to get information about birding and where to go and good field guides and all the rest. But I think that birding
00:40:28
Speaker
is partly experiencing this huge increase in popularity right now, maybe is kind of a backlash against this whole digital culture that we have because people are feeling
00:40:39
Speaker
cooped up and they need to get outside and get back into nature and the environment to get away from staring at their computer screen all day. So, I don't know, maybe there's some of that happening as well. Yeah, I think you're right. What would you consider as a writer what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are? I think I'm a pretty good
00:41:08
Speaker
a capture of my own voice. I tend to write like I talk, which I think is a good thing. I think I do a pretty good job of telling a story in a way that's relatable to people. That's one of my biggest goals is to make birding something that's inherently fascinating, not just to birders, but to a big audience. I'm not so good at writing fast.
00:41:38
Speaker
or doing a lot of drafts. I tend to just start at the beginning and right to the end, however long that takes me. And when I get to the end, it's more or less how it's going to appear in print, usually. I do some editing, of course, but talking to other writers, it seems like there's this whole process involved and having outlines and scripts and drafts and everything. And I've never really done a lot of that. And so I could probably improve my craft a little bit if I worked on it.
00:42:08
Speaker
What appeals to you more like the generative process of the writing or when you're done and you're able to then comb through it and sort of iron out any wrinkles that you see from the first draft?
Challenges and Joy of Writing and Editing
00:42:20
Speaker
Well, editing something that already exists on the page is way easier than creating something. All of the trials and travails of writing for me anyway is when you're trying to get it down for the first time.
00:42:35
Speaker
turning that blank page into something with text on it, that's very difficult. Writing is not something that's easy. It's a lot of work. I think people sometimes don't realize how much work it is exactly. But then going back through and editing what you have already, that for me is pretty fun. I like going back through and tweaking words here and there to make it flow better and shifting sentences around and, you know,
00:43:05
Speaker
Editing is a fun process So it's the work involved is to get it down for the first time and then once you have something to work with Then it's really fun to hone it until it's perfect Is there any particular Bad advice you've heard bandied about when it comes to the craft of writing Bad advice
00:43:32
Speaker
uh... for example i i would say you know there are some people who and and i get it but at some at some point they have to have some some give-and-take is like there are some people are like can't write for free it's bad you know you shouldn't do it you're discrediting the whole field if you write things for free sometimes it's a great way to get get some clips in a little portfolio going so then you can parlay that into some
00:43:57
Speaker
into some paid gigs later. So that would be one example that I might push back against if someone said, no, you can't write anything for free. But I wonder if there's anything else that you've come across that you tend to resist or push back against. I guess more than anything, you should just write for yourself more than what other people are telling you to do.
00:44:22
Speaker
and that can take any number of different forms. I fully agree about writing for free. I've written plenty of blogs and things that I never expected to receive any reward for, just because I thought it would be cool to be able to share that way with other people who wanted to follow along. And then that naturally led to, well, book deals and all the rest, and so it ended up paying off pretty well. So I think you have to be
00:44:49
Speaker
Maybe it's kind of a cliche but true to yourself as a writer before you can be true to anyone else. Would you say that you are your ideal reader or do you have someone else like maybe one or two people in mind when you sit down to write? If I can sell them on this story and make them like it then I'm cool and then everyone else will probably like it after that. I am always writing something that
00:45:14
Speaker
is for the audience of me. I'm writing something that I wish someone else would write so that I could read, if that makes sense. Scratching your own itch, really. That's right. And I wonder, where in the process do you feel most engaged and most alive? In the writing process? Yeah.
00:45:39
Speaker
or even the, even the, even if it's a research based thing, like some people are really involved in immersed in the research and other people just can't wait to get that over with so they can get to the writing. And some people hate the writing cause they want to get to the editing. And I wonder where maybe along that spectrum where you feel you just, you know, you feel most engaged and most alive. I do like when you're setting out to write a new chapter or an article or a blog post or something like that.
00:46:07
Speaker
When you reach that point where you've got all the research down, you essentially have all the material right there at your fingertips, so you don't have to look anything else up. And then you can just start spewing it down. And you know it's going really well when you're lying there in bed, going to sleep at night, and you're literally writing sentences in your head because you can't get them down the next morning when you wake up. That is the ideal.
00:46:37
Speaker
And how do you set up your workstation? What does that look like? What did it look like when you got back from your globe trotting? He had all your notes and everything from burning without borders and you're sitting down to write. What did that space look like as then you were ready to start hammering?
00:46:55
Speaker
Well, it's pretty simple. A table and a laptop and some notes, I guess. I try to be next to a window so that if a bird flies by, I can run outside and look at it. It's got to have birds around. That's my one requirement. No, I think that's a great place to end our conversation here. Where can people find you online and try to follow you and your exploits around the world?
00:47:25
Speaker
Sure, I've got Instagram and Twitter, it's all under my name, Noah Stricker, S-T-R-Y-C-K-E-R. Also my website is noahstricker.com, I've got updates and event schedules and everything listed there, and you can find Birding Without Borders anywhere books are sold.
00:47:42
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Noah, again, thanks so much for doing this. The book is a wonderful testament to your experience and your passion as well as your skill as a writer. So thanks for doing the work and thanks for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Sure. Thanks for having me, Brendan.
00:48:00
Speaker
and so we made it to the end. Take the show, I'd love it if you subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts and maybe consider leaving an honest rating or review on the iTunes. If you do and you send me a screenshot of that review, I'll edit and coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words.
00:48:24
Speaker
you give, you get. People have been redeeming this and I think they're happy. They seem to be happy. And I know I'm pleased with the response and candor of the reviews. Helps with visibility, helps build the community that we're trying to foster here with the podcast. Also, I've got this pretty slick email newsletter that goes out at the start of the month.
00:49:08
Speaker
that's right just once a month in it