Birdwatching Honesty

Double Crested Cormorant

I wanted some kind of excuse to be walking more. Not just walking anywhere, but outside in the woods and fields, the places I loved to roam as a child. So I took up birdwatching last summer with the intent of making colored pencil sketches of the various kinds of birds I spotted. (I allowed myself the liberty of using bird ID pictures to draw from once I spotted a bird in the wild. A picture in a book sits still long enough to draw from!)

In the early part of summer, I had managed to spot in my back yard and draw the common birds: a robin, a goldfinch, a house sparrow, etc. However, as time went on, I knew I had to visit other habitats to find more birds to draw. That endeavor found me and my son strolling alongside the Silver Lake outlet on an old railroad bed. We had our binoculars with us, but not our cameras or bird ID books.

Suddenly, across the water, I saw a large darkish bird on a bare tree branch that kept stretching its neck up high. It had light stripes of feathers on its breast, and it kept fluffing its feathers on its back and nervously jerking its tail. I clearly saw a crest on its head and a large bill when it turned its head sideways. Its feet looked yellow-greenish. My son and I watched the bird for quite sometime until it took off and flew past us, a large and dark bird.

When I got home I poured over the bird ID books. No bird quite fit the description, but at last I decided to settle on the bird being a Double Crested Cormorant. That bird fit most of the features I saw. Quite a rare water bird for our area. I was thrilled to make a sketch of the bird.

Bird watching books warn birders that they have such a great desire to spot new varieties of birds to add to their Life List, that they are tempted to claim to make a sighting when in fact, a clear identification isn't possible. Well, that's what I did! I was dishonest with myself. Because I wanted so badly to draw another bird in my sketch book, I deceived myself that I had made a proper identification. I had done what the Bible talks about- The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it. Jeremiah 17:9

The next week my deceitful heart was revealed to me. I found that my motive of desperately wanting a new bird to sketch made me dishonest with the facts right before my eyes.

Juvenile Green Heron

The next week I spotted a huge, snow white bird take off from a marshy area next to the parking lot where I was standing. The bird flew right past me! A magnificent stately bird with its neck tucked into an S curve and long legs trailing out behind it. Of course, when I got home I looked up what kind of bird it was. There was no mistaking its identity; it was a Great Egret.

However, in the process of identifying that huge, white bird, in my reading I discovered that the dark bird I had seen the week before next to the Silver Lake outlet matched the description of a different bird than I thought! What I had really seen was a Juvenile Green Heron with its yellow-green legs, not a Cormorant, a bird with webbed black feet. (I had chosen to ignore the color of the feet.) Besides that, the Green Heron was far more apt to be found in the wooded, watery location where I was, whereas a Cormorant is found in more open waters of the Great Lakes. (I had chosen to ignore the fact of the habitat I was in.)

To those of you who are reading this blog who are not bird watchers, all these details have, no doubt, been more than you ever wanted to know about birding. However, a birder reading this account would identify with me how easy it is to deceive ourselves when wanting to identify a new bird.

In the same manner, I think it is very easy to deceive ourselves in our motives in almost all the things we do. We might be doing something very nice thing for someone else, when in reality our true purpose is to get that person obligated to us (to owe us a favor). We might give large amounts of money to a popular fund raiser, when in reality we don't care about the cause, but we want to be regarded as generous in the eyes of the public. We might sing praises to the Lord in the church choir, when in reality our motive is to show off before others. We might be friendly to others ,not just because its the right thing to do, but because having other people like us boosts our ego.

Quite honestly, when we begin to examine our motives, I believe that anything we do has mixed motives. The motive of doing things to benefit others is mixed with the motive that brings selfish benefits to ourselves. The Bible speaks of the dilemma this puts us in. The Bible and God can see though the deceptions of our hearts to see the true motives of our hearts. For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from His (God's) sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. Hebrews 4:12,13

Our motives are a mixture of good and bad, charitable and selfish, especially when we compare ourselves with the living Word of God. God will hold us accountable for those mixed motives. Identifying a bird wrongly is of no eternal consequence. Standing before God with besmirched motives has eternal consequences. The shed blood of Jesus is adequate to forgive this kind of sin. How thankful I am for that!