Jinx bird

I BEGIN BIRDING by accident. I am 16 and at a Waldenbooks at the Eastridge Mall. I have gone there to read magazines — to flip through Seventeen and maybe buy a Harlequin romance, if I can get past the embarrassment of buying one. Propped up near the cash register, under a banner marked “LOCAL INTEREST,” is A Field Guide to Western Birds by Roger Tory Peterson. I skim through it, admiring the pictures. In the index, I look up the American robin, one of the only birds I know. There, in simple prose, is a description of a bird I see daily in Casper, Wyoming. I read about its habitat, its song, its plumage, its range.

I have always loved a taxonomy, any kind of categorization. When I was 13 and in I wrote their common names and Latin names on scraps of paper, identifying every flower. I won a blue ribbon at the fair.