“Ah, just a robin.” That’s something you’ll hear or say 100 thousand times if you’ve been birding for a few years. You can be almost anywhere and when you get that tell-tale motion in the corner of your eyes you frantically scan until you see that obvious red breast and eye ring. Or you hear the “cheery-up, cheery-o” call. Your heart sinks. It’s just a robin instead of something actually cool.
Robins are cool, it turns out. They can get drunk on honeysuckle berries, for example. That’s funny. Sometimes they gather in communal roosts with numbers of up to a quarter-million birds. They’re one of very few birds that recognize parasitic nesters like brown-headed cowbirds and kick the eggs out of their nests rather than raising a different species to the detriment of their own offspring. They were also an important bellwether of the threat of DDT to birds and were important in making the case to ban the chemical, which led to a massive resurgence of many severely threatened bird species. Just one example: after the ban, there are 25 times the amount of bald eagles in the lower-48 than there were in 1970.
Arguably the thing that makes robins the neatest are also the reason we get bored of them. They’re generalists. They’re found from Alaska to Florida in the United States, and as far south as Oaxaca, Mexico. They eat essentially any insect and any fruit. They thrive in human communities, especially in yards full of earthworms, but they also happily (I assume because their calls are so cheery) live in the almost completely human-uninhabited Brooks Range in British Columbia. If you’re doing bird surveys virtually anywhere in the United States, they’ll annoy you by continuing to sing their song even after you’ve written them down on your data sheet. It’s like I got you bro, thanks. I need to listen for the weird ones now. Folks will drive hundreds (or thousands) of miles to see one of the 400 or so remaining California condors, but can’t be bothered to look out their window for another robin. I once took work off to see a yellow-bellied sapsucker, which is literally the joke people use when making fun of birders, which aren’t even that rare. They’re just rare for Utah.
The other strategy (and of course this is a spectrum), is specialism. Specialists become experts on a narrower range of food sources. Canada lynx are absolute terrors for snowshoe hare, to the point that their predator-prey relationship is one of the first things you’ll see when learning basic ecology. Being better than anything else on earth at eating one thing has been a viable strategy for billions of years, but it’s also the least resilient to human disturbance, especially in the face of climate change. It’s like if you could only survive off of Granny B cookies and Mountain Dew from the school vending machines but some Washington DC do-gooder has replaced it all with granola bars and fruit juice. Except in this case Granny B cookies are forest bogs and climate change is… Michelle Obama? The metaphor got away from me there at the end.
Now before we go forward, I need to be so clear that no species chooses to be a generalist or specialist. When I say strategy I don’t mean that a bunch of yellow-billed cuckoos got together and said, “we will only nest in multi-story riparian canopy that’s at least 100-feet wide in patches of at least 12 acres.” It’s just what happened over the unfathomably long time scale evolution functions at. These species happened upon a niche they can occupy with relatively little competition and over time got better and better at exploiting it. The most famous example of how specialization occurs over time is Darwin’s finches, but you can see it everywhere. Every desert plant you come across is an example. These are species that evolved to live in the most inhospitable locations on earth, and only in those locations. All because some seed with a slightly unique genetic assortment fell in just the right spot where that mutation happened to hold on to water just a fraction better than its ancestors.
Of the examples I’ve mentioned, I’m more of a robin than a Canada lynx career-wise. It hurts to say that because I would lose all composure if I saw a lynx in the wild and whenever I see a robin I am profoundly composed. I just have a bachelor’s degree, which means I never spent the years of graduate school and a thesis project to focus on one species or ecological topic. In addition, I’ve bounced around so much in my various jobs, never staying at one long enough to become a true expert on any one thing. I’ve joked that I rarely know the answers, but I know what the question means and who to ask.
This puts me in a position where I could work in just about any segment of the natural resources world, but am easily outcompeted if that role requires specific expertise. It also puts me in a weird spot when I try my hand at light science education online because sometimes the bit of basic information I share is a big percentage of what I actually know about the thing. When people ask follow up questions my skill is more knowing how to find and interpret the answer than knowing it off the top of my head.
I get self-conscious about this in all of my walks of life. I know a little about a lot, but not a lot about a little. This makes me fun to chat with at parties but useless at conferences. When meeting a layperson I’ll confidently dazzle with surface-level topics in my comfort zone, because that’s the kind of thing people outside of this field enjoy. If I find an expert on something I don’t have anything to offer and instead just ask them a million questions and just hope that the questions don’t give away my ignorance.
And yes, I had influence over my career path, but not as much as one would think. There have been stages where it looked like I could see a specialization in my future, but the road towards it was always interrupted. Some of these were my choice, like applying for a new job just ‘cause, but most of them were forced by circumstances like global economic shifts, recessions, and office closures. Luckily more often than not there was adaptation in me that enabled me to land and sprout in the new environment, sometimes a part of me I hadn’t even known existed yet.
We often hear only part of the phrase, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” This use infers that us dabblers have gotten too distracted too many times to serve a purpose for society. The ones who know 20 yo-yo tricks, but not hundreds. Who can knit and purl but don’t understand patterns. The ones whose Spotify playlists, if played at a wedding, would cause a riot after Etta James was immediately followed by an 18 minute Tool song followed by the overture to Newsies. We couldn’t focus long enough for mastery and are doomed to being quirky little bit players in our communities, useful only on trivia night.
The full quote, though, is “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than the master of one.” Oh. That makes a lot more sense, actually. And it says, “oftentimes,” because neither strategy is a hard and fast advantage. I need specialists like crazy to do my job. I also need them to help me, piece by piece, be a little better at the millions of things I try my hand at. I say, “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” kind of a lot. And it’s only because of experts that I ever can. Meanwhile, the time and effort it takes to become a master at something comes at the expense of every other thing. So it’s handy to have someone like me around who absorbs random information without consciously doing so to help put that mastery in a context where it’s most useful.
The social media algorithms haven’t gotten the memo about generalists, though. And even users, too. I get that. Last night my wife and I were watching trivia challenge tik toks, and went deep into each creator’s profile trying to stump each other on movie soundtracks, or identifying 80s songs by just one note. It’s boring to make the same thing over and over, though, so the creators would try to branch out and do something else. Even just other music or movie content. No, we said with our swipes. Trivia only. It would be weird if I went to Del Taco for an 8 layer burrito and they said, “today we only feel like making stew. We don’t have bowls so just pull up and make a cup out of your hands, it’ll be fine. It’s really good stew.”
I’ve had some success on social media lately, even when I’m trying a lot of stuff all at once. But on two platforms now I’ve had rapid growth before hitting a plateau and leveling off. Probably because I can’t settle into my little niche. And it’s kind of because I can’t. I haven’t found my snowshoe hare yet. There are wildlife educators who know more than me already doing it better. And there are certainly people with more authority to tackle the social issues I’m interested in talking about. I’m lucky that I’ve found people who are at least tolerant and patient when I go off on a new flight of fancy. So while somebody will always leave comments like “more wildlife content,” on every video that doesn’t have a bird in it, I try to remember the robins.
I bet some of you struggle with this, too. Few of us want to be defined by any one thing, even if it’s our favorite thing. Even if we’re renowned for it being our thing. The joke about this is that you said you like Ninja Turtles once in 6th grade and every birthday for the rest of your life you get loads of heroes in a half-shell swag. “When I saw it I thought of you.” Ok but I’m literally a grown up. If you’re going to give me something I’m currently hyperfixated on that would be awesome. I promise it will never be a secret. Right now it’s Hadestown and I’m a size front row mezzanine.
Now if that’s a universal thing and you, reader, don’t like it, chances are the people around you don’t either. Let’s spend a little time this week learning two or three new things about our people, because few things feel better than being acknowledged as a fully complex human. If you think you have someone figured out I guarantee you don’t. There’s a little hobby or interest or bit of history that will completely change your opinion of everyone, unlock new conversation trees, and make the world richer.
I’m already preparing non-snowshoe-hare-hunting topics for when I get to meet a Canada lynx.
This is so relatable and I enjoyed it tremendously. Birding, learning just enough about ALL the things, and hyperfixation. I do still love robins even after all the bird surveys.
I feel this SO HARD. As a chronic career changer I feel like I’m good at so many different things but none of them have been done long enough or deep enough to make me an expert or competitive in that specialty. Same with my newsletter ☺️ Oh and Wisconsin’s state bird is the robin and I have supervised and assisted with more 4th grade robin research than I knew could be done - kids here LOVE robins!