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I recently confessed to Kate: “I don’t know what the state bird of Oregon is.” She consulted Google and said, “Western Meadowlark.” She found a picture for me too.

Three days later I was driving along a backcountry road when what did I see but a Western Meadowlark on a fence.

I likely would have seen the bird whether I’d just learned about it or not. That’s been the biggest change since I started birdwatching in January 2019 and certainly since I started doing photography in April 2020: I notice stuff now.

Still, I’m fascinated by the connection between language and seeing. In Scotland there are words that describe the subtlest conditions of light and soil and water. Words like caochan, which means “the slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden,” and eit, which means “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.”

My question: Which came first, the language or the seeing? In the case of rionnach maoim—“the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day”—someone first saw and contemplated those clouds, those shadows, the wind and sky and the moorland. But what about from there? Is a child more likely to notice rionnach maoim because they’ve learned the language for it? Do they go through life more expectant once their eyes, through language, have been primed to see it?

What if this is one reason God brought the animals to Adam to be named (Genesis 2:19-20)? Not as a form of control but of attention. Not so they could be more easily exploited by the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, but so they would be noticed, protected, and loved from generation to generation. Maybe we’re more open to the possibility of coyote, of fox, of Western Meadowlark because we have words to describe them.

Location: Marion County, Oregon

Date: May 1, 2021

Exposure: 1/4000 second, f/9, ISO 2500

Focal Length: 850 mm

Gear:

• Camera: Nikon D750

• Lens: Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary with a 1.4x teleconverter