Nature Blog Network

Today’s featured blog is Born Again Bird Watcher, which as you know is the blog of John E. Riutta (john AT bornagainbirdwatcher DOT com), our former colleague in bringing you the Nature Blog Network Blog. John continues to travel, attend nature festivals, share photographs, and (of course) blog at Born Again Bird Watcher.

John, tell us why you blog

Quite frankly, I started blogging out of spite and a desire not to fade slowly into insignificance. I was in the midst of considerable turmoil in my job, disagreements with my boss and so forth, and had just secured an in-company lateral transfer out of my long-held position as a market and product manager for an international optics firm to a position in that same firm’s HR department as a corporate trainer (a position I no longer hold in a firm for which I no longer work). Instantly a decade of associations and connections no longer existed and my life went from one of global travel and high visibility to one of sitting in a little office all day and traveling as far as the manufacturing floor or the company’s conference rooms. I have never been one to court attention, but it is difficult to dispute that in the worlds of hunting and bird watching, product line managers for binocular and spotting scope products are treated like rock stars – everyone wants to know you and talk to you. The same can’t be said for HR-based corporate trainers.

With no return to my former position possible, it began to occur to me that my career was going to enter a tail-spin. Sadly, in America we are commonly only known to be the sum of the job we do; when that job is lost, things change. An identity that one may have thought was one’s own begins to dissolve. People who were thought to be long-established friends no longer call. Life changes in ways previously unimagined. In an effort to try to remain relevant to the world I had known for so long, especially that of bird watching, I decided to begin writing a blog – if for no other reason than to scream to the world on a regular basis “I’m still here!”

What do you like best about blogging?

Blogging allows me to practice my writing, share my photographs, and occasionally even receive critique and comment about both. I think it has made me a better and more effective writer, as well as a more serious one. A good blog requires a schedule to be established and kept if a regular readership, the blog’s community, is to be created and maintained. (Few things are more annoying to blog readers than sporadic posting.)

Blogging also requires that you read other blogs. From this I have discovered many interesting people and from their work have come to learn much. Some of the blogs I read are official communication organs of larger businesses or media organizations (for instance, the SOF Observed blog published by American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett) while others are independent and individual enterprises (such as Bug Girl’s Blog – http://membracid.wordpress.com – for example). Some successful bloggers have argued that reading the “über-blogs,” those with astronomically high readership numbers such as Perez Hilton or Cute Overload, is an important thing to do in an effort to discover techniques for increased popularity; however these are almost all either pop culture, partisan politics, or “time waster” oriented; too different from what I do to be of benefit in studying.

What’s unique or different about your blog?

Nothing really that you wouldn’t expect from a middle-aged, over-educated, portly, bearded, theologically-inclined naturalist who’s excessively fond of sushi [editor's note: me, too. The sushi, not the beard.] Seriously though, I try to fuse two of the great interests in my life – natural history and religion – into one coherent blog. Too often today the popular and overly simplistic impression of science is that it cannot abide religion and that religion cannot abide science. However in my reading the works of some of history’s great scientific and theological thinkers, I find that the two need not conflict with one another. In fact, I hold fast to the opinion that religion without science lacks reason and intelligence, while science without religion lacks poetry and heart. I recall Joseph Campbell once remarking, “Religion gives us the Rock of Ages, science gives us the ages of rocks.” Understand both in their proper perspective and purpose, and the supposed conflict disappears.

What are your favorite posts?

A long overdue post

and

The Japanese Garden Trilogy, Part one, two, and three.

Tell us about the name of your blog.

This is the proverbial sixty-four thousand dollar question. Born Again Bird Watcher actually has many meanings. Let’s get the most common understanding of it addressed first – yes, it’s religious. Despite the best efforts of the some of the most vocal and publicly visible (often self-appointed) representatives of the Christian faith, I continue to practice it. At times in my life this has not always been the case; I have been known, as my dear and recently departed friend Klaus Ferfort was fond of saying, to have “let the [fornicators] get me down.” However, thanks to the continued and untiring efforts of many good people, some to whom I am known and others who have no idea of my very existence, I manage to retain my faith and even sometimes practice it. As a bit of trivia – I actually majored in religious studies as an undergraduate and intended to attend San Francisco Theological Seminary, Graduate Theological Union for my doctorate but life had a few other plans that saw me take a B.A. in English literature, an M.A. in education, and most recently an M.B.A.

However, there are other explanations of Born Again Bird Watcher as well. I am a cancer survivor, living now nine years past a diagnosis of malignant melanoma. For those doing the math, yes, that meant that I was diagnosed just before our only child Elizabeth was born. For those doing the psychology, yes, this was unexplainably difficult both physically and psychologically. Even to this day, despite the fact that once I pass the “ten years with no recurrence” milestone my chance of a recurrence is essentially back to that of a person who has never experienced it at all, the subject is too painful to recall and write about. Suffice it to say that, in addition to the immense unpayable debt I owe my family and friends, I also owe a great deal to my taking up the pursuit of bird watching and from it discovering a metaphorical place in which to on occasion mentally retreat from the constant fear of not living long enough for the memory of me to be securely established in the mind of our daughter. Cancer is not only a disease of the cells, it has a vast emotional and psychological toll to be paid as well – something not always recognized in its treatment.

Then there is a meaning of Born Again Bird Watcher that is now lost to me – one born of foolish pride and self-importance that cost me my previous career. When I began writing the original blog, I saw myself as emerging from the marketing world of predominantly hunting-oriented products and their creation into one of bird watching. However I have now come to see this mistaken and horridly simplistic idea as one of the supreme errors of my life (at least to this point in it). The two worlds only differ in the minds of certain lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and in those of other individuals whose organizational, political, or personal interests lay in the continued public perception that harmony between various groups of outdoor recreation enthusiasts, groups all reliant on the continued existence of wildlife and wild areas for the practice of their preferred activities, cannot be achieved.

How do you promote your blog and attract readers?

I maintain Facebook (John Riutta, as well as a Born Again Bird Watcher fan page), Twitter (babw), LinkedIn (John Riutta), flickr (Born Again Bird Watcher) and StumbleUpon (babirdwatcher) accounts. Facebook and Twitter work quite well for blog promotion as does flickr (if you are a photographer, that is), StumbleUpon somewhat less so unless other users flag your posts for “stumbling,” in which case the page view count for that and the following few days will spike. I have not gotten great benefit from LinkedIn as it really lacks the dynamic social networking structure so well established by Facebook and Twitter.

Outside of the Nature Blog Network, which works quite well due to its topic-centered focus, most general blog networks have been, for me at least, of marginal value at best. It’s important to register on Technorati just to protect your interests but unless you have a blog with traffic in the highest levels little useful is likely to come from it. Digg and delicious (however it’s spelled with lower case letters, dots, and all…) have never shown me much value either; just a lot of political and general interest stories being flogged – too many through which to sort.

Any comments on being part of the nature blogger community?

From what I have experienced, it’s a little less competitive than other blogging communities. Perhaps that’s the “nature” of nature bloggers. There is a healthy attitude of not only posting one’s own work but also of “Hey, I just read / saw something really interesting over at XYZ Blog – go check it out for yourself;” something I find indeed refreshing. Perhaps it’s because, unlike celebrity blogs or political blogs where there are only a few subjects available for people’s writing, nature blogs have the entire world and everything in it as possible topics. Even if one only focuses on one taxonomic class, birds, for example, there are close to ten thousand species about which to write and myriad ways in which to write about them. From a “blog ecology” perspective, there’s little scarcity hence little competition.

Has blogging changed how you think about nature? or how you write?

My ability to think more deeply about nature has been vastly improved since I’ve been writing Born Again Bird Watcher. In the beginning I would find my perspective, write about it, and publish it. With luck, someone would leave a comment saying “Yes, but…” that would cause me to slap my forehead and realize that the critic was correct in pointing out that I had either been wrong, missed an essential element of my subject, failed to consider a perspective, or one of a hundred other sins of shallow and superfluous thinking.

As for how I write, my speech and writing are naturally quite prolix (as is this very sentence). Because of its conventions toward brevity, blogging has caused me to learn to keep the length of an essay under tighter control. While I can still create Disraelian orations when needed, I can also now produce “hundred worders” as well and still feel satisfied with them.

Any words of wisdom for new nature bloggers?

1. Don’t do it for the money – there isn’t any in doing it.
2. Regular, straight-forward posts are superior to irregular works of high literary art.
3. A picture is worth a thousand hits.
4. Link and thou shalt be linked to.
5. Comment on blog posts you read – even a simple “Right on!” is appreciated by other bloggers and it will also make your blog’s link more visible to others.
6. Positively promote your blog but don’t “pimp” it.
7. Feed the spiders responsibly; tag posts liberally but appropriately.
8. Never feed the “trolls.”
9. Share the love whenever possible.
10. Did I mention the part about there being no money in this type of activity?

Anything else you’d like me to ask you, or that you’d like to volunteer without being asked?

Yes, what do I do for a living? I’m a free-lance writer and reviewer, marketing and communications consultant, and subject matter expert (with a specialty in sports optics, their development, and use) to nature-oriented firms, organizations and governmental entities, and a work-at-home father. Anyone needing my services in any of these areas (except, of course, the “father” part) can find out more about what I can do in the “Consulting” section of the Born Again Bird Watcher website.

Thank you, John.