absolutely obsessed with your birding AU!!! i love love love ecology and animal behaviour and my hometown is genuinely so starved for wildlife (chronically cold and snowy place) </3 birding sounds like the coolest thing ever and i didn’t know there was such an intense culture around it lol. i’ve also always headcanoned kohane especially as an ecology/zoology major so i literally jumped with joy when i saw your post!!!
huge text wall of an ask but i do ☝️ have questions: how close to canon do you see the storyline of this AU being, and do you have bird-related variations on the major plot points (an being torn up about kohane. seeing more birds than her…….?) also, do they have favourite birds & are these favourites different from their spark birds?
hi hi! thank you for your message :] one of the wonderful things about birds imo is that anywhere you go, any time of year, there are usually birds who literally prefer to be there... everyone should go to ebird.org/explore > explore regions and see their local birds (once you're on a region's page I recommend "Illustrated Checklist" from the left-hand panel).
you got it, actually - a lot of the emotional beats I imagine for the birding au timeline are purposefully directly parallel to the tone and dynamics of the canonical story... i think biggest difference out the gate is that because it's all based around a big year - a year long road trip to tally as many birds as possible in the contiguous US, basically - this is what bird!RADder (BIRDder?) Also Did. instead of the lightning-in-a-bottle legendary presence of RAD WEEKEND, An and Akito's ambitions are here catalyzed by the extended mythological absence of Ken et al.. which has some implications for their characterization and relationship that radiate out to how all 4 members of vbs relate to each other. an and akito are kind of orbiting each other for that year being messy and so fucking 15 years old its painful. i have a lot i've thought about with that actually but there is an illustration i need to do to go with it so i'll share when I can 🙂↕️
for An and Kohane's issues... Kohane of course has her thing of learning at a remarkable pace. going birding 1-on-1 with Taiga she does see more birds than An at times, but I think the insecurity would arise less from the number of birds and more from an ability to locate and identify them on her own. Like hearing a bird singing somewhere in a line of shrub and Kohane is the one who manages to get eyes on it first and point it out... Sometimes people with fancy cameras also get more recognition in birding spaces since there's this obvious visual impact of their photos. It's this idea of Kohane becoming a known player - you know, rolling up to a stakeout and other birders there whom she's never met before are all, "oh, you're Kohane! i've seen your name around", maybe they bring up a bird she and An saw together but theyre only really speaking to Kohane. It should be gratifying to An, that kohane cares about this world now and had been welcomed into it as someone with something to offer, but something feels complicated about it....
favourite birds <3 I think it's pretty common that people's spark birds differ from their favourite birds! I love gulls the most but my spark bird is the long-tailed duck, for example.
Kohane... I think she really likes Black Phoebes, which are very common, charismatic, and charming (and in general I can see her with a soft spot for the flycatchers). She also enjoys Lesser Goldfinches, which travel in groups and are always chattering like they're having intelligent little conversations with each other. I always imagined her liking House Sparrows for being cute and widespread and comfortable around people, which would make Akito roll his eyes lol. I'm still trying to pick a spark bird for her, but it's one she sees with An some time into their endeavours that makes things "click" for her and solidifies that she really loves this for herself, too. The bird she first finds that's mentioned here is a Northern Parula, though.
An really likes Steller's Jays... A lot of people around vivid street have associated her with them for a long time (because of her hair and personality and love of making funny bird noises) so she has a familial fondness for them. they are like cousins to her. similarly she holds affection for some of the large waders like American Avocets and Black-necked Stilts, which are iconic avian inhabitants of vivid street (black-necked stilt is even the logo for the "Friends of Vivid Street", the nonprofit that advocates for the habitat there). as established, she doesn't have a specific spark bird, since she's been birding since she could hold binoculars. she's lately also been into Bushtits...
Akito, hmm... I think he likes warblers. Whereas we enjoy normal warbler migration in the east, in the west warbler season is a rush to hunt down the scattered eastern vagrants that show up far from home. for some reason i also have in my mind that he has affection for the icterids (blackbirds including orioles, etc). his favourite places however are the hot deserts of the southwest (mojave + sonoran + chihuahuan) and while he enjoys the warbler game, he loves the desert specialist birds like roadrunners, thrashers, phainopepla, etc. his spark bird is the Western Tanager, which is a relatively common bird in LA, but one you might not see unless you're paying attention.
Toya is most obvious - he has a special interest in gulls, especially the "large white-headed gulls" (Larus). their ubiquity, tenacity, grace, and the infinitely deep identification challenges they pose all appeal to him. he also dabbles in shorebirds, particularly the Calidris genus (small sandpipers which are colloquially called "peeps" - very cute) for many of the same reasons. He seems to appreciate birds that are often frustrating and overlooked as a result. his spark bird is the Brandt's Cormorant (another story for another time), so totally different, but another coastal bird.
birding culture is really fucking funny. i mean i think it's so funny. it's truly special but you have to take a step back and laugh sometimes. you should see some messages i have received from 50 year old men who have DMed me to shit-talk after I agreed with their ID over some other 50 year old man's. and then the next month all three of us are 30 km out to sea crammed on a lobster boat with 20 other people hooting and hollering sharing a warriors bond over some rare seabird 1 kilometre away on the horizon. funny.
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