Make Birds Great Again

W ith siblings now on opposite sides of the U.S., my family is always looking for ways to stay connected. Over Christmas, we not only employed Zoom for sharing the hilarity of opening our gag gifts with each other, we used it to dial in sibling No. 2 as we on the home front performed a budget version of the “Triune Tale of Diminutive Swine.” The video service also came in useful for playing games together, and we managed a round of Scattergories (which nearly ended in a brawl) and some games of Yahtzee (a more congenial endeavor) with our distant relations. What we really wanted to try online though? Wingspan — or, as it’s affectionately called in our home, “the bird game.”

If memory serves, this game appeared under the Christmas tree in 2023, a present to my parents from sibling No. 2 and her now-husband. Being the absolute pill that I am, and in keeping with my dislike of learning new games, I asserted my stubborn streak and refused to learn it for nearly a year.

In my defense, I’m particularly bad at strategy-based games — which is why I’ll probably never learn Catan and why Risk sounds terrible (sorry, Dan McLaughlin). Wingspan, a highly strategic game from Stonemaier Games, was designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and beautifully illustrated by Natalia Rojas and Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo. When I say “highly strategic,” I’m not being dramatic. This game requires players to think simultaneously about short- and long-term goals, how best to deploy your ever-dwindling number of turns, and how you could (slightly) sabotage the other players’ chances for points.

This past December, while I was visiting sibling No. 2, she and her husband convinced me to drop my stubborn ways regarding this game and learn it. Thank goodness I did, as it proved both a delightful Christmas gift to my dad (who loves this game and was always bugging me to play) and a fun way to spend cozy afternoons with my family.

How exactly does one play? Well, the end goal is to have the most points, and there are a variety of ways, over four rounds, to gain those points. While you are competing against the other players for certain points, you’re mainly focused on your personal game board, set up in front of you. The game has a lot of pieces and nuances, requiring you to pay close attention to your cards and the other players’ boards. I’m at the point where, in order to keep everything straight, I play with a notepad and pen next to me, planning out my moves for each round. It doesn’t always work, but it helps to externalize the jumble of options and try to make them coherent.

Whether you enjoy strategy games or not, this one is simply lovely to look at. There are over 170 bird cards, each one unique. You don’t need to know anything about birds to play the game, but each card gives you some interesting information about the depicted bird and includes a pictograph of its general habitat. There are wooden eggs in pastel colors, sturdy resource tokens, and a clever little “birdfeeder” construction for holding dice needed for game play. You can even increase your card and egg options by purchasing the European expansion pack, the Oceania expansion pack, or Wingspan Asia.

My one quibble with the creators of this game is their kowtowing to that menace of bird welfare, the American Ornithological Society. A few years ago, the AOS decided to start renaming all birds whose moniker included a person’s name (think Say’s phoebe or Wilson’s snipe), because naming conventions in the past were “clouded by racism and misogyny.” Stonemaier Games decided to respond in kind and appended a statement to the game’s description in support of this renaming effort, “so that no birds are named after people and that no names that are deemed offensive or exclusionary (e.g., to indigenous people and various cultures)” will continue to exist.

 The game makers continue:

Given that these names are officially changing, when the AOS finalizes their name selections for sets released so far, it’s likely that we’ll make a pack of the renamed birds and offer them on our webstore. . . .

This isn’t a matter of erasing the past or pretending that some of it never happened — the past isn’t changing. Rather, it’s using the information we have in the present to not celebrate or honor those who committed atrocious acts in the past and to simply not be derogatory to various cultures.

This is patently absurd and something I’ve railed against for years now. In 2021, I wrote:

The Washington Post, NPR, and BirdWatching Daily, all with headlines such as “The Racist Legacy Many Birds Carry” and “Monuments and Teams Have Changed Names As America Reckons with Racism. Birds Are Next,” are filled with quotes from these activists. Many of them claim that we need to “decolonialize” birding, or that the black community isn’t represented enough in this field, or that they feel oppressed by having to wear a shirt with Audubon’s name on it (apparently, the Father of Birding had ties to slavery, too).

I don’t mean to be insensitive, but have these people truly heard what they are saying? It is tone-deaf, historically illiterate, and absurd. The Washington Post article goes into great detail about some of the men after whom different birds are named, and while some of them certainly did engage in some cringe-inducing activities, our knee-jerk reaction to rename or blot out anything that might make us uncomfortable is deeply unwise.

And I continued my crusade in 2023, writing:

Getting rid of eponymous bird names is a fool’s errand and will cause more division than unity. . . .

News flash: People sin. That universal fact should not be a reason for wiping their names off the map and ignoring their legacy. By erasing these bits of history, we are losing many things, not the least of which are stories. . . .

The removal of human names from bird monikers is also stunting our conversation. By removing them, we’re not celebrating the birds, we’re only viewing them as a collection of biological parts. We’re taking away something to discuss, a way to forge understanding between us and people of the past. Historical realities are there whether we like them or not, and ignoring them makes our conversation poorer and our culture sicker.

Luckily for me, my family’s game dates from before this madness, so we can play with Wilson’s warbler and Bewick’s wren to our hearts’ content. And thanks to the thoughtfulness of my sister and brother-in-law, my own version of this game (with its bird names intact) appeared on my doorstep a few days after New Year’s. Now, though we live in three different cities in two different states, we can spend peaceful hours playing together.

And even though I haven’t lost my stubborn streak, and despite my dad and sister crushing me every game, I wouldn’t have it any other way.