In the world of birding, “jizz” is a fascinating but little-used term (perhaps little used because of its other, crude meaning). Jizz refers to the overall impression of a bird—its shape, posture, movement, and “vibe”—that allows an experienced birder to identify it instantly, even without seeing field marks. It names something that seasoned birdwatchers know intimately but find difficult to articulate. When I ask them how they know that distant bird is a New Holland honeyeater or a sacred kingfisher they are liable to reply, “You can just tell.”
The origin of the term is disputed. One theory claims it is derived from GISS, RAF slang for aircraft identification by a plane’s “general impression of size and shape”, but its use in ornithology predates the Second World War. It was first used in 1921 by a well-known British ornithologist, T. A. Coward, who picked it up from a West Coast Irishman who had told him he could recognise wild creatures at a glance by their jizz. We can recognise someone close to us from a distance, even in a crowd, by their gait, shape, and the way they carry themselves.
Jizz is not something that can be learned by studying field guides but only by spending time in the field. You can memorise every field mark of the white-eared honeyeater as listed in the CSIRO’s bird guide and not internalise its jizz. That can only happen through long encounter, through what might be called educated attention. In other words, the birder goes through a kind of perceptual apprenticeship in which their awareness is gradually refined by repeated exposure until it resonates, almost bodily, with the particular presence of a species.
As a concept, jizz resists precise articulation because it’s a form of knowing that precedes description. This idea takes us into philosophical territory. Martin Heidegger distinguished between things that are encountered unthinkingly and absorbed into practiced, unreflective use and things that we step away from and consider, itemise and describe. Something similar happens in birding.
Novice birders (myself included) use the latter mode. We take note of a bird’s features—colouring, tail length, bill shape, flight characteristics—which can be matched against field guide descriptions. Field guides depict a bird in a Cartesian fashion, that is, as an assemblage of identifiable features. This takes for granted a sharp division between the subject and object, observer and observed.
By contrast, when accomplished birders name a bird from its jizz they are operating with a kind of trained perceptual reflex. The identification isn’t assembled from parts but intuited from the bird’s gestalt, the overall and instantaneous impression it gives. Enumeration of field marks comes after identification. Heidegger saw this as a more “primordial” way of being in the world, that is, an unmediated, pre-reflective way of knowing from inside the world.
When jizz is not enough, even the experienced birder stands back from their immediate engagement or embeddedness in the world and consciously lists and checks field marks to make an identification.
Bird worlds
Having considered jizz as a mode of knowing, we can now ask what it is the birder comes to know. Jizz, seen from the bird’s side, is the external expression of its way of being in the world, its characteristic mode of inhabiting space. What the experienced birder is picking up on, in the instant of recognition, are the outward traces of the bird’s Umwelt. Umwelt is a German word meaning environment or surroundings. It was repurposed by the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) to capture the idea of a creature’s unique, and essentially impenetrable, subjective world. In the words of one expert, it describes “a world of experience for each living creature that is strictly beyond the reach of scientific knowledge.”
While we can learn a great deal about birds by studying their environment and behaviour, we cannot really know their worlds. Among other things, they have sensory abilities we do not possess, like magnetic geolocation, the ability to smell storms half a continent away, and the faculty of perceiving ultraviolet wavelengths that gives them a much richer colour palette. We do not share their perceptual environment.
The only bird I can recognise by its jizz is the Australian magpie. For two or three years, I studied daily a family nesting some thirty metres from my balcony. I watched the way the family members occupied their well-defined cube of territory, of which my balcony served as an upper vertex. Without any intention to do so, I began to know the quality of attention the magpie brings to its surroundings, including the square of grass that served as the family’s main “larder”. I became familiar with the magpie’s particular combination of alertness and deliberateness, moving across the grass with a kind of proprietorial confidence, pausing and tilting its head to listen for the rustle of a grub beneath the surface. I took in the rhythm of family life, the variety of behaviours towards other birds, the ways a magpie will fly depending on the task at hand, and much more.
The magpie’s Umwelt can only ever be, for us, an outside impression of what it might be like to be inside it. Even so, this is philosophically interesting because it suggests that the different worlds we and the magpie occupy are not entirely closed to outside perception. They leave certain traces and the skilled birder can learn to read those traces.
There is an ethical implication worth drawing out. If jizz is the perceptual skill of reading the gestalt of a bird’s way of being in the world then the experienced birder develops a form of attentiveness to the particular presence of another kind of being, its characteristic way of inhabiting its world.
Once a creature ceases to appear merely as an instance of a species and begins to disclose a distinctive way of inhabiting the world, it becomes harder to regard it as just an object. So, attentiveness becomes a form of respect and as such may carry an ethical obligation that mere identification does not.
This is not the sentimental projection of human “care” but a perceptual skill, educated by long encounter, that builds sensitivity to the otherness of a bird’s Umwelt. I now feel a particular affinity to magpies after becoming so engaged in the family’s world and I felt an enduring sense of loss when they mysteriously disappeared from my neighbourhood. Now, when I come across a dead magpie, I bury it, respectfully, and say a few words over it.