family hobbies
birds, fish, & third things
To bond with my husband, I downloaded the Merlin bird ID app. There’s little I want to do less these days than download a new app, but I was won over by its (free) passive birdwatching feature. Sit somewhere with audible birdsong and hit record, and it will identify every tweet in real time, disarticulating, to my best guess, trees full of sparrows into the calls of birds I didn’t know existed, like the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Great crested flycatcher, and Northern flicker. It also captured this super mature conversation between my husband and me:
“An Eastern phoebe.”
“That was on the last one.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“It was, I remember.”
“How much do you want to bet?”
“Nothing.” [Long pause] “But I know I’m right.”
Poet Donald Hall wrote of his marriage to Jane Kenyon:
“We did not spend our time gazing into each other’s eyes. [. . .] Most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
I came across this quote most recently in a piece about Suleika Jaouad and Jon Baptiste’s beautiful farmhouse, which she describes as their third thing. (Suleika also started a newsletter about it called Tunisiana.) My husband and I also have a house we love, but it’s currently inseparable from our young kids, their presence and mess everywhere, and marriages need more than kids as a third thing. While the kids, more than the house, are the source of our contentment, I don’t think it’s good for them to be the constant site of our double attention. That’s too much pressure, like a lover who stares only into your eyes.
Also, if kids are the third thing, then they can’t participate in looking at the third thing, unless they start watching themselves, which I’d like to avoid. So families also need third things, preferably low stakes, amateur things, in other words: hobbies.
Birds aren’t actually low stakes. They’re signs of everything right or wrong with the world -- canaries in the global coal mine. I often think of this essay by Jonathan Franzen (sorry, can’t mention birdwatching without him), which I used to assign my writing students because of how it breaches the gap between low and high stakes, between liking and loving, as he puts it. It’s by falling in love with a small thing--a bird or a child-- that we grasp the stakes of the large things--the natural world, humanity.
I love our local birds (except, possibly, the brown-headed cowbird, which has an unpleasant name and call and is, I recently learned, a brood parasite). But I don’t see myself becoming more than a passive bird watcher. I’m not compelled to travel in search of birds, although I understand that impulse because I have traveled for fish, most notably to La Paz, Mexico to swim with a whale shark. (Joe says swimming with a whale shark is more like hang gliding with geese than birdwatching, but I don’t want to hang glide with geese either.)
Fish, not birds, are the shorthand of my soul. My dreams are full of fish and water—at least, they are when I’m properly connected to myself. In the best dreams, fish swim through the air like birds, although I haven’t had one of those in a while. More often, I dream of forgotten aquariums that I return to with anxiety: will all the fish be dead? They’re not. Usually, they have somehow begun to breed, and I find new species I didn’t introduce. These are dreams about my creative life.
Fish are the most misunderstood pets. I learned how to keep them alive the hard way, which is how most people learn because they’re considered expendable. I had the tragic childhood goldfish (goldfish actually aren’t good for aquariums because they’re vegetarian super poopers that outgrow most tanks and should ideally be kept in ponds) and no one at Petco stopped 20-year-old me from putting two dwarf gouramis in the same uncycled 10-gallon tank, where one promptly bullied the other to death (they’re in the same family as bettas, aka the “fighting fish” sold in cups).
It was the gouramis that sent me off the aquarium deep end. This was in 2003, so my main source of wisdom was the still extant Aquarium Advice message board, where (mostly) patient middle-aged dads talked me through the nitrogen cycle and water changes. The killer gourami lived happily for another year or so, then I replaced him with a magenta betta named Prince. I eventually got a 55-gallon where I kept clown loaches and two pairs of mated angelfish (plus one reject), which outlived many moves and spent their last decade in my parents’ dining room (thanks/sorry, Mom).
When we moved again last year, for hopefully the last time in our kids’ young lives, I comforted Eva (whom I’d already told the previous move would be our last) by telling her she could get a fish in her room. This worked surprisingly well. Just the idea of it was enough to carry her for six months, at which point she started calling me a liar, and I had to get moving.
I set up a 5-gal. for her and a 2.5-gal. (which soon became another 5-gal.) for Jojo, and we welcomed two bettas, Angel (he/him) and Snow White (she/her), into our family in November. They’ve been thriving, thanks to my past mistakes and many advances in the aquarium world. It’s easy to get live plants on Etsy, and bio substrate makes cycling less of an issue. (I recommend Chewy.com, which refunded us for a tank we tried to return and told us to donate it to a “rescue,” aka Eva’s friend who will save another betta from a cup.)
I have mixed feelings about supporting the betta industrial complex, but it’s very rewarding to see how these fish come alive when given a bit more space. Once they know you, they’re fearless, begging like puppies at the glass. Eva said Angel reminds her of a dog and has since gotten over her fear of dogs, which might be a coincidence, but I think is an example of how loving one animal can be a gateway to loving them all.
Meanwhile, Joe, who’s always been a gardener, started self-soothing by watching timelapse aquarium videos set to Erik Satie (soothing and educational). I bought a book called Aquascaping, which he studied, saying he wanted to set up a nano tank in his office. He ended up finding a nice 5-gal. on Etsy, to which I contributed some driftwood, and we decided that this tank should actually be for Snow White, who seemed a bit traumatized in her too small tank in the loud playroom.
I’ve always thought it would be cool to set up a fully planted tank but am always too eager to get to the fish part. Turns out, Joe is my perfect companion in this pursuit. He has many skills that would be useful in an apocalypse, but I met him in the aesthetic fishbowl of a fiction MFA program and apparently love him best when he’s creating new worlds for no reason.
It’s still amazing to me that I can keep small aquatic worlds in my house. Kids, fish, what else can I keep alive? We also have lots of snails and are talking about getting some shrimp. After that, maybe we’ll be ready for a dog?
I was going to also write about our family’s other third thing, books, but this is already long, so maybe I’ll do a reading update next month.
Do you have a third thing? A misunderstood pet? Tell me about it in the comments! Also, if you’re interested in setting up a freshwater aquarium for yourself or your family, drop me your email and I’ll send you my full list of fish geek links.
I recently added the Merlin app to my phone and I like to record it when I’m gardening or on walks with the little one. I even got my mother in law to download it as she’s an avid bird lover as well!
I like the third thing idea, and it makes me think of what I've wanted third things to be, and what they actually turned out to be. We're definitely into birds these days. This area (coastal SC) almost makes it mandatory - lots of fun birds visit our feeders, and there's a nearby barrier island state park where migratory shorebirds, bald eagles, and ospreys hang out. Also a cypress wetland a couple miles away with a walking trail where ibis, herons, egrets, spoonbills, etc. roost and raise their young. So birds are basically always in our faces doing bird stuff.
Fish were an attempted third thing that became my thing, and I've lost my fishkeeping stamina. We're down to a one corydora and one danio. The danio is the biggest jerk of any fish I've known. I love corys and if I had space, one day I'd like to have a big aquarium with a school of them zipping around.
The current attempted third thing that became my thing is native plants. I'm working on a pollinator garden, learning about grasses and sedges and ferns that like our light/soil conditions, etc. There are more sources for plants and plant info than the last time I tried this (probably ten years ago)...I seem to be keeping more things alive this time around.