Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

Automatic Electric, the huge phone and switchboard manufacturer a few blocks from my childhood home, gave our town an enormous tax base, meaning the public school teachers in Northlake were among the best qualified and highest paid public-school teachers in Illinois, and there was funding for school programs that people would have a hard time imagining nowadays.

At the time, every Illinois public school from first grade through the first year of college was required to provide physical education. Like most schools, West Leyden had an excellent swimming pool, gymnastics equipment, track and field courses, and tennis and basketball courts, but there was also enough money to provide surprising extras. One was that senior girls had a unit of golf in gym class. All expenses, including the use of good golf clubs throughout the 6-week class and a field trip to a real golf course at the end of the unit, were paid by the school district.

Back then, I didn’t know anyone who golfed, and our TV was black and white, so if I happened to turn the TV on when a golf game was on, I’d not have noticed that the golf course was just as emerald green as Automatic Electric’s spacious lawn. But the first time I noticed a golf course as my family drove past, at some point when I was in high school, those same eyes of mine that had thought Automatic Electric’s lawn was the prettiest natural space I’d ever seen were even more wowed by the golf course—so much sprawling green dotted with aesthetically shaped bunkers and even greener greens, a pond or two, and lovely shade trees. I’d grown up with the DDT truck, FLIT guns, and a neurotoxin, hexachlorophene, in our Ipana toothpaste and teenage acne products. Kids in my class sometimes shot spit balls up into the asbestos ceiling in our class; when they got caught, they had to pry them out, along with flakes of asbestos, with a knife. I didn’t learn of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring until high school, didn’t read it until college, and didn’t really grok it until birding opened my eyes to how each bird species had its own special needs and fit into its own natural communities, and then my first pregnancy, when I was on red alert to all kinds of dangers as my maternal protectiveness kicked in.

I didn’t enjoy anything about golf, so I wasn’t the least bit troubled by how utterly inept a golfer I was. Most of the unit was taught on school grounds, and the one field trip to a real golf course was to occur the very week our science club was planning an 8-day camping trip to the Smoky Mountains, so I got out of it. The teachers sponsoring our science club were focused on the physical sciences, so most of our activities involved geology, mapping, astronomy, and chemistry, and we learned nothing at all about wildlife. It’s ironic that I was as close to genuine wilderness as I’d ever been in my life but still thought a golf course or the oversized lawn of a factory was the more beautiful “natural” setting.

Six years later, when I was reading my brand-new Golden Guide, I figured out from the maps that there must have been a LOT of birds singing in the Smoky Mountains in the spring of 1969, and many had to be easy to see as we were hiking and looking at rocks. Russ and I returned there in 1980, retracing our steps in some of the places we’d been, and I saw a lot of cool birds that must have been right there while I passed by, oblivious. Carolina Chickadees. Carolina Wrens. Kentucky and Hooded Warblers.

There are birds on golf courses—indeed, one major birding destination for listers is the exclusive Biltmore Hotel’s golf course in Coral Gables, Florida; the hotel building is a haven for several hard-to-find non-native but countable parrots, and the golf course itself is home to a small flock of exotic but “countable” Egyptian Geese. But native birds there are few and far between.

A few golf courses are actually very useful for native species. The Princeville Makai and the Kahuku golf courses on Oʻahu are home for a few oceanic birds, including Laysan Albatrosses, who nest there every year. But these oceanic birds don’t eat there—they find all the food for themselves and their chicks at sea—so contaminants aren’t as big an issue for them as they are for birds who need nesting habitat to provide food as well as a simple substrate.

TV producers stick bird songs into the background soundtrack of golf tournaments to give viewers the subliminal sense that every golf course is the lovely natural setting my childhood imagination believed it to be, but TV viewers seldom notice that the sounds are of species that would never ever be in the geographical location of the golf course, much less in that kind of habitat with crowds and cameras all about.

In 2024, there were about 16,000 golf courses in the United States and fewer than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants, and the footprint on the landscape of those golf courses is many orders of magnitude larger than that of fast food franchises. The average 9-hole golf course covers 50–60 acres—significantly bigger than Automatic Electric’s sprawling 35-acre plant and property, and an 18-hole golf course covers an average 115 acres—some exceed 200 acres. Heavy pesticide and fertilizer use is standard, contaminating both the water features on the course itself and the groundwater and surrounding lakes, rivers, and streams essential for non-golfers and wildlife.

Every single thing we humans do to provide for both our needs and pleasures exerts an environmental cost, and millions of decent human beings love playing golf. The Biltmore and those Hawaiian golf courses could be considered “multi-use” in the sense that birders are allowed to walk on the marked and paved pathways, or at least the surrounding pathways, but people are prohibited from being anywhere golfers actually are playing, even when no golfers are present—golfers protect a golf course’s pristine lawn much more diligently than our society is willing to protect wilderness. And that little fact breaks my heart.