Birdwatching
is not one of my usual pastimes, but I joined some friends the other day for an
expedition to the Houston Audubon Society’s bird sanctuary at High Island on
Bolivar Peninsula to take a gander at blue herons, snowy egrets, and roseate
spoonbills (but no ganders). At the entrance to the sanctuary is a sign
enumerating its rules and regulations, among which is the stern admonition: NO
PISHING.
“Pishing”
must be a typographical error, I assumed, either with a “P” mistakenly
substituted for an “F,” or with an “H” in place of a second “S.” Either of
these I thought would make sense as a reasonable prohibition. A third, but
remote, possibility was that an “H” had been omitted after the “P,” and this
was a warning not to try to electronically extract personal information from
your fellow birdwatchers; that injunction, however, struck me as unlikely in a
wildlife thicket.
It
turns out that PISHING is not a typographical error, and it means just what it
says. To pish is to imitate the sound
of a songbird in order to lure it into the open. It is a technique of
scientists doing avian surveys and of many birders to attract species that are
difficult to find. Pishing is controversial, with some experts maintaining that
it unethically disrupts the natural life of the birds, and others claiming it disturbs
them no more than silently traipsing through their habitats. The Audubon
Society seems to have decided that pishing is harmful, and therefore it is
banned.
The
etymology of pish is apparently
simply an echo of the sound made by the most elementary type of bird luring—the
unvoiced repetition of the syllable pish,
pish, pish. This is a sound
that is similar to “sshh,” used to quiet someone, and it will often lure birds to investigate what is going on.
An
allied practice known as “squeaking” is noisily kissing the back of one’s hand,
which mimics the sound of a bird scolding a predator.
The
word pish is also an exclamation of
contempt, dating to the 1590s, and is often found in combination forms such as
“pish-tosh” or “pish-posh.”
The
Bard of Buffalo Bayou thinks his work is for the ages, but most people think
it’s for the birds.
I
write the poems that make the grown men cry.
Oh,
how I labor over every word!
My
deepest thoughts take wing and soar, they fly!
Then
one of my readers flips me the bird.
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