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Orange-crowned warbler

Nature Offers Us a Counterpoint:
An Interview with Priyanka Kumar

By Melissa L. Sevigny

Birds had magically and mysteriously imbued my life with rasa. Birds essentially became my community.
 

Introduction

Priyanka Kumar
Priyanka Kumar.
Photo by Molly Wagoner.
“When the universe gives us a bird,” writes Priyanka Kumar, “we should accept it without too many questions.” This acceptance of the miraculous, mysterious, and inexplicable sings throughout her book Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2023), a collection of spiritually rich essays about the natural world (read an excerpt, “A Flicker of Light,” in Terrain.org). Kumar’s approach to the topic is unique. She’s not a “lister” who travels the world to find rare species, but rather a keen-eyed observer who is at “home in two realms”—the East and West, India and America—in search of a sense of community that seems to be vanishing hand-in-hand with the Earth’s species and habitats. In birds, Kumar is restored to a sense of self. She suggests that with radical attention to those creatures of the world most unlike ourselves, we find out who we are.

An award-winning author, filmmaker, and naturalist, Kumar holds an MFA from the University of Southern California. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, which is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. She is the author of the novel Take Wing and Fly Here (Garcia Street Books, 2013) and The Light Between Apple Trees (Island Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I don’t write about all my experiences; I write about experiences essentially that haunt me, that keep nagging at me for a while.

Interview

Melissa Sevigny: You pose a question early in this book: “Are animal sightings simply more available to those who make it a habit to keep looking?” I wanted to ask you more about this art of looking. Do you think it requires a certain amount of knowledge and experience—being able to name the creatures you’re looking at—or do you think this is a kind of skill that any of us can practice and develop? How do we learn how to look?

Priyanka Kumar: It’s a great question, because it gets to the heart of what it’s all about. It really is about looking. I think we can all cultivate it. It’s a practice. For me, I’ve found that in order to be able to look, I first have to cultivate a certain depth of silence within me, and that comes from embracing solitude and just having a certain level of silence in my consciousness, so there’s not a lot of chattering going on. When I get into that zone—usually I’m walking or hiking—I feel like all of me is more receptive to a sighting. It seems to work in mysterious ways, because I feel like when I’m in that zone, I tend to have more sightings. I haven’t worked out why it works that way, but I do know I need to go into a quieter place within myself—it’s really a meditative space—in order to be able to perceive wild animals.

I almost feel like it’s not just me looking at the animals. The animals or the birds are looking at me, too. And when I am in that quiet mediative zone, I feel perhaps they’re more comfortable around me. Something happens. It’s very special. But I think it’s a state absolutely any of us can cultivate.

Melissa Sevigny: I like that, making yourself receptive to what’s going on in the world, this internal work that you have to do.

Priyanka Kumar: It’s almost counterintuitive. There’s this internal work you do to have sightings that are meaningful, and you develop a way of moving through the forest in silence while not disturbing the birds. In a sense you become part of the forest. That’s what I feel and that’s what I always strive for. I like to be there for sustained periods of time, so I become one with the trees, and essentially the birds and other wild animals can ignore my presence and go about their lives.

Melissa Sevigny: This is a very different way of looking at birds than birders practice—specifically, birders who make lists of birds and who fly around the country or the world to find birds. I know you have problems with this whole concept of listing birds. Can you tell me more about that?

Conversations with Birds, by Priyanka KumarPriyanka Kumar: I’ve been thinking about this a long time. There was a period of my life when I was more involved in that active birding community. Very early on, I had issues with seeing birds as eye candy. For me, experiencing birds is so meaningful that the last thing I want to do is zip over somewhere, get a sighting for my list, and zip away. I don’t get it. That has more to do with our ego and how we live in a materialistic culture. It’s ironic to me that the hand of materialism reaches even our relationship with the natural world, so that we’re acquiring a bird for our list.

For me, the natural world exists as a counterpoint to the materialism in our daily lives. When I’m out in the forest, I want to be in an entirely different state of being. The forest encourages that. Why would I not sink into that? Why would I have a list? Which gives me, I understand, a mental high, or can encourage some people to get out there and look for birds—there’s no reason to feel guilty about having lists, enjoy your lists—but maybe that doesn’t need to be the central purpose. It could be something that initially gets people interested in birding, but we have the capacity to move beyond that and experience the natural world in ways that are deeper, that contribute to cultivating a relationship with the natural world, so that we understand why it’s important to protect nature. So that it’s not just jargon to us, whether it’s climate change or habitat loss or biodiversity loss; we actually have a connection.

When we think about a grove of trees being cut down, it becomes personal, because we’ve experienced birds there who have become our friends, beings whom we encounter in the course of our lives. We understand that these trees, this forest, is their habitat, their home. I think when it becomes personal, we truly understand what that word habitat or home means, and we care. Whereas if we’re just birding for a list, ultimately, it’s just a mental construct, it’s jargon. It’s not as meaningful.

Melissa Sevigny: You write just a bit about this idea of calling birds with devices, which I’m seeing becoming increasingly common as a practice. How do you see that kind of interaction as causing harm, either to yourself or to the world around you?

Priyanka Kumar: There are times when a ranger or a researcher will use a device. When they have sensitivity toward the birds, and there’s a specific purpose for which they’re using the device, I think that’s valid. But I think for birders or the public at large to be actively using these devices—you’re talking about somebody playing a call of a bird, let’s say a three-toed woodpecker, and it gets a three-toed woodpecker to come over. It’s potentially quite confusing for the birds. Sometimes people will play an alarm call, and the birds think, oh, my friend needs my help! And really we played a trick on them. We got them to appear. I don’t think this is too sensitive on our part, and I don’t understand what purpose this is serving.

It’s actually really beautiful to be out there in nature without devices. Devices have taken over our everyday lives to an acute extent. Again, coming back to how nature offers us a counterpoint, when we’re out in nature it’s a wonderful time to leave all our devices—every last thing—in the car or bicycle or what have you, and just be out there, with our inner selves and connecting with the forest. Thoreau said the best way to watch birds is to sit down someplace and let them come to you. I think that’s so beautiful. That’s the kind of naturalist I feel I am, where I just want to be around trees and rivers and experience them, and be there long enough that the birds essentially come to me. The last thing I want to do is play calls and try to trick the birds.

Melissa Sevigny: Right. Your book’s title, Conversation with Birds—with people playing calls, it’s kind of like having a conversation where you don’t actually speak the language, maybe.

Priyanka Kumar: Yeah. It’s about having a relationship with them. It’s something I’ve developed over the course of many, many years, with birds such as the white-breasted nuthatch—that particular bird is a year-round resident here in Santa Fe where I live. It’s a very special bird, because some of the bird species I enjoy spending time with are migrants, so I look for them during particular seasons, but the white-breasted nuthatch is here all year, so even in the utter bleakness of winter when the forests are bare, I know that bird will still enliven my hikes. There are places I know where I can sit down and watch the nuthatches; I know where they nest in the Santa Fe National Forest. It’s a relationship you develop from year to year.

It’s more about experiencing the life of these birds and understanding what they need to thrive. It’s a conversation, in a loose sense; having a relationship with birds. It has to be based on respect. And time. To develop a relationship you certainly need to put in time. But it’s rewarding.

Allen's hummingbird
Allen’s hummingbird on tip of agave at Huntington Gardens in California.
Photo by Priyanka Kumar.

Melissa Sevigny: I love the references to The Little Prince in your book, where you talk about the concept of taming an animal, the way the Little Prince tames the fox. You write that taming has to work both ways—that the animal being tamed has to understand and engage in the process. And then you said something that just stopped me in my tracks, which is that we, the human species, have failed to tame one another. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Priyanka Kumar: In a sense we’ve already been talking about some of the themes that lead up to that sentence. One of them is materialism. We live in a society, a culture, that’s constantly encouraging us to be highly individualistic, highly competitive, and always look out for ourselves. When we live our lives that way, it’s easy to forget how important it is to have compassion for other people. It’s easy to forget that our communities are fraying and have been for decades now. It’s easy to forget how enriching communities can be in our lives. By looking out just for ourselves, we’re losing so much. I was noticing this happening back in the early 2000s, that communities are fraying, that we’re becoming lonelier as a people.

On top of that, around that time came things like the iPhone that completely changed the way we live our everyday lives. The devices took over. The names—“social media”—there’s a suggestion of something that promotes community and society and socializing, but it turned out to be completely the opposite. This actually pushes us back into the rut of myself as individual, myself showing off to other people, or feeling envious because of the way other people are living their lives.

All of these forces have been pushing us to live our lives essentially in cubicles, separated from each other. As someone who grew up in strong communities, I perhaps see this more clearly than some others might. This concerns me. I feel there’s a parallel here: in the same way we have progressively lost our everyday connection to the natural world, it seems we’ve also lost the connection we had to each other. We’re seeing some of the effects of that now. Mental health has become a huge problem in this country. The Little Prince says it so beautifully: What do we need for taming? The biggest thing we need is time. And it seems time is what we don’t have anymore. Our time is gone, fragmented, because we’ve gotten so deeply involved in our devices, and—coming back to capitalism—Silicon Valley is wanting our time to look at their advertisements and use their apps. We have somehow—whether consciously or not—given up our time to these devices, to capitalism. We no longer have the time for deeper conversations, the kind of conversations that are needed to tame each other.
 

Cormorants in the Salton Sea
Cormorants adorn a tree in California’s Salton Sea.
Photo by Priyanka Kumar.

 
Melissa Sevigny:
I liked that you go on your adventures with a flip phone; do you still do that?

Priyanka Kumar: I had this phone that was so old, Verizon couldn’t even support that anymore. I think they were disgusted with me. I got their next bottom-of-the-barrel phone. I have something I can use to make calls, if there’s an emergency, but it doesn’t open anything, an app or anything like that.

Melissa Sevigny: Our technology bubbles us, right? If you don’t have it, you’re open to the possibility of getting lost or stranded in a way that few of us experience. And it’s not that you want to have those experiences, but you write about how risk can “crack the heart open.” Tell me about that. And a craft question: Do you write from experiences that happen to you, or do you go out deliberately to create these experiences that then inform your writing, and what role does risk play in all of that?

Priyanka Kumar: All my writing is very intuitive. I don’t have a preset theme in mind. I like to be out in nature as a way of living. I don’t write about all my experiences; I write about experiences essentially that haunt me, that keep nagging at me for a while. I let them do that and eventually I’ll write about it.

Circling back to the phone—yes, we can’t get stranded anymore because we have phones. I think that’s a loss. I think it’s great to have adventure and wildness in your life. It goes without saying, we all want to be safe, and within the constraints of that, it’s great to have as much adventure and wildness as you can fit into your life. I think the phone cuts into that sense of adventure and wildness. Not having it makes me prepare a little bit more for these trips, but also there are times when I am lost or stranded, and there’s no way out that’s quick. I just have to retrace my steps. Some of the best teaching moments I’ve experienced have been when things haven’t worked out. That’s how it is in the natural word. Nature is indifferent to us. That’s part of experiencing nature, the beauty and brutality of nature. Knowing how to navigate that—that’s something we’re also forgetting, because we’re over-reliant on these devices. Don’t get me wrong, devices are great tools. At the same time, I hate to see them take over our lives.

As far as the writing, the craft of it, just in the same way that I don’t chase birds but let birds come to me, I don’t really chase the stories. I just love being out in the wild, and I want to live as much of my life as possible in that way. Sometimes, stories come at me, and I have to trust that I will remember.

In June of 2022, something magical happened: I saw an orange-crowned warbler playing. I was rooted to the spot. The bird was spinning in the way that I’ve seen children playing. I spent some time with the orange-crowned warbler and his mate, and I let the image percolate in my mind for several months. It kept coming back to me at unexpected moments. I would see my children playing and remember that bird. Finally, I knew the bird was in some way calling out to me. I ended up writing an essay about bird play. But it was a while—several months—after I had that experience.

The bird etched itself, I would say, into my heart and soul, and at some point I realized I had to write something about that moment. I had been privy to something really special, and I wanted to share the story of that bird with the world. That’s a pretty good description of my process.

Green heron
Green heron among streamflow at the Japanese Gardens in Los Angeles.
Photo by Priyanka Kumar.

Melissa Sevigny: The book is full of those moments of awe like the one you just described: these stop-you-in-your-tracks moments. It struck me as a very spiritual book. You have this concept of rasa that’s woven throughout. Tell us more about what that is, and how that concept came to shape the structure of the book. Was that something you anticipated from the beginning or did it arise as you wrote?

Priyanka Kumar: Rasa is “juice,” literally and metaphorically in Sanskrit. It’s a word but also a philosophical concept. It’s something that was written about in one of our ancient texts. The text was about theater and dance, and it was about how an artist, when they are working on something, has to decide what rasa will be the dominant rasa in their piece. It could be something that’s sensuous, or something that has to do with anger. There’s a whole spectrum there.

In the early 2000s, I was starting to think in a more formal way about the lack of community. I thought about my childhood in some of these remote areas in the foothills of the Himalayas, and how I had experienced a deep sense of community: a sense of kinship and belonging to a wider circle, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good friends with everyone in that circle, but you as an individual feel a part of this greater network of people, all of whom you trust. It’s this exquisite feeling that people will catch you if you fall, not necessarily because they know you personally, but because that’s just what we all do around here. That feeling imbues you with a certain sense of juice and rasa—you’re fully yourself, you’re alive to adventure and wildness, and you experience life in all of its color and vibrancy.

I recalled that vividly, and experienced the flip of it, the lack of community, feeling you’re an individual walking around, anonymous and alone, and you don’t have that feeling that if you fall there are people there to catch you. That rasa is not there. It’s dry. You can work against that. You can try to create rasa in your life, and that’s what you have to do.

So the concept of rasa wasn’t something that I initially used to consciously structure the book, but as I started writing it, I became acutely aware of how birds had filled my life up with rasa at a time when I didn’t feel it in the human world. Birds had magically and mysteriously imbued my life with rasa. Birds essentially became my community. When I connected that mentally, I knew that rasa was going to be one of the central concepts I would explore in this book. It’s a complex concept, so I don’t go out of my way to explain it—because it’s not about explaining it. It’s something that has to be experienced. My hope is that a reader who is engaged in the book will experience rasa in the way that I did, and perhaps that’s one reason why the book itself is so sensory and experiential.

Melissa Sevigny: You’re also a filmmaker. I think I see the influence of that in this book with how imagistic it is. I’m wondering how you see writing and film interacting in your artistic life; are they things that feed each other, or do you find points of tension where they contradict each other?

Priyanka Kumar: I think they feed each other. First of all, filmmaking is so challenging. It’s very expensive. You have to raise a lot of money and bring together a lot of people and equipment. It’s a huge production, making a film. Writing almost seems relaxing compared to it.

The other thing is that when I was working as a filmmaker, I wanted to have a working knowledge of all the parts of filmmaking, so I got formal training to be a competent cinematographer both on 35-millimeter film and digital video. Training myself to be a cinematographer and shooting some films for other people make it intuitive for me to see the world in colors—warm and cold colors—and not just that, but be able to almost unconsciously frame an image. I don’t really do a lot of still photography anymore, but I see the image. It’s very focused. Like when I was seeing that orange-crowned warbler spinning, I was transfixed there, but I could also see myself filming that, it was highly cinematic, seeing that bird in the thick of the forest and his mate circling around trying to get his attention, but the bird was just completely rapt and spinning, and I was rapt in watching him spin. Those images are very powerful. They remain in me. Somehow, I don’t have a fear I’ll lose the image. I don’t know if some of that comes from my training and experience as a filmmaker, but I think it does feed into my writing.

gray jay
Gray jay among the evergreens at Maligne Lake, British Columbia.
Photo by Priyanka Kumar.

Melissa Sevigny: What’s your next project?

Priyanka Kumar: I’m working in a sense in both mediums. In film, I find myself on the other side of the camera. A couple of filmmakers have been inspired by Conversations with Birds and are doing a documentary episode inspired by the book. As a naturalist, I’ve been taking them to some of my haunts and they’re filming me there. I remain connected to the practice of filmmaking.

As an author, my next book is The Light Between Apple Trees. I’ve had a relationship with heirloom orchards since I was about five, which is when my dad took me to an apple orchard in the foothills of the Himalayas. I’ve always loved interesting varieties of apples, and the wildlife that fruit trees attract. My love for apple trees deepened during the pandemic. I was spending more and more time out in nature, and running into wild fruit trees that no one even realized were there. In this book, The Light Between Apple Trees, I write about how not just me, but America had a deep connection to biodiverse orchards. With industrialization and the commercialization of fruit growing, we’ve lost that, and many fascinating apple varieties have gone extinct. I dig into the loss of biodiversity and strand it with my own love of heirloom orchards.
 

Learn more about Priyanka Kumar on her website.

 

 

Melissa L. SevignyMelissa L. Sevigny is the interviews editor for Terrain.org and author of three books, most recently Brave the Wild River (W.W. Norton, 2023), which won the National Outdoor Book Award and the Reading the West award. She also wrote Mythical River and Under Desert Skies. She writes about science and nature with a focus on the American West, and her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Orion, High Country News, Sierra, and elsewhere. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Read nonfiction by Melissa L. Sevigny appearing in Terrain.org: “The Bighorn’s Dilemma,” “On the Trail of Mountain Lions,” and “The Thirsty Tree.” And read an interview with Melissa: “Blush and Rouge in the Grand Canyon,” by Rebecca Lawton.

Header photo of orange-crowned warbler by Peter K. Ziminski, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Melissa L. Sevigny by Alexis Knapp.

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