The Bird Girl of Jasper Ridge
Tags: Stanford, Profiles, Nature, Jasper Ridge, Birds

“The usual suspects,” she said. We had crested a hill to get a decent view, and the lake’s surface was startlingly clear, scattered with ducks and a soft fog. Before the Ridge closed to the public, the lakeside had included an artificial beach, a concession stand, and a bathhouse. I had trouble picturing mobs of people in such an ethereal place — it didn’t seem wrong, exactly, just strange, in the same way a beachgoer in 1970 wouldn’t be able to imagine the lake without boisterous toddlers and beachside volleyball games.

Christel alerted us to a canvasback, apart from the other ducks, and a group of double-crested cormorants. “They’re easy to spot in silhouette because they always hold their heads up a little bit,” Christel explained, bringing to mind a regal queen bird. “And they sit really low … just a sliver above the water with a snaky neck and a long, upturned head.”

To me, squinting through Mike’s binoculars, the birds were indistinguishable. Christel announced the absence of a species she had seen on Wednesday, and Mike said, “They must know when you’re here, Sophie.”

“I’m like the duck Santa,” Christel joked. “I see them when they’re sleeping, I know when they’re awake.”

Christel has been this way since she was eight. Growing up in Palo Alto, she always lagged behind, birdstruck, when her family hiked every Sunday at Foothills Park and the Baylands. “I really connect with and yearn for the amount of freedom that flight provides,” she said. “That’s something I’ve always been captured by with birds.”

The Sunday ritual petered out as Christel and her brother reached adolescence. As a student at Gunn High School, Christel became deeply involved in theater, but she still hiked and “spent a lot of time … looking at trees.” During freshman year at Stanford, the thought of becoming a docent energized her. Christel wanted a place to escape to, and the program offered the possibility of fieldwork. She planned her schedule around the two-quarter docent training class.

The trainees spend five hours a week at the Ridge, but only about twenty-five minutes in the classroom. “We have a very big focus on preparing people to teach on the trail,” said Cindy Wilber, Education Coordinator at the Ridge and Christel’s mentor. “What you have on the trail is your knowledge and your ability to explain it to someone else. But you don’t have a PowerPoint or a textbook — you’re out there using our twelve hundred acre classroom as your whiteboard.”

The class dashes through geology, history, vegetation, and wildlife, but the students are mostly outside. Sometimes, “literally, we’re all crawling through the bushes together,” said Wilber. The physicality creates an immediate camaraderie between docents, and Amy Kim ’15, Christel’s classmate in training, initially pegged Christel as the quiet, awkward type. “In the most loving and endearing way,” she added, “but maybe not one hundred percent comfortable in her own skin.”

As the docents gain more experience, particularly with public speaking and personal projects, self-consciousness abates. For Christel’s project at the end of the class, she chose to conduct bird counts, a precursor to her future honors thesis. She learned to identify birdcalls slowly, with constant mistakes, listening to recorded calls on a CD set when she wasn’t at the Ridge. Some calls were tender and babbling, others an unnerving squall. “Birds are so expressive,” Christel said. “It’s kind of hard not to project human emotions onto them.”

Another afternoon in November, I met Christel at Lake Lagunita, where she stood with her hands outstretched, staring fixedly at a passing helicopter. I tapped her on the shoulder, and we sat down at a picnic table. Her transition lenses had darkened in the late afternoon, and she wore patterned blue pants with lace-up boots; sitting, she clasped her hands daintily. In the midst of telling me about her life at Stanford, she interrupted herself to point out the white-breasted nuthatch crawling on a nearby tree.

“The Stanford bubble is a real, real thing,” she said. “There’s a certain façade of calm on campus, and yet people are always busy, always tired.”

In part, Christel’s time at the Ridge has been a refuge from the “toxic” environment at Stanford. As an introvert, Christel didn’t always want to socialize, but felt that when she did put in effort, people were flaky. “Everyone’s crazy busy and has seventeen million things on their mind,” she said. “If you’re not a little pushy, people aren’t going to make time for you, unless you make them want to make time for you.” When Christel sensed that a friendship was waning, she struggled to keep reaching out: relationships felt too quick to change as people bounced between commitments. For much of her time at Stanford, she floated between groups or had no group at all.

“I don’t think of Sophie as shy,” Wilber said, when I mentioned this to her. “This is the girl who sings opera — how could a shy person do that?” Fellow docent Amy Kim, in describing Christel as someone who “really does know who she is,” agreed that Christel’s self-image is several shades removed from the way others perceive her.

“Jasper Ridge is a place I feel very at home,” Christel told me. “I know the trails, I know the plants, I know the people.” Spending time at the Ridge, especially in the midst of social anxiety or turmoil, gives Christel a sense of deep calm. Tours are like showing someone her house — her tours emphasize birds but also how to spot animal tracks and which plants have the most aromatic scent. Elementary school kids need Christel to explain the basics of vegetation and animals, while peers studying earth sciences ask complex questions, and she feels confident no matter the temperature of the group.

“I like seeing other people experience the same sort of awe that I’ve already been through at the Ridge,” she said. “I like the sharing aspect.”

Much of Christel’s work — excepting tours — is in solitude, but solitude that she chooses herself — not imposed by other people’s unreliability. Christel felt this intensely while conducting her honors thesis on bird-counting methodologies in her junior year. Five days a week, she arrived at the Ridge before sunrise to count birds, crawling out of bed in the dark and blasting the radio in the car to stay awake. “The first five minutes of every day sucked,” she said. But once she arrived at the Ridge, sunrise began in earnest. Gradually her fatigue melted into the peaceful chaos of birdsong and the earthy smell of the Ridge.

“It’s a similar thing to snorkeling, where you’re just hanging in the water, and you feel both separate from and a part of everything going on around you,” she said. “It’s like you don’t really belong there — you’re a person in the ocean — but it’s this weird disembodied floating state.”

On campus, this feeling often eluded Christel. She felt it was much easier to hole up in her room than fling herself into achievement and relationships. “In terms of the way I behave, I don’t know if it’s so much unwillingness, so much as I don’t know how to reach out to people I find interesting,” she told me. It felt like there was a fundamental barrier between what she expected from other people and what she expected to give in return. At times, Stanford was profoundly lonely.

“Being at Jasper Ridge,” she told me, “doesn’t require that sort of frenzy that is often necessary on campus in order to succeed or feel like you’re succeeding. If all you have to do is pay attention to what sounds are around you and what’s under your fingertips and your feet … it’s a lot less stressful.”

The irony of this characterization is that Christel and I had joked about the recent swath of articles decrying the “pressure cooker” of elite college campuses. Coming from Gunn High School, Christel has read far too many. But on our hike that Saturday, I didn’t think about schoolwork or heartbreak or any number of terrifying and mundane things that encompass our time at Stanford. I did just one thing: I watched Sophie watch birds. When she pointed them out to me, her voice bright, she wasn’t “made of birds” in the same way I had initially imagined her — with graceful wings sketched over pale arms, her bones nimble and precise. Instead I pictured Sophie with wings erupting out of her chest, hundreds of birds singing opera, wild, dazzling, released.

Fiona Kelliher ’18 is West’s profiles editor.

Photography by Kari Wadden ‘19.