Generalists and Specialists by John C. Street 

Was thinking the other day about the things I’d learned in over a half century of participating in outdoor activities and the list, to my surprise, was mighty short.  That’s not to say there aren’t a few types of hunting and angling I know how to do, it’s just that there are danged few of them, if any, I can do real well. 

It’s wasn’t the shortness of the list of my of hunting and fishing skills that troubled me, however, it was the lack of knowledge about the common every day things like  bushes, bugs, birds and bees that kinda’ stuck in my craw.  After all these years of tromping around in the midst of the flora and fauna of the outdoor world, I just seems like I should know a little bit more about them.  

Back a few months ago, for instance, I had an in-your-face reminder of this when I spent four or five hours in the woods with a young man who is a legitimate expert on all things that are covered with bark and grow leaves for a living.  Well, yes, I do know the difference between a black cherry and a red oak and a red maple from a black oak but beyond that I quickly discovered I needed to keep my mouth shut.   

What dawned on me then – and what came echoing back the other day as I mentally reviewed my meager list of skills – is that in the out-of-door world I’m a generalist in a whole bunch of things but a specialist at none of them.  And that assessment carries beyond just identifying birds, plants and animals.   

My parents used to live next door to a man who had won a lot of fancy ribbons and gold and silver do-dads for being able to sit at a bench with a heavy barreled, small caliber, center fire rifle and place a passel of shots into an amazingly small hole, a hole that was so small it was measured with a set of electronic calipers. 

Over the course of several years, I studied everything he did from the way he measured out his powder to the way he pulled the trigger and, no doubt, I learned a great deal about making rifles accurate.  Yet, to this day, although I can sometimes make my trusty shootin’ iron keep five shots inside a measured inch, the group is still five times the size of almost any target he ever shot. 

It tickles me no end to saunter through the woods and identify its flying residents by the whistles and chirps they make.  In some circles I’m considered moderately good at this but most of those circles are rather small and comprised of folks who don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about identification beyond the general classification known as “Dickey bird.” 

I know a woman, though, who has been at this business of bird song for a long, long time and she’s so good at it she not only knows the name of the birds that are making the strange little noises but what they’re saying as well.  Befuddled by some new tweedlee-dee, I’ve sent her emails describing – best I could – what I’d heard and she’s never missed with a name, generally including in her response more about the natural history of the little feathered creature than my dog-eared copy of the Peterson Field Guide could possibly provide. 

One would think that doing anything for fifty plus years would pretty well qualify someone as an expert and, without sounding too uppity, I think I do alright with a fly rod. I can not only throw a fair amount of line and throw it with some degree of accuracy but can also identify a couple of the bugs I’m trying to copy – and by Latin name if necessary – when the need arises.   

But back eight or ten years ago I found a great big bug flying over one of my favorite fishing holes and hadn’t a clue – aside from it being a part of the generic mayfly family – what the danged thing was.  Went through all the aquatic bug books I owned and couldn’t find a thing to match it that was supposed to be in this neck of the woods. 

And so, with help from a kindly woman who supplied big butterfly nets, samples were caught, packed in alcohol and sent off to a real water bug man I know.  And, in short order, he sent me back an email identifying it as the great slate drake.  “Duh,” I thought I read between the lines of his response, “a first-grader should have gotten that one.”   

Over the years I’ve probably emptied a couple thousand shotgun shells, even went through a period when I was shooting them up at the rate of four or five hundred a week. Even got to the point where I broke twenty-five straight on occasion. 

Had an opportunity to watch a real shooter in action a few years ago, though, and the impressive part wasn’t that he ran twenty-five straight, it was that he did it with five different shotguns, none of which belonged to him.  And those smoothbores ran the gambit from a ten gauge, full choke semi auto turkey gun to a Thompson Contender with a .410 barrel.  I think he could have thrown rocks and done the same thing. 

Some of the specialists I know engage in other outdoor activities and are passably at a few of them. I fish on occasion with a guy who is a guru at wildflowers and also does a fair job in the grouse covers but he wouldn’t know a primer from a powder charge.  And I shoot once in awhile with a man who could be nationally competitive at trap and skeet if he was so inclined but he barely knows which end of a fish pole to hold. 

Perhaps it’s sad that a body could spend so many years as a hunter and angler and not have at least one specialty on which to hang their hat.  But then again maybe it’s not.  To be really good at something, to be a specialist, requires an inordinate amount of time and a singularity of focus that leaves little time for anything else. 

And I just can’t imagine which of my outdoor pursuits I’d give up.