It is a cold December day along the Quinnipiac River in New Haven, Connecticut. The light of the midmorning sun peeks over the tops of bare trees, igniting those chunks of the Eugene B. Fargeorge Preserve that it succeeds in touching all the more brilliantly for its low position in the sky. On a coastline dominated by housing developments and strip malls, industry and crowded beaches, the preserve is a pleasant jewel of mosaic wildness where coastal thickets of stunted eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and serviceberry (Amelanchier spp.), along with invasive species such as autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) and multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora), roll over into wide open expanses of saltwater marsh grass (spartina spp.), and diverse multitudes of coastal birds squawk, chirp, and flash through open skies and gentle waves. Ever since I first came to this spot in 2018, my visits have primarily been relegated to the summer, when I am home from school and have the time to explore. This winter, however, having been sent home to Connecticut early to avoid an expected spike in COVID-19 cases, I returned to discover a whole new cast of characters and a whole new side of the personality of a place I thought I had known—flocks of colorful sea ducks bobbing in the water, many of which I have never seen before; huge wintering raptors soaring overhead and perching in the trees; and bushes of white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis), whistling a startlingly clear recitative that has quickly become one of my favorite bird songs. For several weeks, I reveled in the intense novelty of a place that suddenly seemed like new—until one day, it didn’t.

Slipping into a dull blue, leaky bird blind on the bank of the river, the first thing that I see is a pair of immature bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) perched in the treetops on an island across the water, their presence initially revealed by the loud scolding of a flock of fish crows (Corvus ossifragus). These two eagles have been here for a few weeks now, and I can’t help but wonder if they’ve had a quiet moment since—the last time I was here, I watched with a chuckle as one of them, wishing to eat a bit of scavenged meat in peace, flew off with the branch it had been perching on still in its talons, so as not to release its grip on its meal. Turning to my left, I see a small flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) swimming along in a side channel that flows through the marsh and, darting between them, a few gadwall ducks (Mareca strepera), their deceptively dull plumages lighting up with rusty metallic flashes in the low winter light. In front of me, a pair of scrawny, red-breasted merganser (Mergus serrator) dive like boogie-boarders into the surf closer to shore and, a little further out, a small group of their hooded cousins (Lophodytes cucullatus) turn in profile to show off heads that resemble hatchet blades. Both merganser species possess characteristically long, thin bills with tooth-like edges and hooked ends for catching their ichthyic prey. Sure enough, within a few seconds, they have all disappeared beneath the waves to chase after schools of silvery coin-flip fish.

Then, suddenly, something new arrives—a large flock of small black and white ducks, their wings beating with hummingbird intensity as they coast into the water in front of the blind. I almost drop my binoculars as I excitedly raise them to my face, pressing them tight against my eye sockets as I squint to see the ducks clearly. A buzzing cloud of species names and appearances bounce around and collide in my brain as I fiddle with the focus nob. Could this be something new? A common goldeneye, maybe? Finally, a single name settles into place: “Eh, just a bufflehead,” I mutter to myself.

I tilt my head a few inches to the side, already looking for something else, before a feeling of mild horror pierces my concentration—just a bufflehead!

I swing the binoculars back toward the new arrivals (Bucephala albeola), now bobbing casually in the waves. The group consists of seven individuals—two males and five females. They have likely flown here all the way from the boreal forests of Canada, where they spent the summer raising chicks in tree holes hollowed out by northern flickers (Colaptes auratus), a species of large woodpecker that makes holes just big enough for the buffleheads, but too small for most other ducks. The males are a sharp division of dark and light, like living yin-yang symbols paddling on the water. Indeed, I have the impression watching them that the ducks may embody unity in opposites even better than the human-drawn symbol—after all, how could anybody make the mistake of focusing on the brilliance of the pure white belly and head spot over the iridescent, starling black of the face and back, or vice versa? The females, while a bit more visually subtle than their male companions, sport a dark shadow of brown and gray feathers, broken by white cheek spots that further advance the yin-yang analogy. I watch them for a while, floating and preening, but like the river in summer, this is only part of their world—and after a few moments, they all dive beneath the surface in another sort of flight burst which I am unable to see. Still, the slippery grace of the initial dive at least aids my imagination in sketching out a grainy mental sonar of the ducks’ hunt for small crustaceans and mollusks on a dark, cloudy riverbed.

Just a bufflehead?

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the oldest fossil of a bufflehead-like duck dates back to the Pliocene—that’s almost 2 million years ago! Here in front of me is a creature which has flown thousands of miles and survived millions of years to reach this spot. And I, having seen my first only a few weeks ago, and several dozen more since, dismiss it as just another bufflehead! How could I lose my wonder at this creature so quickly?

* * * * *

Like many words with functions on the more abstract side of language, I think that we have a tendency to underappreciate how very powerful the word “just” can be. Most of the words we call nouns, like “river,” “grass,” or “bufflehead,” pick out and identify tangible beings and objects in the world. Adjectives, like “stunted” and “sharp,” describe their features, and verbs, like “dive” and “squawk,” their actions. The word “just,” diverse as it is in meaning, can function in many ways, including as an adjective when used in its legal or moral sense. But the word’s true, hidden power comes, I think, from its use as an adverb—as in the sentence “It was just a bufflehead”—for in this form, it functions as an indicator of value and what should (and should not) be given one’s attention.

Spoken intentionally, the word can be used to stunning and undeniably useful effect. Imagine a child waking in the middle of the night after a bad dream and becoming convinced that a terrifying monster lurks in the closet or just outside the window or behind the walls. A parent trying to comfort the child would dig into their bag of language tricks and likely come out with the word “just”—a sort of grammatical nightlight to throw the deliberately casual glow of explanation into the dark corners of the child’s imagination.

“A monster in the closet? No, that’s just your coat!”

“And the claws on the window? Just the tree in the backyard!”

“And behind the walls? Nothing but water running through the pipes!”

Yes, this last example doesn’t use the word “just,” but its replacement phrase (“nothing but”) serves the same purpose by reassuring the child that there is no reason to pay any attention to the coat in the closet or the branch of the tree or the creaking of the pipes—they pose no threat, so you can just turn over and go back to sleep.

When the child eventually does this (helped along, of course, by the reassurance that their parents are present), the objects and sounds that they once perceived as threats to their safety melt into the background. They return to a state of being ignored, a state in which most objects, at any given time, exist. After all, humans, like all animals, are both busy and limited creatures—we simply do not have the time, energy, or sensory capacity to focus on everything all the time. Whether my current goal is to obtain my family’s next meal of roast goose or count how many Branta canadensis there are on a particular section of the Quinnipiac River for a scientific study, certain aspects of the environment around me—such as a smaller species of duck that won’t feed as many people or is not the species I am trying to count—must be ignored so that I can save my limited focus for picking out aspects of my environment that will actually help me to achieve my goal.

Another way, then, of thinking about the word “just” (when it is used as an adverb) is as a kind of verbal representation of this often-subconscious process of blocking out the “noise” of everyday life in order to focus in on information that is more relevant to what we are doing. One of the most important ways that the brain seems to do this is through responding to novelty with bursts of dopamine, motivating us to explore new places and phenomena for potential rewards. If we find ourselves in a familiar environment, there is not much point in this kind of exploration from an evolutionary perspective, since we probably already know where the site’s dangers and resources are located. If we come across something new, however—a new plant or animal or idea—it would be in our interest to investigate it, since it may represent either a danger to be avoided in the future or a valuable new resource to seek out.

The ability to narrow one’s focus in this way was surely important for our ancient ancestors as they learned to survive in new environments, and today our attraction to novelty still plays an important part in directing what kinds of information we pay attention to as we go about perusing our goals, as well as what goals we choose to pursue in the first place. It is both a driver of space exploration and the reason why even your most neophobic friend probably wouldn’t want to do the same crossword puzzle more than once or twice. It is also why activities such as birding, which involve searching for things that one has yet to see, can be so enjoyable. But what about when you don’t have a particular goal in mind? What about when you go out for a hike, not with the intention of searching for some rare bird or flower or herp, but simply accepting that you will see what you see? Of course, most naturalists still hope to come across new or rare species in these situations and are excited when they do, but it’s not as if this happens all that often when one is not specifically looking. And yet, I still often find myself unconsciously dismissing common species as “just this” or “just that” and as not being worth my time to look at. My attraction to novelty and disregard for the common carry over, even when I don’t need them to.

This, I think, is where the power of the word “just” can become a little dangerous. Contained in these four letters is the power to easily smooth over our unexamined assumptions—that something is too common, too boring, too unimportant to occupy our limited and valuable focus, even when there is nothing else immediately available to, or which must necessarily, occupy it. The potential cost of this sort of thinking, which is not really “thinking” at all in the traditional sense, since it usually happens unconsciously, is the sort of wonder that lifelong interests in natural history are made of. In an essay on her relationship with her copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers, naturalist Diana Kappel-Smith tells a story from when she was seventeen and went on a guided nature walk while vacationing in Maine with her parents. On the walk, she pointed to a small white flower and asked the guide what it was. “Hmmm? Oh, just an aster,” he responded with, as Kappel-Smith notes, a “hint of a sniff” at her ignorance. Luckily, this incident, which very well could have pushed her away from natural history for years to come, did not prevent Kappel-Smith from immediately turning around and having a life changing encounter with that unimportant little aster—“the sun’s echo.”

Or think of the humble house sparrow (Passer domesticus)—I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the words “oh, it’s just a sparrow” uttered, including from my own mouth, in response to the revelation that the mystery bird chirping from the bushes is nothing more than a dull, gray and brown representative of that much-ignored family. Even moving past the almost absurd non-specificity of this statement—there are whole field guides dedicated to helping birders distinguish between the many species of sparrows that are out there—I cannot help but think that the house sparrows which are so often its subject do not deserve such a cavalier attitude. Here, after all, is a species which has existed alongside human civilization since the very beginning. By sequencing the house sparrow genome, scientists have discovered that the origins of this bird go back at least 11,000 years to the Fertile Crescent, when some populations developed the ability to digest the sorts of starchy grains that were grown and stored around early human agricultural settlements. In other words, the same birds that we see today munching on French fries and pizza crusts in strip mall parking lots may have ancestors that looked for seeds caught in the cracks of Hammurabi’s stone tablets or been a little-recognized member of the Nativity scene.

Of course, we do not need to look at these birds from the angle of speculative human history in order to appreciate how amazing their evolutionary story is—just think of how they have actively followed the very animals which have succeeded in driving so many others to extinction, until they came to exist all over the globe. Surely, such a feat is worthy of our wonder? At the very least, those of us who love birds may wish to learn a few neat facts so that we are able to fan any sparks of curiosity we come across in a species that the average person sees much more often than bald eagles and buffleheads.

All in all, I suppose that the point here is one that many scientists and lovers of nature have made before me—that every species, no matter how small or common or annoying, is something truly amazing, a unique, provable miracle sitting at the end of an unbroken chain of ancestors stretching back to the origins of life on this planet. And what’s more, each one contributes in its own way to the near infinite depth of difference, possibility, and detail that makes exploring the natural world so much fun. Nothing, at some level, is “just” anything.

And yet, as I continue watching the buffleheads dive through the blue-gray water, I wonder if I was perhaps a little too hard on myself when I first realized that I had disregarded them. After all, human nature is human nature, itself the result of many millions of years of evolution, and I will probably never be able to focus completely on every plant, animal, and fungus that I come across on my walks. Often, I won’t even want to try, especially on those trips where I have something particular I want to see or do. For those trips where I have no particular goal, however, I think that I have learned an important lesson. When I uttered the word “just” in reference to the buffleheads, I may have unnecessarily rejected an opportunity to observe them, but I also gave myself a sign that this had happened, a little mark in language, tracking the unconscious processes occurring in my brain. Perhaps the best I can do is train myself to see this marker clearly when it comes to the surface and, if I am not occupied with a more definite goal, turn back to try and really see what I had found fitting to ignore.

In many cases, I’m sure, I will find no above average insight or enjoyment in this process of turning back (and I’m fairly certain the buffleheads’ opinion of the matter will tend to err negative to neutral), but that’s okay. Most of the everyday moments we spend with the people, places, and animals that we love are not noticeably special either, and “not above average” is still pretty darn good. Over time, “average” mysteriously accumulates into something more, and those rare moments of indisputably beautiful, exciting engagement are better for their rarity—like the strands of a flashing spiderweb, we must stop and be made breathless in order to enjoy them in their brief delicacy before stepping around and back onto the trail of everyday life…

Better off, hopefully, for having spotted a “just” go by.