Green Green Grass of Golf

In high school, I was much more wowed by lush green golf courses than by actual wilderness.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

My sister-in-law Jean used to golf a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. She dug out this photo of a Chicago-area golf course from the 1970s for me.

Automatic Electric, the huge phone and switchboard manufacturer a few blocks from my childhood home, gave our town an enormous tax base, meaning the public school teachers in Northlake were among the best qualified and highest paid public-school teachers in Illinois, and there was funding for school programs that people would have a hard time imagining nowadays.¹

At the time, every Illinois public school was required to provide physical education. Like most high schools, West Leyden had an excellent swimming pool, gymnastics equipment, track and field courses, and tennis and basketball courts, but there was also enough money to provide surprising extras. One was that senior girls had a unit of golf in gym class. All expenses, including the use of good golf clubs throughout the 6-week class and a field trip to a real golf course at the end of the unit, were paid by the school district.

Back then, I didn’t know anyone who golfed, and our TV was black and white, so if I happened to turn the TV on when a golf game was on, I’d not have noticed that the golf course was just as emerald green as Automatic Electric’s spacious lawn. But the first time I noticed a golf course as my family drove past, those same eyes that had thought Automatic Electric’s lawn was the prettiest natural space I’d ever seen were even more wowed by the golf course—so much sprawling, bright green dotted with a pond or two, lovely shade trees, and aesthetically shaped sandy-colored bunkers contrasting with even more vivid greens, each marked with a brightly colored triangular flag. What could be prettier than that?

A couple down the block used one of these FLIT guns to spray their hollyhocks.

I had no clue that golf courses were maintained with huge applications of fertilizers and pesticides, but I probably would not have cared—after all, I’d grown up with the DDT truck; FLIT guns; and a neurotoxin, hexachlorophene, in our Ipana toothpaste and teenage acne products. Kids in my class sometimes shot spit balls up into the asbestos ceiling in our class; when they got caught, they had to pry them out, along with flakes of asbestos, using a knife. I didn’t learn of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring until high school, didn’t read it until college, and didn’t really grok it until, first, birding opened my eyes to how each bird species has its own special needs and fits into its own natural communities, and second, when my maternal protectiveness kicked in with my first pregnancy, putting me on red alert to a host of dangers to all the tiny beings I loved.

I didn’t enjoy anything about golf, and our PE grade wasn’t averaged in for our class rank, so I wasn’t the least bit troubled by how utterly inept at golf I was. Most of the unit was taught on school grounds, and the one field trip to a real golf course was to occur the very week our science club was planning an 8-day camping trip to the Smoky Mountains, so I got out of it.

I can’t find any pictures of our Smoky Mountain trip, but this was taken at one of our science field trips, either at Pere Marquette State Park in west-central Illinois or Porcupine Mountains State Park in northern Michigan.

The teachers sponsoring our science club were focused on the physical sciences, so most of our activities involved geology, mapping, astronomy, and chemistry. We didn’t focus at all on wildlife.

It’s ironic that on these field trips I was as close to genuine wilderness as I’d ever been in my life but still thought a golf course or the oversized lawn of a local factory was the more beautiful “natural” setting.

Six years after our Smoky Mountains trip, when I was reading my brand-new Golden Guide, I figured out from the maps that there must have been a LOT of birds singing where I was in the spring of 1969. Russ and I returned to the national park in 1980, retracing our steps to several of the places we’d been, and I saw a lot of cool birds that I must have passed right by, oblivious. Ruffed Grouse. Tufted Titmice. Carolina Chickadees. Carolina Wrens. Kentucky and Hooded Warblers.

Carolina Wrens have a LOUD song—how could I have missed them in the Smokies?

There are, of course, some birds on golf courses—indeed, one major birding destination for listers is the exclusive Biltmore Hotel’s golf course in Coral Gables, Florida.

The hotel building is a haven for several hard-to-find non-native but countable parrots.

Mitred Parakeets flying around the Biltmore Hotel

The Mitred Parakeet was, for a short time, #700 on my “ABA Continental” list, and surprisingly, it was also #700 for Sara Bettencourt, so of course we celebrated! But I felt yucky about getting my 700th species on a golf course, to say nothing of it being a non-native species, so I was thrilled when just a few months later, the AOS lumped the Cordilleran and Pacific-slope Flycatchers back into the Western Flycatcher. That bumped the Mitred Parakeet down to #699, making my #700 a much cooler species, the Smooth-billed Ani that we saw three days later, far from any golf course.

The Biltmore golf course itself is home to a small flock of exotic but “countable” Egyptian Geese and Florida’s ubiquitous Muscovy Ducks. But native birds there are few and far between.

A few golf courses are surprisingly important for native species because otherwise the land they’re on would most likely have been developed for housing. The Princeville Makai and the Kahuku golf courses on Oʻahu are home for a few oceanic birds, including Laysan Albatrosses, who nest there every year.

Laysan Albatrosses on the Kahuku Golf Course in 2024.

But these oceanic birds don’t eat anywhere near the golf course. They find all the food for themselves and their chicks at sea, so contaminants aren’t as big an issue for them as they are for birds who need their nesting habitat to provide food as well as a simple substrate.

TV producers stick bird songs into the background soundtrack of golf tournaments to give viewers the subliminal sense that every golf course is the lovely natural setting my childhood imagination believed it to be, but TV viewers seldom notice that the sounds are often of species that would never ever be in the geographical location of the golf course, much less in that kind of habitat with crowds and cameras all about.

In 2024, there were about 16,000 golf courses in the United States and fewer than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants, and the footprint on the landscape of even one golf course is bigger than that of all the fast food franchises put together in that town or city. The average 9-hole golf course covers 50–60 acres—significantly bigger than Automatic Electric’s sprawling 35-acre plant and property—and an 18-hole golf course covers an average 115 acres, some exceeding 200 acres. The standard heavy pesticide and fertilizer applications contaminate the water features on the courses themselves, seep into groundwater that may supply houses and farms miles away, and run off to surrounding lakes, rivers, and streams essential for golfers, non-golfers, and wildlife alike.

Every single thing we humans do to provide for both our needs and pleasures exerts an environmental cost, and millions of decent human beings love playing golf. But those golf courses could not be considered multi-use—the Biltmore does allow birders to walk on some marked and paved pathways, and there’s a surrounding pathway circling the Kahuku golf course that even bikers can use, but non-golfers are strictly kept off every inch of playing area. Golfers protect their pristine courses much more diligently than our society is willing to protect wilderness. And that simple truth breaks my heart.

1. Regarding those exceptional high school programs: our town was genuinely blue-collar. Russ’s and my families were typical—my dad and Russ’s mom finished high school, but my mother dropped out when she was 16, and Russ’s dad only attended school through sixth grade. Only one or two of our friends’ parents had gone to college, none of my relatives had, and to be honest, when I started high school, I had no clue what college even was. But somehow we were given opportunities that many kids of much more upscale suburbs didn’t get, at least not paid for by their school districts:

1. Every year we had at least one major field trip for English class—entirely free for us. Just one example: in 1968, when we were juniors, my beloved English teacher Jane Lucas took us to the Goodman Theater in downtown Chicago to see an exceptional performance of Othello that had me sobbing.

   

   I was too clueless to recognize any of the names in the program, but I kept it as a memento of a glorious experience. A full nine years later, in 1977, Russ and I went to see some science fiction movie he was excited about. I got into it a bit but got distracted very time Darth Vader spoke. His voice stirred some vague recollection that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then, right at the climax, it hit me and I blurted out “It’s Othello!” Russ shushed me, but we stayed through the credits and saw that the role was played by David Prowse. The moment we got back to our apartment, I pulled out my old program tucked in my yearbook to prove that David Prowse played Othello, but no—some guy named James Earl Jones had played him.

   

   I took so much pride in being able to recognize voices—human and avian—that I was bummed out. Months later, Parade did a feature story about James Earl Jones, saying he’d done the voice of Darth Vader but hadn’t wanted a credit—David Prowse was the guy in the suit. Vindication! And when the original Star Wars was re-released in theaters just before The Empire Strikes Back came out, they added the credit for the actor who, for me, has always been the real Darth Vader.

   On other English class field trips, we saw other plays and at least two movies: Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
   

2. If we wanted to learn a musical instrument, the school district not only provided lessons in beginning band or orchestra class—it also provided the instruments for our own personal use so we could practice at home. For free!
   

3. All the transportation to just about all extra-curricular club events was paid by the district. The school board didn’t particularly like our science club field trips, both because they involved co-ed camping and because there was a potential for accidents hundreds of miles from home, so this was the one thing we had to pay out-of-pocket for. My parents were not willing to foot the bill, but I could usually scrounge up enough babysitting money, and the one time I did not have enough before a trip, one of our teachers advanced me the rest until I could pay him back.

   

   Russ was on the tennis team. Seriously, how could I not have had a crush on him?

4. I wasn’t into sports, but for the kids who were, all the equipment and transportation to events was paid for by the school.
   

5. Besides the golf unit in girls’ gym class, we also had a six-week unit on fencing.

   

   We learned judging as well as fencing. I’m the “judge” closest to the camera, facing away.

   I loved it so much that I took a semester of fencing at the University of Illinois, and for a while (until I started birding—one must prioritize!) I was on the women’s fencing team at Michigan State. At the time, there was no such thing as Big Ten women’s fencing, but the men’s coach—the amazing Charles Schmitter—thought that was criminal. He received absolutely no compensation to coach us but put out notices to see if any women were interested, got the men’s team to share their equipment and help us along, and set up informal matches when the men’s team was playing where a similar unofficial women’s team was being developed.
   I still have the fencing equipment Russ bought me back in the early 90s. Again, my interest was entirely sparked during that fencing unit at West Leyden High School.