Birds Art Life

by Kyo Maclear

  Portrait of a Wilderness by Guy Mountfort. A Twitcher’s Diary: The Bird-watching Year of Richard Millington.

  I borrowed more books. Despite a desire to remain open-minded, I was fighting my prejudices. I judged books by their covers. I judged them by the dull and distinguished-looking authors who looked as if they had just returned from wind-tossed heaths. I judged them when their first pages were sickly sweet or deadly dry. I grazed and sampled.

  The Bird Collectors by Barbara and Richard Mearns. Songbird Journeys by Miyoko Chu. Living on the Wind by Scott Weidensaul. Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman. John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes. Where Have All the Birds Gone? by John Terborgh. Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey. Birding on Borrowed Time by Phoebe Snetsinger. How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes. Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds by Chris Chester. Grass, Sky Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds by Trevor Herriot. Nature Cure by Richard Mabey. The Running Sky by Tim Dee. On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger.

  I gathered seminal field guides to North America. Smooth pages. Straightforward glossaries, and no-nonsense grids. I loved these books for their biblical heft and diagrammatic certainty.

  The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley. Collins Bird Guide by Killian Mullarney et al. A Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson.

  • • •

  The books tended to fall into two camps: birds seen by scientists/taggers and birds seen by poets/roamers. It was the latter that tended to sweep me away, but because these books were so voice-driven, questions of subjectivity and entitlement rushed to the fore: Who was doing the roaming? Who was boldly going forth, mostly alone and untrammeled? Was it the “Lone Enraptured Male” Kathleen Jamie famously pilloried in her London Review of Books essay? (“What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! . . . From Cambridge! . . . Quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.”) Despite a twenty-first-century veneer of self-awareness and cosmopolitanism, it was often the same old gents on spiritual quests.

  The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by Gilbert White. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane.

  The tone varied widely. There were breezy, conversational books full of corny humor. There were quiet, austere books that had been blurbed and praised by quiet, austere magazines. The books I liked most were the shorter and warmer ones, the ones built on personal stories that did not assume access to rural traditions that were dissolved for many of us ages ago. The books I liked tended to emphasize the smaller wildnesses in the nonpristine places in which most of us actually live. “Between the laundry and fetching the kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life,” wrote Kathleen Jamie in Findings. Many of these books were written by women for whom the focus on the close and domestic rather than the far-flung and epic was often a necessity.

  The Greater Common Good by Arundhati Roy. Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price. To the River by Olivia Laing. Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson.

  It made sense to me—the focus on the nature growing in the cracks and crevices of urban life—not because we should romanticize human blight and fallout but because, at the end of the day, humanized nature is all that many of us have.

  I began to appreciate the books that were more plainly science-minded rather than piously inspirational. Poetry captures the elusive nature of birds, but it is science that allows us to see them with precision and grace. The best books captured the sweet spot between poetic not-knowing and scientific knowing.

  The Wisdom of Birds by Tim Birkhead. What the Robin Knows by Jon Young.

  I liked learning specific things. For example, from The Bird Detective by Bridget Stutchbury, I learned that birds around the world have adapted their singing behavior. The ones that live in urban areas have changed their songs “so that the notes are not masked by background human noise.” Adjusting their tunes “opportunistically” allows them to rise above the din of city life. When the culture is noisy, one way of adapting is to big it up.

  From Olivia Gentile’s Life List, I learned about “spark birds.” A spark bird could be as bold as an eagle, as colorful as a warbler, or as ordinary as a sparrow, as long as it triggered the “awakening” that turned someone into a serious birder. Most birding memoirs begin with a spark bird.

  SPARK BIRDS

  Eastern phoebe—John James Audubon (As a young boy living in Pennsylvania, Audubon tied silver thread around the legs of several young birds, hoping to discover if they returned to the same nest every year. The following spring, two returned with “the little ring on the leg”—so inaugurating the practice of bird banding in North America.)

  Northern flicker—Roger Tory Peterson (It was lying on the ground. “I poked it and it burst into color, with the red on the back of its head and the gold on its wing. It was the contrast, you see, between something I thought was dead and something so alive. Like a resurrection. I came to believe birds are the most vivid reflection of life. It made me aware of the world in which we live.”)

  Blackburnian warbler—Phoebe Snetsinger (Spotted in the woods of Missouri, the songbird with its flaming orange throat “nearly knocked me over with astonishment—and quite simply hooked me forever.”)

  Magnolia warbler—David Allen Sibley (“My father, an ornithologist, had trapped and banded this incredible black and grey and yellow and white bird, this little feathered jewel. . . . We took it outside and released it, and it flew into the woods and disappeared.”)

  Northern flicker—Jonathan Franzen (“Right after my mother died, I spent a lot of time looking at a northern flicker that was hanging around my brother’s house in Seattle. Objectively it’s a stunning bird, and it had so much personality. That was when I first started having a glimmer of why one might spend time doing nothing but watching a bird.”)

  Black-and-white warbler—Starr Saphir (A bird she spotted when she was six, when her grandfather’s car broke down in upstate New York. “I knew what it was because my grandmother had a copy of the old Audubon prints. You see these things in books and you don’t think they actually exist.”)

  • • •

  I began to think about “spark books.” It occurred to me that, if asked, most ardent readers would be able to pinpoint the book that ignited their love of reading. I polled a few friends to find out. Without exception, they all named a story from childhood.

  SPARK BOOKS

  Danny the Champion of the World—the musician

  Alice in Wonderland—Michael

  The Wump World—Hiromi

  Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back—Terence

  Harriet the Spy—Jim and Kelsey

  Search for a Living Fossil—David

  Watership Down—Kelly

  A Light in the Attic—Julie

  The Secret Garden—Martha

  Bartholomew and the Oobleck—Stephen

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Nobu

  • • •

  The spark of children’s literature—stories lusciously rendered in words and pictures—was distinctive and determining. These books had a radiant quality, a quality that Anne Carson describes in her book Decreation. “When I think of books read in childhood,” she writes, “they come to my mind’s eye in violent foreshortening and framed by a precarious darkness, but at the same time they glow somehow with an almost supernatural intensity of life that no adult book could ever effect.”

  While I went on my reading binge, while the musician recovered, the air outside filled with migrant birdsong. I sat in my garden every day with my Peterson’s Field Guide and a pair of binoculars, trying to compare the living birds around me with the book birds on my lap. One day I emailed the musician and told him what I saw.

  I wrote: “Based on its stocky red and grey body, I think it’s a crossbi
ll.”

  And he wrote back: “It’s definitely not a crossbill. Wrong time of year. Probably a house finch (lots of them around right now) and remotely possibly a purple finch (though I doubt this.)”

  It was a house finch. Any momentary feelings of stupidity and shame on my part were dispelled by the bird’s charm. I watched for a long time, fell in love with its rosy red crown and breast and its gregarious twittering. I felt the lift of bird in me, which felt like the lift of wine, or the lift of an ascending elevator, or the lift of discovering that I did not prefer the book to the reality. I wondered if this would be my spark bird.

  Around this time, I completed writing a children’s book about the ocean. It was the story of one child’s encounter and connection with a magical place in nature. It was inspired by a family trip we had taken to British Columbia. We stayed with our friends in a beautiful hamlet on the Sunshine Coast. We looked out on a soft and ancient coastline and, in the far-off distance, a little island. One day as we sat on rocks watching a pod of dolphins magically leap across the bay, my younger son declared that he wanted to live by the “Specific Ocean” forever. This lovely malapropism set me thinking about the idea of place and where we find our specific oases of serenity and belonging.

  I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to have a fixed point, the way Thoreau had his Walden, Willa Cather had Nebraska, Annie Dillard had Tinker Creek, Rachel Carson had Silver Spring. I had always felt an allegiance to the migratory and rootless: to those of no place and many places, who (out of necessity) had developed the ability to move and adapt quickly. My friends were mostly of the diaspora, mongrel and scattered people. But seeing my younger son respond so forcefully to the ocean made me wonder what we were missing.

  I began to wonder if one of the things we were missing was the opportunity to miss, to yearn for, to possess the sort of deep local knowledge that inspires you to fight for a place. Viewing nature as optional—as always elsewhere or in the past—denies us, or spares us, the work of caring.

  The book I ended up writing, The Specific Ocean, is about the places that sustain us. It is about the joy and mournfulness of deep emotional connection. Mournfulness because when you love a specific place you open yourself up to the singular sadness that arises when that place is harmed or lost to you.

  My close friend was deep in the throes of a book on climate change. She later wrote of hearing “the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our ‘homeplace’ more than any other.” When the talk was over, she approached him for guidance. “I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who live in our computers and always seem to be shopping for a home. ‘Stop somewhere,’ he replied. ‘And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place.’ ”

  The musician was still recovering, so I decided to take my sons birding. It was the third week of April. I packed snacks, and we headed off to Ashbridges Bay in the east end of Toronto. It was chilly but sunny. My younger son started complaining the instant we arrived. He was too cold and too hungry and too itchy and his binoculars were too blurry. He finished all his snacks within five minutes of leaving the parking lot.

  In the park, there wasn’t much to see. I pointed to a red-winged blackbird, and we watched a few robins scurry-stop-scurry across the grass. I was determined to find other birds, but I couldn’t.

  My younger son eventually pulled us toward the bay, where he had spotted a float of small diving ducks. There were three pairs, and we sat and watched them synchronize their dives, disappearing and reappearing in the viscous green water.

  An hour passed, and I realized it wasn’t the birds that had bored and annoyed my younger son, it was my attitude of leading and instructing.

  I discovered my sons didn’t need a guide or scout leader. All they needed was for me to lead them to beauty’s general habitat, to wave my arm and say, “I think there might be something that way.”

  The musician’s doctor said it was okay for him to walk. His knee would heal through gentle activity. So we made a plan to take a forty-five-minute trip to a marsh just outside the city. The Bonaparte’s gulls were in full breeding plumage—a striking sight with their pale, dainty bodies and jet-black heads.

  Things did not go according to plan. Our car started to fail ten minutes after we set out. We fishtailed onto the shoulder of the highway as smoke plumed from the hood. The mechanic’s verdict: overfilled oil tank, a leak, and (most seriously) a broken ball joint. The last was probably what caused us to veer off the road, and we were lucky the tire didn’t fall off and the engine didn’t blow. We were lucky we were not dead.

  I felt shaken, so the musician suggested we go for a long walk to settle our nerves. We still had an entire afternoon ahead of us. There were still birds to see.

  The walking made us feel better. We walked to a diner for lunch. Then we walked a few loops around High Park, where we saw fancy wood ducks, a cigar-shaped chimney swift, a kingfisher, a great egret, a black-crowned night heron, and a solitary male gadwall that stayed still long enough for me to fixate on its delicate herringbone feather pattern.

  I looked at the musician with new admiration. I had now learned that a person could be good at big stresses even if he was not so good with the normal little ones. I was happy to be walking with such a person, a person much like my father. If a crisis came our way, I knew he would act with rare decisiveness.

  It began to rain. We crouched in the grass, and the musician taught me to tell the difference between a male song sparrow (streaky red-brown breast with black dot at the center), a house sparrow (fuller, black-bibbed, grey-headed), and a white-throated sparrow (striped crown, yellow brow). I learned that when it rains, the birds come down from the sky, and that when it rains and you realize you’re alive, the rain goes from feeling bleak to feeling refreshing.

  After we parted company, the musician stayed in the park and found three chipping sparrows—the tiniest sparrows. He wrote me later: “They were sweet and hoppy and I wanted to be close to them and I wanted them to feel safe and I said ‘what a day we had today, you only live once, your knee can take it’ and so I lay down flat on the wet ground and sure enough the little sweethearts got in nice and close to me and it was a delightful time.”

  I stayed up that night reading in bed, crawled back into my nest of books, feeling the residue of what hadn’t been walked off yet. The reading was comforting and cleansing. I had made peace with my reading. The true arts of survival lie in multiple realms, both physical and subtle.

  The book world and the real world were not antithetical. Knowledge was not the opposite of passion. Good knowledge didn’t smother ignorance’s sparks of enthusiasm. Good books were not a mortuary of joy. The scientific words you learned to speak with more and more confidence and dexterity, the ones you began to make your own: these could be passion’s conduit. There is a wilderness at the edge of all knowledge.

  Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete.

  MAY

  FALTERING

  (House Finches, a Magnolia Warbler, Dunlins, and Whimbrels)

  On the frailties of birds and humans, especially when the terrain of our lives is unstable.

  In May, I discovered that my younger son was eating books. He licked their covers and ripped off pieces and ate them. This new habit was revealed to me one night when, complaining of nausea, he vomited up a piece of blue paper—a page from The Complete Peanuts 1963–1964. When I laid down a rule against eating books, he immediately complied and went back to reading them instead.

  Had this book-eating behavior come from nowhere, I might have been more alarmed, but at the time my eight-year-old son was a fretful boy—thumb sucker, occasional insomniac, prone to stomachaches—with more than average nervous energy. Sometimes he expended this energy lavishly (making comics, dancing), and sometimes he expended it strangely.

  During one memorably strange period, feeling himself under n
ew social pressure at school, he would come home and fling himself around the house, as if tossed by gale-force winds, declaring himself—definitively—fed up.

  I learned not to take these phases too seriously or too personally, though I did feel somewhat genetically responsible. I am an anxious person, easily pulled by currents of panic and worry. I come from a family of anxious people. Nail biters, teeth grinders, paper rippers . . . I suspect there might have been some book eaters among my ancestors in their thatched-roof cottages and drafty minka farmhouses.

  I understood that my son needed to find ways to release the frustrations that had been building since he started grade school. I learned to breathe deeply when he passed through moods like a loose radio dial. Gleeful, aggravated, stormy, sensitive, obstinate, operatic. I nicknamed him Scramble, hinting at the impact his shifting tempers had on my state of mind.

  • • •

  In May, on the first semi-warm day of a spring that had been long in arriving, my younger son and I sat together on the bench in our front garden watching the house finches. Our usually quiet street was alive with pedestrians—women talking into cell phones, cloth bags on their arms, stroller walkers veering around an abandoned mattress, a couple carrying beat-up books and old vinyl from a lawn sale up the road.

  The house finches sat high on our cherry tree, adorning the branches, singing their long, twittering songs. We were discussing my son’s ambivalence about his new bicycle, specifically his anticipation of falling, and I was trying to say that while I understood his worries, it was hard for me to see him fear something that was supposed to bring him pleasure.

  As we sat there, the house finches began to descend, springing lightly from branch to branch, until they collected at the seed feeder hanging a few feet from us. The pounding of their tiny hearts, the nervous flurry of hunger and joy as they cast their caution aside, was palpable. My son, hypnotized, inched forward on his seat to meet the birds.