Odd Birds

by Ian Harding

  American kestrels are small falcons—and no joke, they’re red, white, and blue in color. I’ve seen one hover in place for minutes on end, then cartwheel through the air to nab some unwitting insect.

  Kestrels—and falcons in general—are more closely related to parrots than to other kinds of hawks. I like to imagine they’re little carnivorous parrots, though maybe that’s not quite biologically correct.

  Seeing the kestrel cheered me up. My feet were feeling lighter as we arrived at the end of the trail and began our short drive back to the campsite.

  Heading back felt like driving through the opening scene of Bambi. There were quail all over the road. We passed mama deer with their fawns trailing behind them. Flocks of turkeys bobbed about in the bushes.

  When we got back to the campsite and started setting up our tents, a cheeky raccoon came right up to beg for food. I turned to Walter: “We’re trapped in a Disney movie.”

  It felt good being back at camp, surrounded by animals, feeling like a welcome guest in a wild habitat. I started thinking about my audition again, and about the condor. My mind wandered.

  I think the thing about birding—about loving the outdoors in general—is that to do it, you need to find something in nature that is just yours, something that nobody else can touch or take away from you. It isn’t about one specific bird. You can’t be a birder who only wants to see one bird. That’s not birding; that’s an obsession. When you become a birder, you do it as a life plan.

  Acting’s the same. You have to find something you love about it that doesn’t depend on anybody else. It isn’t about booking one specific role on one specific day. If you just keep concentrating on the things you’re not seeing, if you keep focusing on not getting the role, you’re kind of missing the point. Nobody has ever seen every single bird on the planet. It would be impossible. No actor has booked every single role—the world would just be one giant monologue.

  We had set out that morning to see the California condor. We hadn’t seen it, and I’d felt grumpy all day as a result. But I’d seen half a dozen birds that I had never seen before. It was a day of discovery for me. The only choice I had was whether or not I embraced that discovery.

  There would be other birds, other days spent outside, other chances to see the skies filled with flying colors. One bad day doesn’t magically make you stop being a birder. One bad audition doesn’t mean you aren’t an actor anymore.

  For dinner, we made pasta on a gas camping stove. We hadn’t seen any condors, but it had been an undeniably good day for birds. I popped open a bottle of Apothic Red—my mom’s favorite wine—and poured it into our metal camping mugs.

  I turned to Walter and held up my mug. “To the American kestrel,” I said.

  “To the turkey vulture,” he replied.

  After we ate, we sat outside our tents looking at stars. Walter asked me if I knew any of the constellations.

  “I know Orion, but that’s about it.”

  “I actually know the bird ones,” he said.

  I didn’t know there were any bird constellations.

  He pointed at a big star above us, and I followed him as he traced a cross in the sky with his finger, connecting the first star to half a dozen others. “Cygnus,” he said. “The Swan.”

  “It looks more like a cross,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s also called the Northern Cross. The Greeks knew it as Cygnus.”

  Walter pointed up to another star.

  “See that one?” he asked.

  I squinted. I could just make out a dim star where his finger was pointing.

  “Follow it down and to the left,” he said. “See it? Now from there, go to the right and a little down.”

  I got lost. Walter had to trace it out two more times before I could see what he was pointing at: Aquila, Zeus’s eagle.

  “Aquila carried Zeus’s thunderbolts for him when he fought the Titans,” he said. “At the end of his life, Zeus placed Aquila among the stars to thank him for his service.”

  Constellations always seem to overwhelm me with emotions. Looking up at the stars that night, I felt the usual cliché: I was a small and insignificant cog in the larger workings of the vast and limitless cosmos, and it was a humbling experience.

  But I also felt the cliché’s exact opposite. I realized that I was sitting there staring up at the exact same stars that people had stared at, named, and personified thousands of years before I was ever born. Before my country ever existed. Before my language was first spoken. These stories and these names had come down through an endless stream of shared narratives, shared values, beliefs, and stories. And they had arrived here. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, I was listening to tales and learning names from the beginning of humanity. The name Aquila had not faded with time. Nor had Cygnus. The names had outlived their creators by millennia.

  I didn’t make it into my tent that night. I fell asleep under the stars. Shortly before dawn, I woke up shivering and crawled into the tent, wrapping myself up like a burrito in my sleeping bag.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but I was wide awake.

  I pulled my sleeping bag around my shoulders and stepped out of the tent. The sun was poking out from behind the mountains to the east. I sat on a stump and watched it rise. Within half an hour, the campsite was flooded with radiant pink and orange tones.

  I walked out into the street to get a better view of the sunrise. As I did, I heard the distant patter of small feet—dozens of them—running along the road. It sounded like a stampede of pygmy buffalo was coming up behind me.

  A herd of quail rounded a corner and hustled toward me. They moved as one, curving this way and that like a rushing stream as they overtook the road. Despite their minute size, I was genuinely frightened. A headline flashed in my head: ACTOR TRAMPLED TO DEATH BY QUAIL AT SUNRISE VISTA.

  I didn’t know where I could run to avoid them, so I stood my ground.

  The quail rushed forward, their tiny feet pounding against the asphalt in a muffled din. I closed my eyes as the first quail reached my feet. This was it. Time to get pecked to death.

  I felt something soft brush against my right ankle. Then against my left. I felt wind and fluff and dust breezing lightly by my calves. I opened my eyes.

  The herd had not stopped, nor even slowed. The quail continued to rocket down the street, but they had parted at my feet like water around a stone, doing their best to avoid this unexpected human obstruction in their path. It was incredible. I felt like the Moses of fowl. Or perhaps I was a quail whisperer.

  When the quail had passed, I walked back to camp and sat on a tree stump. I waited for Walter to get up.

  When he appeared, we agreed to grab breakfast on the road instead of cooking up something at the campsite. He had a lunch date, and I needed to get back to LA for a fund-raiser that night. We loaded up the car and hit the road.

  On the way out of the park, we stopped at the ranger station to use their bathrooms. As we were getting back in our car, a golf cart pulled into the parking lot near us. The park ranger behind the wheel waved good morning.

  “Just getting in or heading out?” he asked.

  “Heading out,” Walter said.

  The ranger nodded. “You get any good hiking in?”

  “Yeah, we went up the High Peaks Trail yesterday.”

  “See any condors up there?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir. No condors this trip. Just turkey vultures and a couple of falcons.”

  “And some Germans,” Walter added.

  The ranger didn’t seem surprised. “Yeah, they’re up there, but they can be pretty tough to spot.” He wasn’t talking about the Germans. “Tell you what, if you boys really want to see condors, you might try the Grand Canyon next time.”

  “To see the California condor?” I said.

  “They’ve got a lot of them out there.”

  He nodded goodbye and whistled as he lumbered over to the ranger station.

  We got back in th
e car and drove out of the park. The road back to LA was rural at first—and at times there was only one lane going in each direction. We’d been on the road for about fifteen minutes when I saw a flash of feathers dart across the highway and perch on a tree in front of us.

  It was a black bird with white on its wings.

  I slammed on the brakes. The car came to a screeching halt in the middle of the highway.

  “Ian, what the hell are you doing?” Walter yelled. “That’s not a condor!”

  “I know it isn’t,” I said, taking off my seatbelt. “It’s a yellow-billed magpie. I’ve never seen one before.”

  We pulled over to the side of the road and got out. Sure enough, there it was, perched high in the branches of a tree just off the road: a yellow-billed magpie. A gorgeous blue stripe circled its belly like an inner tube. After a few moments, the magpie flew off to continue with its day, and Walter and I got back in the car to continue with ours.

  I turned to Walter: “Want to go to the Grand Canyon next week? See if we can spot any California condors in Arizona?”

  He smiled. “John’ll be better by then so we can drag him along, too.”

  NOT THAT KIND OF BIRD

  Sometimes it’s hard to trust your own eyes. When what you see doesn’t match your expectations, your brain can play tricks on you. It’s hard to know if you’re ever actually seeing what you think you are.

  I moved to Laurel Canyon after the third season of the show. I’d spend most Sunday mornings playing with my dogs in the yard. The house I lived in backed up to a hill, which Mochi and Bailey would run all over.

  Sometimes we’d play fetch, and I’d throw a ball up the slope. They’d tear after it, then trip over their legs as they raced back to me.

  Mochi wouldn’t always bring back the ball. Sometimes she’d bring a stick instead—and once she brought me a freshly uprooted rosebush.

  One such Sunday morning, I let the dogs out and went back inside to get some coffee. The kitchen looked out onto the yard, and I glanced out to see Mochi and Bailey hightailing it after a squirrel.

  I grabbed some half-and-half out of the fridge, then looked back out the window again to make sure the dogs weren’t getting into trouble. All three of them were romping around, tails wagging.

  Wait—what the hell? I only have two dogs.

  I leaned over the sink to get a better look outside. There weren’t three dogs in the yard. There was Mochi. There was Bailey. And there was a coyote chasing them.

  I bolted out the door, waving my arms and shouting. I grabbed a shovel on the ground next to a recently replanted rosebush and ran to save my two helpless dogs from this vicious apex predator.

  As I crossed the yard, all three of them—Mochi, Bailey, and the coyote—stopped what they were doing and stared at me. The coyote sniffed the air, then ran off into the bushes. Bailey looked at me and whined.

  The coyote hadn’t been trying to eat them. He had been playing with them!

  The dogs had made a new friend, and I had chased him off with a shovel.

  I set the shovel down and called the dogs over. I had been right to scare the coyote off. Coyotes are dangerous. They eat cats and maim dogs … and they had looked so happy playing together in the yard.

  “Come on, guys. Let’s go inside.” I ushered the dogs into the house, stopping at the door to take one last look around in case their coyote friend had come back. He had totally vanished.

  * * *

  A few Sundays later, I was again out in the backyard with the dogs. The coyote hadn’t come back to visit yet, but I’d been keeping an eye out for him.

  As I stood there, waiting for Mochi and Bailey to quit wrestling over a ball and bring it back to me, I spotted a small bird perched out on a dead branch of an oak tree. It was mostly black—it looked like a little flycatcher.

  Some flycatchers are notoriously difficult to identify. There’s a family of about a dozen of them, called the Empidonax flycatchers, which are nearly indistinguishable. Early naturalists would kill birds they were studying in order to see them up close, but killing an empid for identification purposes would be nearly pointless—the only way to reliably tell them apart is their song. And, to add to the fun, if Empidonax flycatchers aren’t at their summer breeding grounds, they don’t sing.

  Anyway, those flycatchers are mostly gray, and this bird was mostly black, so I didn’t need to worry about its song. The bird sallied out from the branch and caught a bug in midair, then returned to its perch.

  My first inclination was that it was a black phoebe, a fairly common type of flycatcher that nested in the neighborhood. But the bird wasn’t that far away, and with my naked eye I could see it had a crimson breast and patches of white on the wings.

  I watched as the bird skated around the trunk of the tree, flashing white feathers on the sides of its tail. I was looking for field marks—parts of the bird that are characteristic markers to help distinguish it from other species. The bird I was looking at now had what looked like little white bags under its eyes—giving it an oddly sleep-deprived appearance.

  Black phoebes don’t have any of these features. They’re all black with a white breast.

  It suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at an extremely rare bird for Los Angeles: a painted redstart.

  Mochi dropped a broom at my feet and began whining. Not wanting to take my eyes off the redstart, I tried to shush her as I backpedaled toward the house to grab a pair of binoculars, maybe even a camera. The bird was spiraling up through the branches of the tree.

  I got to the door and dashed inside—but in that short interval, the bird disappeared. By the time I got back outside, I couldn’t find it again. I’d seen it for just the briefest of moments—so short that I could barely believe my own eyes.

  After searching the trees in my yard for a good half an hour, and then walking up and down the street, I gave up and went back inside. I knew what I’d seen, but I pulled out a bird book to confirm it anyway. I found the right page in the book and checked all the field marks. It was definitely a painted redstart. I was sure of it.

  Where was Sophia? Out working?! Damnit. I needed to high-five someone.

  That night, I met up with my buddy Walter at a bar in Highland Park. I’d told him I had some really exciting news to share, and he was just about the only person I knew who’d understand how excited I was to have seen a painted redstart in my yard.

  “Bullshit,” he said, putting down his beer.

  “I swear to God,” I told him.

  “I thought exciting news meant you’d won the lottery, or booked a film, or … something that was actually true.”

  “I’m not making this up! Why would I make this up?”

  Walter shook his head. “Did you take a picture?”

  “I didn’t have time—but it had the red belly, the white patches on the wings…”

  “Maybe you saw a black phoebe and it caught the light in a weird way.”

  I’d expected Walter to be just as excited as I was, but now he was trashing my birding abilities.

  “You’re just jealous,” I said, exasperated.

  “I’m not jealous, I swear. I think you’re just a little overenthusiastic about birds—and you thought you saw something that wasn’t actually what you were seeing. Painted redstarts only pop up around here once every few years.”

  “But they do pop up!”

  Walter finished off his beer with a big gulp. “When you were a kid, did you tell everyone you’d seen Santa Claus at your house? Did you lie about that, too?” he asked.

  We agreed to talk about something else.

  * * *

  Walter and I had that conversation about two years ago, and to this day, whenever he doesn’t believe something I’m saying, he’ll ask, “Is this another one of your redstart stories?”

  It’s easy to misidentify birds when they zip by in the woods and you only glimpse them for a few seconds. But it isn’t just birds—or coyotes. We do the same thing with peopl
e.

  Ever since Pretty Little Liars started airing, people have come up to me in restaurants and bars to tell me they recognize me from somewhere. They know they’ve seen my face, but they can’t place it. They’ll ask if I went to their church, or if we went to high school together back in Minnesota.

  One time I was at a restaurant in Los Feliz called the Alcove. It’s got a big outdoor patio area under a few giant oak trees. As I was finishing up my lunch, I heard a muffled gasp from the table behind me. I looked around, and out of the corner of my eye I saw two teenage girls staring at me. One of them had her hand over her mouth. The girls were clearly fans of the show, and I heard them start to argue.

  “It’s him!” one of them whispered, under her breath.

  “There’s no way.”

  “It is! It’s definitely him.”

  I turned back to my food and tried to stop eavesdropping, but I could hear the girls continuing their debate over whether I was actually me. Finally, the one who insisted that I was “him” whispered, “Look at his hair. It is him.”

  “Actually,” the friend said. “I think you might be right.”

  “Told you so.”

  “Oh my God. What do we do? Do we say something? Should we say hi?”

  “No! Don’t be an idiot. Leave him alone.”

  The friend, now fully convinced, wasn’t backing down. “I’m going to go over and talk to him,” she said.

  “Don’t!” the first girl hissed.

  At this point, I was beginning to feel bad. I felt like my presence in this café was becoming an issue. I quickly paid my bill and stood up to go.

  As I did, both girls fell silent and pretended to look the other way. They were smiling.

  I couldn’t resist. As I passed by them, I leaned in and whispered, “It is me.”

  The girls flipped out.

  “Oh my God!” the first one cried, shaking her hands by the side of her face.

  “Holy shit!” the friend squealed. “You have no idea how much this means to us. I’m like—I’m your biggest fan, Mr. Marsden.”

  Oh no. Oh shit.

  I’m not James Marsden.

  I tried to set the record straight as smoothly as possible.