Unseen City

by Nathanael Johnson

  As you learn bird language, a new world is supposed to open up to you. Young tells the story of a teenager he calls Jack, who immediately tired of the lessons. After sitting alone in his spot, Jack told Young that there weren’t any birds around. But over the course of the school year, Young writes:

  “no birds” became “a few birds,” which morphed into “some little brown noisy birds,” then into “flocks of little black and white ones that stayed in the trees” and “other birds I couldn’t really see.” One day Jack announced he had seen “some Pacific wrens” (those “little brown noisy birds”) and some “chickadees in the trees” (those “little black and white ones”). . . . Then “the Pacific wren seemed upset because another Pacific wren came close to this one’s favorite stump.”

  In one sense this was a modest change: Jack learned the names of a couple of species and came to understand what they were doing. But in another sense, he gained a superpower. He went from not seeing anything to recognizing individual birds and perceiving the invisible outlines of their territories. This isn’t useful by the normal measures of humans—it’s not going to make Jack money or get him a girlfriend—but it does provide a sense of a place. What’s true of other people is also true of places: to know deeply is to love more. To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.

  Failing at Bird-Watching

  It was a cool February morning, still damp with dew. Brown birds were hopping around under the live oaks across the street. I sat on my stoop doing my time, watching as Young had instructed. I felt good. This seemed like the right way to learn birdsongs: Observe the birds and connect them to their songs naturally. It was much more doable than trying to memorize a series of notes from a recording.

  While I watched, a pair of birds foraging on my neighbor’s driveway protested in mild distress and surged upward, into the trees. They might been frightened by a predator, but I hadn’t seen enough to feel the slightest confidence in that conclusion. In the dense canopy of one oak, a bird was chirping more and more loudly, like a parent yelling at a toddler who isn’t listening. But I had no clue what was going on.

  There was birdsong all around me, but which birds were producing it? A pair of black dots flitted across the sky and were gone. Birds, I assumed.

  I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Maybe I need to get binoculars, I thought, but what would my neighbors think if they saw me sitting on my stoop, scanning our tiny street with binoculars?

  Hearing the Future

  Spend enough time studying bird language, Young writes, and you’ll be freaking out your friends by announcing that a cat is coming just before it appears.

  “Birds have always been messengers,” Young says. “They’ve always brought us messages about the safety of the land around us.”

  There’s nothing mystical about this: birds are just always spewing out information. They create a sort of sonic Internet. All sorts of animals tune in to this exchange of data, alert for ripples of disturbance, sometimes adding their own contributions, sometimes manipulating the chatter in their own favor.

  Young identifies five types of bird noises: baseline songs, companion calls, territorial squabbles, juvenile begging, and alarms. When I began sitting and watching birds, I heard mostly companion calls, with songs and the occasional alarm thrown in. Companion calls are simple chirps back and forth (“You good?” “Yep. You?”). I wasn’t hearing many songs, I think, because it was still winter, too early for nesting. Songs generally advertise the boundaries of territories, those three-dimensional spaces individual birds claim as their own. When these property lines are well established, Young writes, you can see an obvious change when a bird crosses over. A robin that is cocky on his own turf will become furtive when he slips into a neighbor’s property.

  Of all the signals the birds were sending, the alarms were the most interesting to me because they indicated the detection of something beyond my visual field. The shape of a disturbance often allows an experienced bird interpreter to decipher what sort of creature is triggering an alert. A predator on the wing creates a “wave of alarms, followed by a tunnel of silence,” Young writes. A strolling cat causes birds to “hook” up to a slightly higher perch while also broadcasting a mild alarm. A human blundering through acts as a “bird plow,” oblivious to all they are flushing out of their path.

  Young tells one story of watching Pacific wrens sound the alarm as something moved through a salmonberry thicket near his house outside Seattle: The birds would scold vigorously, then stop, peer into the bushes, and scold again. Young concluded that there was a weasel among the salmonberries, disappearing and then reappearing in another spot. This is a classic weasel pattern. Weasels are elusive predators that can vanish into rodent holes and slip beneath dead sticks and leaves, only to pop up in a new place.

  Young had just moved from New Jersey, so he asked a local who helped take care of the land if there were weasels around. The man assured him there were not. Young was puzzled, until he began to find other indisputable signs: road-killed weasels, and a nest of baby weasels in a Volkswagen behind his house. The weasels were there all right, they were just too sneaky for human eyes. But Young could see them through the birds.

  LOOK SMART

  I was having trouble seeing the birds at all, let alone detecting more stealthy beasts from their movements. I swallowed my sense of neighborly decorum and, one Sunday, took Josephine to a sporting goods store to buy a pair of binoculars. I found some I liked for just under $100; they had the right magnification, but not all the high-tech materials. As soon as we got home Josephine insisted that she should have right to their exclusive use. I tightened the strap around her neck and made her promise to be careful with them, and to keep her fingers off the lenses. They were comically large when she pressed them to her little face. She gazed at the sky, at her feet, at the trees, and then she turned the binoculars around the wrong way and repeated the sequence.

  I got my chance to use the binoculars after leaving Josephine at daycare the next day. It took me a while to master the focusing wheel, but once I did, I began seeing birds with remarkable clarity. The sun was fiercely bright and a little black bird was swooping toward the grass, then back up into the trees. It would perch, then swoop down, making acrobatic midair turns. Through the binoculars I could see this bird was dressed in a tuxedo and a starched white shirt, with fluffy feathers on its black head. When I went to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Guide Web site, I spotted it right away: a black phoebe. It’s a fly-catching bird, which explains the acrobatics. I felt momentarily triumphant, but overall I was frustrated. This bird-watching thing was hard, harder than watching snails or trees, I mused resentfully.

  That night I called up Mike Nelson, a friend of my brother’s and an amateur naturalist who had offered to give me pointers. He assured me that I wasn’t going blind, and that binoculars really are helpful, even for birds just across the street. As a kid, he told me, he had a very short list of the birds he’d seen until he got binoculars. Then, he said, “all of a sudden I was like, ‘Holy crap, I just found six more species, all in my backyard.’”

  Mike also told me to stop beating myself up over failing to connect songs to specific birds. Just watching and listening probably wouldn’t do the trick, he said, because I’d also be surrounded by the songs of unseen birds. And he thought learning from a book would be just as hard: “If you try and read about it in a guidebook, it will say something like, ‘twitch-twitch-twitch rising on the third note and then alternating with a wheezy buzz.’ Good luck remembering that!” The way to do it, he said, was to hang out with someone who knew the sounds and let that person teach me.

  His method was to listen to the birdsongs and link them to a story or image as a mnemonic. “So a wrentit, for instance, is like a lifeguard getting progressively more angry, blowing on its whistle. Or there’s the common yellowthroat, which has a call that sounds like wh
ichisit-whichisit. It’s yellow with what looks a little like a black mask, so I imagine that it’s a frightened thief running into a museum and trying to figure out what to steal: whichisit-whichisit-whichisit!”

  Mike suggested I learn a few of the most common birds first to get my bearings, and promised to send me a list.

  I’d love to be able to recognize every bird by its song (Mike knows them well enough to stop whenever he hears something he doesn’t recognize), but I’d settle for simply having a better grasp of my surroundings. I’d like push notifications on my phone that tell me when each bird arrives in spring, and how they are doing with nesting and finding food. Bird language provides those notifications—it’s the original social network. Young uses a different metaphor: “Nervousness among robins flocking in the winter,” Young writes, “is a great barometer of neighborhood tension.” If I can’t have notifications, a barometer will do just fine.

  The most basic readings from this barometer tell a story of lucky coincidence and adaptation. The most common birds we see today are the ones that found they could thrive in the environments humans created. Nighthawks nest on gravel rooftops and chimney swifts rely on human-made structures (notably chimneys), while house sparrows nest under eaves. Mown lawns produce an earthworm buffet for crows and robins, and house sparrows travel to highway rest stops to eat the bugs splattered on car windshields.

  BIRDSONG AND MENTAL HEALTH

  Young is careful to talk about birds that live near people, like robins and house finches and song sparrows. He suggests finding an observation spot that’s immediately at hand—certainly not a place you have to drive to, and ideally one that’s no more than a few minutes’ walk away. There’s no need to seek out untouched wilderness, because the bird closest at hand is the best teacher. And a city bird teaches more than its language.

  Often when I’m working, I’ll have several windows open on my computer at once: I’m chatting with half a dozen colleagues in one window and monitoring what people are saying about my latest piece on another, while also responding to e-mails and fielding phone calls. Sometimes my mind snaps under all this stimulation and I enter a sort of fugue state in which I manically click from one window to another without accomplishing anything. It’s hard to break out of this; the feeling is remarkably similar to the sense of being powerless to stop eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.

  But I’ve found that spending five minutes watching birds on my front stoop is a reliable cure for this frenzy. I come away calmer. I think more clearly afterward. I suspect this is because watching the birds allows me to exercise a very different part of my brain. Instead of receiving hundreds of digital jolts coming in from the outside, all specifically directed at me, me, me!, I’m reaching outward. I’m trying to empathize with another species, understand their culture. Instead of being at the focal point of a million strands of information, I am an outsider trying to connect. This not only feels healthy, it also feels more honest than my online existence. There’s much more to life than existing as a node in the information web.

  It’s not that nature doesn’t send the equivalent of status updates directly to me, it’s that normally I’m just oblivious to them. I’m only just beginning to notice when it’s me the birds are talking about. Whenever I tune in to bird language, I begin to feel the reality of interdependence. It’s like a chiropractic adjustment for the brain.

  As promised, Mike sent me a list of birds to learn. I had been expecting a literal list of names, but instead he created a multimedia document with photos, recordings of songs, and his favorite factoids. Anna’s hummingbirds steal insects from spiders and use their webs “to hold their shot-glass-sized nests together.” House finches, whose red-tinted heads I’d just learned to see, have a jumbled warble that often ends “with an upward slur, which makes them sound like they are saying: blah-blahblah-blah-blah-RIGHT?” Some of the hidden birds I’d heard singing in the bushes turned out to be hermit thrushes, furtive relatives of robins. And you can identify a robin’s song, Mike wrote, by listening for a cadence that sounds like cheerily–cheer up–cheer up–cheerily–cheer up.

  I was learning, but slowly. I’d figure out the names of half a dozen birds on one day, only to forget them the next. Josephine, curiously, was much better at remembering names than I was.

  “What is that bird?” I’d ask. “With the white stripe over its eye and the upturned tail?”

  “Um, is it a Bewick’s wren?” she’d answer, correctly.

  The decline in my powers of retention was distressing, but predicable. The young mind is calibrated for absorption: Josephine was learning new words every day, so it’s no surprise that she could learn birds. Mike also had started learning young. At my age, without extraordinary effort, I might never become fluent in bird language. Josephine has the chance, but not necessarily the inclination. She’s curious about birds, but she’s much more curious about ballerinas. That’s fine with me: I just want her to have the opportunity.

  Birdsong is just one of the millions of signals that most humans ignore on a regular basis. We can’t pay attention to everything—that would be maddening—so we pick and choose. But the point is that often we don’t choose: We listen, by default, to the voices in our heads rather than the voices of our avian neighbors. I find that I’m happier when I listen to the world rather than to the whining of my doubts.

  If we started listening to birds, perhaps we’d get a little quieter (it’s hard to listen while making noise) in ways that would benefit both birds and humans. We’d probably be both happier and healthier. But even more interesting, in my view, is that we’d begin to perceive an unseen world of gossip and warfare and love all around us. And if we understood this language, I think we’d make different choices: not to stop building and living, but just to be a little more thoughtful in the way that we live.

  GINKGO

  In the first autumn after we moved from San Francisco to Berkeley, I would regularly walk from my house to the university campus in the mornings. Every time I made this journey, at about the halfway point, I’d find myself in a state of high dudgeon. This agitation invariably struck just before I reached Shattuck Avenue. The world grew unpardonable. Whatever I happened to be thinking about—some argument with a critic online, some puzzle in my writing, some exchange with Josephine—would turn over in my brain until it itched with offensive implications. The warmth of the sun, the crispness of the air, the students cycling past, all were loaded with insult. I was like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, suddenly livid for no apparent reason.

  Then I would cross Shattuck and my world would steady on its axis. I’d notice that I was walking on a typically beautiful fall day, on a street lined with gold-leaved trees. I’d remember how grateful I am to have work and a family that I love.

  I wasn’t fully conscious of this bizarre mood swing at first. But one day, I set out on my walk with the suspicion that there was something about that particular block that set me awry. This time, it was about as subtle as an air horn braying at my head. After I crossed the street, this silent air horn disappeared as quickly as it had started up. It was like I received a powerful mood-altering injection that wore off after precisely one block—and always the same block. I stopped and walked back. Why was I so annoyed? It was only then that I became aware of the stench. Occasional breaths of rot, wisps of vomit, wafted delicately in the breeze.

  Smell is the most subliminal of the senses. Volatile chemicals can slip into our sensory receptors and work powerful magic on our emotions, without alerting us to their presence. It may be different for sommeliers, but I suspect that the Proustian effect of smell on emotion is related to the fact that scents act below the level of consciousness.

  I looked up and immediately guessed the source. Those beautiful gold leaves clung to the limbs of ginkgo trees, and their seeds were underfoot. They were each about an inch in diameter and covered in desiccating flesh, like greasy yellow dates. They were putrefying with fury.

&nbs
p; I’d only recently learned that ginkgos produce stinky seeds, but had assumed that the friend who mentioned their smell was just supremely sensitive. I’d never noticed that the trees smelled bad, and I’d never seen the seeds.

  Most trees are hermaphrodites. Each oak tree, for instance, produces both acorns (female) and pollen-spreading catkins (male). Each pine makes both pinecones and pollen cones. But ginkgos have distinct males and females. Because ginkgo seeds smell so bad, people often plant only the males. This is true for other trees as well: Yews, ash, holly, junipers, poplars, and willows all come in male and female varieties. Landscapers and city arborists often favor the males so there will be less fruit and other reproductive equipment falling from the branches. But by choosing males, we are also opting for pollen. A big male ginkgo can throw a trillion rugby-ball-shaped grains of pollen into the air every spring.

  This trade-off between spring pollen and autumn stench made me wonder: What are we doing planting ginkgos in the first place? Why populate our cities with these particular trees? And, on the other side, what were ginkgos “thinking” when they evolved to produce such offensive fruit? Clearly they weren’t considering human sensibilities. But who, then, is the ginkgo seed designed to titillate?

  THE SURVIVOR

  Is there any leaf as strange as the Ginkgo biloba? Most tree leaves are built around a main backbone running up the middle with ribs branching off to each side. The structure of ginkgo’s dual-lobed fan (the source of the name “biloba”) is strangely simple: The veins run from the edge of the leaf all the way down its stem. Sometimes they divide in two, but they never resemble the normal branching networks. If we were built the same way, a capillary in your little finger would run directly back to your heart rather than connecting to a nearby artery. In fact, the ginkgo’s leaf design is unique among seed-bearing plants.