It took all the concentration I could muster to drive myself home, and it did not make me feel better when the actor reading The Woodlanders came to a passage that I later looked up in a print copy of the book:
A diversion was created by the accident of two large birds, that had either been roosting above their heads or nesting there, tumbling one over the other into the hot ashes at their feet, apparently engrossed in a desperate quarrel that prevented the use of their wings. They speedily parted, however, and flew up with a singed smell, and were seen no more.
“That’s the end of what is called love,” said some one.
I read about the injured rider in the paper, and the experience was curiously dissociating. The journalist’s description of the “freak accident” seemed basically accurate, though the number of birds struck me as considerably lower than my cursory count, and how it constituted an accident was unclear. The victim was twenty-six, a professional equestrian who’d worked at High Hill from as far back as his teenage years. He was expected to make a full recovery from his injuries, the article stated. So, yes, the facts and figures were more or less right, but the deeper, urgent, ineffable story—maybe the untellable story—wasn’t there. Missing was the appalling weirdness of the scene. Its shocking visceral reality, its nightmarish horror, were somehow absent. Once again, I found myself awestruck by how acclimated, how conditioned so many people had become to the bird deaths and disappearances. I gave the newspaper to Caitlin, as I did every day, so she could use it to line the finch cage.
I felt compelled to visit the horseman, ask him if he happened to see how the whole tragic event started, find out if he had any theory about what caused the birds to tumble to their deaths. But I knew that a hospital call was far outside the precincts of my responsibility and rights, so I didn’t give in to the impulse. I did recognize, however, as a result of grappling with whether or not to go to his bedside, that while others were concerned about the birds—nervous, even deeply worried that some sort of avian plague might soon afflict the rest of us—I myself had become more tormented than nervous, more haunted than concerned. I found myself obsessed. Birds didn’t evolve from prehistory in order to fall helpless from the heavens.
Insomnia settled in on our household around this time. I found I wasn’t capable of sleeping through the night anymore. My reading was less focused on nineteenth-century British novels and more on the history of bird extinctions, mass deaths, and so forth, whenever I could find the time away from my job to research the subject. I read about a flock of sixty thousand ducks who in 1976 misread an oil slick for a nice stretch of becalmed water in the Baltic Sea, landed, and—feathers weighted down with petroleum—drowned. Read about how wild parrots, having lost most of their habitat to deforestation, were right in the crosshairs of annihilation. Learned just how endangered the albatross had become thanks to long-line commercial fishing, in which something like one bird for every ten fish is by-caught. Hadn’t I recently mused that I’d become a metaphoric albatross around Caitlin’s neck? Now I had to wonder what would become of that old Coleridgean metaphor once the species itself was dodo-dead.
The more consumed I became, the more I tried to hide it from my daughter. Around her I spoke of almost any subject other than birds. But one night after I’d turned off my bedside lamp and lay there, eyes fixed on the ceiling where moonlight flickered through the leaves of the cherry tree, I heard a voice downstairs, and knew I wasn’t alone in my sleeplessness. Quietly pulling the blanket aside, I tiptoed to the door and opened it, silent as I could manage. Down the carpeted hall and carpeted stairs I went, feeling like the sneak I surely was. Who knows, I thought, maybe she’s talking with a secret boyfriend on the phone, or with some confidante about how crazy her father’s been acting lately. Instead, when I listened out of view beside the entryway to the living room, I heard Cate talking to her finches.
“—don’t need to worry. You’re safe here,” I heard her murmuring.
Part of me felt so keenly sorry for her I wanted to march straight into the living room, take her in my arms, and say exactly the same words to her she’d just said to her birds. A wiser part of me acknowledged she was doing something necessary for her own emotional balance. As quietly as I’d crept downstairs, I slipped back up to my room and into bed. Before I finally drifted off to sleep, I assured myself that our little diminished family, deprived of wife and mother, was not wrong for being solicitous about what was happening. Canaries were taken into coal mines for good reason. The fate of birds is our fate. I could almost hear these words spoken in Laurel’s voice.
My supervisor wasn’t too pleased when I put in for a temporary leave of absence. Summer was a busy season, already complicated by scheduled vacations that would leave him shorthanded. That said, I’d always been one of his steadiest adjusters, hadn’t even asked for much time off the year before while Laurel was dying—a sacrifice I now regretted. Jim had no real choice but to honor my request. No doubt he assumed it was due to grieving, exasperated by adjusting to the roles of widower and single parent, which wouldn’t have been wrong. I told him that Caitlin and I wanted to make some possible college visits, which wasn’t entirely a falsehood as she had expressed interest in Amherst and Bennington farther north, although admittedly we had no official appointments.
Rather, I wanted to devote more time to the birds. And Caitlin, who’d begun sleeping on the sofa down in the living room so she could be closer to the Peeps during the night, wanted to join me. With Laurel gone, and with school out for the summer and me off from work for an unspecified period, this was something we could do together, a father and his daughter. Like a couple of storm chasers, except our storms were made of birds.
While our feeders continued to be infrequently visited by the usual suspects, most of the summer visitants we looked forward to sighting in the back woods—scarlet tanagers, Baltimore orioles, cedar waxwings—were totally missing. Freed up to search together for a few uninterrupted days and evenings, we discovered—Cate online, me on the phone—that Audubon Society chapters and bird-watching clubs up and down the East Coast and fanning across the country and overseas had received quite a few reports of sudden population declines, mass fatalities, and incidents of sightings so freakish that the birder’s term “accidental” no longer applied. This latter would substantiate, but of course not explain, why I’d seen many more than one species very far from home.
Leaving the still-healthy, still-nesting finches in the hands of the trustworthy Mrs. Tyson, Caitlin and I made excursions into neighboring states, staying in bed-and-breakfasts along the way where we could talk with locals, see birds firsthand in other locales, and ask what people had been experiencing. Needless to say, ours was a very unscientific, highly subjective exercise, but at least it was a chance to see things for ourselves. It was also, I began to understand, an opportunity for us to reach out to each other in a way that hadn’t been obviously necessary before Laurel’s death, nor possible after it until now.
Caitlin added sightings to her life list like crazy.
“Wait, what’s that?” she asked one morning on a rural stretch of road up near Canada. “Loons?”
I slowed the car to a halt beside a long, azure lake and glassed them some fifty yards away, floating on the calm mirror of water.
“Well?”
“Loons, right. But your guess is as good as mine as to what kind of loons. Better get out the field guide.”
Together we looked them up. A mating pair of red-throated loons. Birds neither of us had ever observed before, generally found far north of here at this time of year. It seemed as if the traditional habitats and ranges had all metamorphosed into some new order of being. Peterson, Sibley, all the field guides would need to be revised, if not tossed out the window. The way things were trending, they threatened to become as archaic as a medieval treatise on the sun’s rotating around a flat earth.
“Well, you wanted us to move to the Arctic,” I said as we drove away from the lake.
“Guess the Arctic decided to move to you.”
We saw other birds outside their usual haunts. A handsome if nervous northern wheatear, a species that typically summers way up in Greenland and other arctic climes then migrates overseas in winter to Africa, even India. A magpie, of all things, common enough out in western scratchlands and pine forests, but in New Hampshire? The oddest of all was a Smith’s longspur who was a lot farther away from home than we were, although perhaps no less confused.
There is no need to catalogue the audiobooks we listened to—The Woodlanders long since having come to its tragic ending—or the strangers we interviewed, or even to reproduce a complete tallying of species we sighted during nearly a month of driving as far south as the Carolinas, west to Ohio, north into Quebec. What is necessary to report is that everywhere we went, people noticed that certain birds weren’t present in the numbers they were accustomed to and others were turning up where they’d never been seen before. They mentioned having witnessed or heard about mass bird deaths in or near their counties, but asked us, in response to our enquiring, if this wasn’t just a cyclical thing. Troublesome to some degree, but to be expected in any day and age?
“Well, it happens,” a man we met in a diner outside of Binghamton commented as we were making our way back downstate from a trip up near Buffalo. “Black plague. Locusts, boils, frogs, and hail—the plagues on Egypt. Pied Piper of Hamelin and all those rats? Don’t tell me that story isn’t about something that really went down back in the olden days. Always was plagues and epidemics, always will be. These birds aren’t anything special.”
I didn’t know whether to argue the point or shake his hand. Since I couldn’t do the former, I managed the latter. It felt as if in one brief burst of logic, I’d been liberated a little from this near-mania I had been wading through day after day along with my poor, equally lost daughter.
Yes, there had been multiple, inexplicable incidents of birds tumbling out of the heavens. And yes, their numbers had been reduced and territories mixed up. But life, like the very atoms that make life possible, moves in wave patterns. Clearly, Laurel’s premature death had sent Cate and me on a downward slope of one of those natural waves. Did it only seem that the birds we grew to love because of her deep interest in them were leaving us behind too? Or was it possible, we agonized, that they actually were doing so?
Home again, we didn’t lose sight of how eerie, how disturbing all this had been. Yet a wary calm had settled over the house. Caitlin moved back into her bedroom. I stopped staring at the hand-shadow silent movies on the ceiling over my bed at night. And as the summer wore on, hot August mugginess drove most of the birds who’d been visiting deep into the shady woods, as it usually did. The scarcity of life on and around the feeders and in the backyard trees wasn’t really alarming, or so Caitlin and I told ourselves.
I should add that one of the Society finches died that month, but from nothing more exotic than old age. We buried him beneath a small cairn of handpicked stones out in the perennial garden in the shade of a vibrant flourish of black-eyed Susans. As we walked back to the house, I saw that Caitlin was weeping. I put my arm around her shoulders and gave her a kiss on the top of her head. This was a gesture I’d seen her mother do a hundred times, both when Cate was sad and happy. She leaned against me. Neither of us said a thing.
Now it was September. We were coming up on the first anniversary of Laurel’s death. I had been back at work for well over a month. Easing again into my routine of driving here or there to review claims while listening to my audiobooks, I settled on Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities as my next novel.
As for Caitlin, she had just started her senior year in high school and seemed to have come out of her cocoon of mourning. She was spending more time with friends than she had since we buried Laurel. Her bird blog seemed to wind down as her homework got more intense. As ever, she excelled at science and math, fields that always made her mother proud and were, I always believed, bolstered by Cate’s maternal gene pool. Music filled the house on weekends, some of which I liked, some of which I didn’t much get. No matter. What mattered was that she was both reblossoming into the Caitlin I used to know, before all the months of struggling through Laurel’s unsuccessful chemo treatments and painful demise, and was also becoming a new, fresh Caitlin I was proud to call my daughter. We both agreed that our days on the road together had brought us closer. A shame that what had compelled us to make the trip was shrouded in chaos and death. On the other hand, if this current harmony was our recompense, it was time and effort well spent.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t lost track of the shape of those wave cycles. Down, up, down again. Jim Helms was well aware that Caitlin and I planned to head back to Camden for a small graveside memorial service in honor of the first anniversary of Laurel’s death. He apologized for having to send me to the first site of bird carnage in our area in weeks, and even told me that if I didn’t feel up to it, he’d find somebody else to go. But I was closest to where the incident took place at a house in Garrison, not half an hour away from home, overlooking the dramatic S-curve in the Hudson where West Point was situated above the steel-gray palisades that descended straight into the water.
“Modern glass house, some famous architect,” Jim said. “The owners think a flock of birds could only see the reflection of the mountains and trees surrounding the place and flew through the glass, sure there wasn’t anything there but clear space.”
Birds did that, of course. But in ones or twos at the most. I’d never heard of a whole flock simultaneously making the same fatal misjudgment.
“I know you leave for Maine tomorrow. Just get down there, take some shots, file a fast report. Most of their valuables are scheduled, so this shouldn’t be too time-consuming, I hope.”
Starlings lay everywhere around and inside the house. Iridescent speckled birds with sharp beaks and lustrous feathers. Starlings had always been among my least favorite species, though I’d read somewhere that Mozart loved them best of all birds. To each his own. But love or dislike them, I hated seeing them like this. Because it was a warm day, the sticky-sweet scent of death hovered everywhere.
I did my job. I must have appeared to be calmer than I felt, as the owner commented, “You seem to have seen this sort of thing before.”
“Too many times,” I answered smoothly, professionally, knowing that the company preferred its field adjusters show as much equanimity as possible in these circumstances. How else can we give claimants any sense of security? I felt, though, that the peace I’d experienced in recent days and nights was again slipping away.
Curious that the only species involved this time was starlings, instead of the unusual mix of birds I’d encountered in earlier en-masse deaths. On the other hand, what I had begun to learn was that none of the incidents necessarily foretold what might be expected in the future. This was one of the many reasons neither animal behaviorists nor epidemiologists nor any other community of scientists had thus far been unable to settle on an individual theory as to what was the root cause of this extraordinary behavior. Predictably, environmentalists laid the blame on human activities. I myself certainly thought this theory had a lot of truth to it. After all, we had managed to drive innumerable species into extinction over the centuries, including any predators who might challenge our position at the top of the so-called pyramid of life. And yet, clever as we were, humans didn’t have the wherewithal to move the magnetic north pole. Nor could our rampant destruction of rain forests and marshlands and all the rest completely account for what was happening. I was not surprised that public opinion increasingly turned to divine decree for explanation.
Back home, Caitlin saw the ashen look on my face and stated in a low, flat voice, “Another mass bird death.”
I nodded.
“Bad one, I guess.”
“You all packed for Maine?” transparently changing the subject. I didn’t want what I’d encountered in Garrison to somehow stain Caitlin or our journey to Camden
, and Laurel.
She wasn’t having it, though. “Why is this happening? What’s going on?”
The poker-faced professionalism I’d successfully displayed at the client’s house utterly failed me at home with my daughter. I looked down at my hands and shook my head. A feeling of grief and defeat suddenly washed over me.
I sat at our kitchen table, mute, my head bowed. When Caitlin came up behind me and gently placed her hands on my shoulders—a very Laurel gesture—I reached up and laid my own hands over hers. We must have stayed like that for a minute or more. When I glanced through the open window at the feeders hung along the porch, I saw there were no birds. Neither did I hear even faint, distant birdsong outside. The only sounds were the old wall clock ticking away and the occasional high-pitched peeps of Cate’s caged finches, a couple of which had begun to pick on the others, compelling Caitlin to move the aggressors into a separate cage, where they proceeded to pluck out each other’s feathers, darting around like angry, naked mice.
Fall of the Birds Page 4