delicate bones
on birds, fleeting relationships and soundscape ecology
This morning a rare thing happened.
As I sat at my desk, journaling pages in the early bluish light, our neighborhood hawk landed outside my window. Typically, I see this hawk along my commute to work, a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, atop a street wire or diving into a field far away. But this morning, we were separated by only a pane of glass. The hawk perched on a branch, perfectly still, its head rotating, scanning side to side. Searching. Vigilant. I didn’t dare reach for my coffee. I didn’t want to scare the hawk away. Both of us tried to exercise control. Stillness. The hawk tightened its hold against the high gusts of wind, and I studied it while it studied the yard. The bird was a soft palette of browns and creams. A small curve of a head. Talons. So close I could touch it. I could almost feel that wonderfully strange texture that only feathers have, a combination akin to fur and taut vinyl string, strong blades of grass stitched to hollow bone. It spotted something, took off in a shallow dive, lifted over the neighboring fence and disappeared among the trees.
Yesterday a crow shat on me. An even rarer thing. I thought this sort of moment only happened in the movies. But no, on my walk home as I smiled and skipped along to the music in my headphones I passed underneath a crow sitting on a limb and bam—a giant release of shit splattered onto my hair, my face, my jacket and pants. Someone happened to be driving by at that moment and saw the whole thing but didn’t slow down. Why would they. I attempted to wipe the shit from my glasses and smeared it instead, then walked the rest of the way home in tears.
The day before that, a blue jay kept circling our house, changing its positions as if it could not settle itself. It seemed directionless, angsty, looking for a rumble. Most of the time I ignore blue jays because they are always around. The kind of always around that they start to blur into the background of everything. The comedic sidekick. But this punch of blue kept appearing outside my windows, when I left for work, when I got home, when I left for my workout, when I returned home again. This blue jay had boundless energy, the kind a toddler has when following you around plaintively calling, “I’m BORED.” Spring fever.
These are just a few of my companions for better or worse.
My property is home to a number of birds in residence, most of them common: jays, crows, hummingbirds, chickadees, red-bellied woodpeckers, even mourning doves. The half dozen or more male cardinals turn into a real sausage party. Then there’s the wild turkey mafia. Although I don’t have yellow finches living here, I can drive a short ways to the river and fields to see a camp of them.
But one thing to note: I am not a “birder.”
There are miles to go in my journey of understanding and identifying fowl, and I let these miles add up through organic encounters that warrant enough curiosity to do a little research afterward. This goes against my completist tendencies, my love of a checklist, such as watching all John Hughes films in a week, but sometimes you just want to take your time.
My affinity for crows is something a handful of people are aware of. Ever since I was young I’ve felt connected to them. Long story short, when my Cherokee godfather was still alive we would hold sweat lodge ceremonies out at his property. During my first sweat as a kid, somewhere between searing steam heat and nearly passing out, I saw a crow flying toward me in the dark. It didn’t stop. It plunged forward at full speed and burrowed itself into my chest. Afterward, I recalled to my godfather this ecstatic, terrifying vision. He said, “The crow is asking to be your guide. Let it in if you want.”
Well, I was convinced I would one day have a crow as a pet. Like with a collar. Maybe I would walk it around the neighborhood. I read stories of people who left little gifts and food for crows and the crows began to protect them in return. So I started leaving crackers on a stump in my yard for a while. A crow took them, in the beginning. When the other birds started eating them, I grew frustrated, took the crackers away in some kind of insolent display of power. The crows still land here, but seemingly without expectations. If you don’t have expectations, you can’t be disappointed. I am considering a different food to leave for them.
Living among birds has taught me that things need to be worth the wait, worth a good long study. Let them come to you. Let them just be and appear in your path. Or shit on you so you take notice. Or hammer your tin roof until you wake up. Whatever. They’re the subject of a horror film but they’re also the beauty of a fleeting connection, a reward in patience. Once you notice one, you notice more. Like learning about an edible weed, or the name of a type of pine. Suddenly, all of them are plainly there in front of you and you wonder, This whole time?
There is a barred owl that lives somewhere among the trees between my neighbor’s land and my own. It’s a thin strip of forest. Not exactly a place where one hides. And yet for the life of me I cannot find this owl. I hear it, hoo-hooing, a comfort in my lonely porch hours as I sip wine and stare out into the blackness. When things feel hopeless in an era like the one we’re living in now, the barred owl’s call can soothe one’s mind, restore faith in one’s gods.
Most times, I prefer birds over people. I feel more at home among the animals who live with me in my corner in the world: my friend the black bear, the possum who outlines our home each evening, the rabbits and squirrels, dashing little chipmunks, the black snake sunning itself next to me while I garden. (The mole and I are currently at odds. He’s being a total dick.)
But something I haven’t done in my years living here is put out bird feeders or baths. Does that make me a terrible person? They seem to get by. Our property is overrun with delicious earthworms and grubs, there’s a spring nearby. They seem happy. But how would they tell me otherwise? There is a language barrier.
Anyway, the joy of observing birds. When I see two crows, I know there are really three. There is always one more, hidden. He is the lookout. If more of us played the role of the lookout I think the world would be a better place.
Last spring in Colorado, I found myself sitting around the campfire with a woman named Loretta. She is the trail designer for all the 14ers, which means her job is to essentially protect the mountains from the people who climb them. She’s been doing this since the late 80s. She must also work within a landscape that is rapidly shifting because of climate change. Now, with warming temperatures, wildfires and sudden storms, we talked about how birds like the lark bunting and the rosy finch are disappearing. Other species are essentially trapped on mountaintops with less and less to eat, because if they wandered below a certain altitude, it would be too warm for them, and the variation of a few degrees means death.
A few years ago, I revisited a TED Radio Hour episode called “Everything is Connected” (an excellent one and highly recommended, as it has the detailed story about Yellowstone wolves in the first half and eco-soundscapes in the last half). I became obsessed with the work of soundscape ecology. People like Bryan Pijanowski, Bernie Krause, etc. These are folks who basically spend all their time recording all of the sounds of one particular place, mapping it and storing it like a time capsule so we can listen for patterns in how the whole of everything is changing. Basically, there’s an assumption that all living beings are aware of, and evolve, to create one cohesive symphony of sound. That’s probably why those cheesy nature spa CDs are so appealing: they offer a specific harmony we cannot recreate as human beings and they sound perfectly aligned.
Animals and insects evolve to make sounds that complement one another in order to distinguish themselves from another being. The exact opposite of, say, what we do on Instagram. Some birds have short calls that fit oh so nicely between others’ longer calls.
A friend of mine recently told me he’s getting ready to move. “I’m a city mouse,” he said. He’s moving from the middle of the city to a house with some woods. “You’ll have to get used to all those weird noises,” I joked. Later, after we hung up the phone, I realized I hadn’t adequately prepared him for the jarring changes that lay ahead. This happened to me when I stopped living with roommates and thin walls and returned to a more remote place. The discomfort that can happen when one moves from the company of people to the company of nature. The anxiety of “quiet” that’s not really quiet at all. If you’re not used to living with a cacophony of birds, it can really fuck with your sleep patterns.
Another one of my friends, Aaron, leads birdwatching tours. We have never been on a tour together. Timing, I suppose. At house parties, when the conversations converge and everything grows to a roar, I see him bow his head and duck out of the room, escaping to the porch or another quiet corner. It took me a while to realize why. Some people are sensitive to too much noise. And his livelihood depends on the silence, a negative space through which he can see the shapes of bird calls.
Bernie Krause had this working theory that population expansion, commercial development, pollution, and invasive species would result in “gaps” in this perfect orchestral arrangement. In 1989 (coincidentally, the same year Loretta began working on trails and embarking on a journey that would define her life’s work), Krause found proof to back his theory. He presented a soundscape of the Sierra Nevadas. It was largely silent. Only a year before, when it was still a forest, before it was selectively logged, it had been richly layered with sounds.
My backyard companions are something I’ve taken for granted and occasionally griped over, and it took me until adulthood to realize this. Perhaps because I was born in a mountain cove filled with crows and have rarely known a day without them: I have been surrounded by multiple species of birds, sun up to sun down, pretty much all my life.
The soundscape around us is ever shifting. When I step outside, I have to slow down, be still, let my ear focus and find one bird. Then another. Then another. All the while, there are lawnmowers and kids screaming and someone chopping down a tree and the FedEx driver blaring her music through the neighborhood. The arctic actually has the same problem. You can’t really go anywhere in this world and only hear the sole sound of a bird. There is a jet flying overhead as well. As Falk Huettmann once declared, "We need to abandon the idea of wilderness. It doesn’t exist."
He’s German, so. Hopefully it’s not as dire as that.
It’s hard to tell if my companions are leaving altogether slowly over time. When they fly away during the natural course of migration, I can’t say with certainty that they will choose to return to me next season, or that they’ll even survive.
And so each relationship I have with each bird that lives here for a little while, that lands a few steps from my feet, is precious. Delicate. Every cracker I leave on the stump is a humble offering. I laugh and cry as I step into the shower to wash all the crow shit out of my hair. I am still figuring out the best way to say, Thank you for being with me.
What I’m reading: Lioness by Mark Powell (I’m reviewing an ARC - click to preorder)
What I’m spinning: Quiet Music 1 by Steve Roach