(Sully voice) birds BIRDS
Birds I’ve seen during this thing:
Pileated woodpecker
Yellow-bellied sapsucker
Red-headed woodpecker
Downy woodpecker
Eastern bluebird
Goldfinch
Indigo bunting
Ruby-throated hummingbird
Scarlet tanager
Brown thrasher
Wood thrush
Red tailed hawk
Turkey vulture
Actual turkey
Sparrows
About 7 billion robins
Seagull
Cardinal
Blue jay
Red Winged blackbird
Mockingbird
Scrub jay
Yellow warbler
Mourning doves
Pigeons
Crows
Hermit thrush
American redstart
Tufted titmouse
Chickadee
Bufflehead
Osprey
Rose-Breasted Grosbeak
Eastern Phoebe
Lots of others that I can’t identify, which drives me insane
The fact that so much of birding is hearing things you cannot spy, being surrounded by these living things and the systems and individual wills that comprise them, of being very much part of them but decidedly not of them, of it being much easier to destroy them than to truly appreciate them in all their beauty and dirt and complexity. This is where on the vertical margins of my observations about birds I draw a big felt tip line and append it with the word, “Society?”
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Something like 5 or 6 years ago I was on some crappy manhattan sidewalk staring at a mess of little birds doing whatever it is they do on manhattan sidewalks when I realized I didn’t know the names of the little guys. Sparrows sure, but what kind? It got in my head, like when you think “Toyota” and start noticing Camrys all over the highway, only imagine you don’t have the word “Camry.” Crows, Robins, Pigeons, sure, I’m not an ignorant ape, I can read, but it turns out there like, a lot more bird types than that, and I started to notice them all, and their names stubbornly eluded me, which I found offensive.
(The same very healthy brain process eventually happened with trees and shrubs and such, and I take pills for this kind of thing, but that’s none of your business.)
I’m at what I think is on sight recognition for maybe 60% of the birds I see now. It’s higher in the city where there’s less faunal diversity, but I’m in Ohio right now because of Privilege, and it’s spring in northern Ohio right now, which means Bird Fucking City baby. See what’s tough is just as you start to get somewhat competent at naming the staples of the scene, the true complexity and ambiguity starts to set in. It’s fitting that I started with sparrows: while they’re everywhere, there are actually a bunch of varieties of sparrows, and the differences can be minuscule, and those variants will flock together, presumably to fuck with us. So no, I can’t even say for sure what those sparrows on 56th street were called.
And don’t get me started about birdsongs, which begin to resemble taunts when you start attempting identification. Some of the most vocal performers prefer highly elevated perches, crowded canopy spots maddeningly out of reach from the naked eye. Mike sends me audio clips every day or so of what he hears in his outpost on the St. Lawrence and I’m like “durrr maybe its a vireo??” [drooling]
Birds make a lot of noises, and a lot of it is very near identical, and a lot of the most common singers who make the most beautiful songs prefer to hide from sight. Imagine being surrounded everywhere by things you know are there, that announce their presence at every turn, and not only can you not name these things, but people seem to have just accepted this ignorance, or otherwise ignored it. The whole thing reminds me of a certain economic system which I am not allowed to talk about in this blog.
Do you know about pigeon racing? It’s very popular among Saudi Princes and billionaires and other psychopaths, but I don’t want to talk about them, so instead I’ll leave you with an except from a very sweet article from 2006 about a 13-year old pigeon racer from South Boston. You see, homing pigeons, even if released hundreds of miles from their coop, will inevitably make it back home. And, well:
No one is exactly sure how the birds do it. Scientists have been studying homing pigeons for decades; at Cornell, experiments have been conducted on them since 1967. Inertial routing—the theory that the birds register the physical experience of the journey and retrace it—cannot entirely account for their ability. Nor can navigation by sight (pigeons fitted with translucent contact lenses are still able to find home); sun-compassing (pigeons can find their way home on overcast days); smell; sound; infrasound; telepathy; or magnetic sensitivity. Many biologists now believe that pigeons use some combination of these. The sentimental explanation is that if pigeons like where they live they use all their animal instincts—which are beyond our capacity to measure—to find their way. Sedona believes that magnetism has something to do with it, but she mostly subscribes to this notion. “I believe it’s the love of the loft,” she told me. “They return to where they feel is their home.”