the reluctant ornithologist

bird-watching, bird-reading, bird-listening, bird-boredom

I just happened to finish Irish author Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren the same day I went for a bike ride to the local Florida bird sanctuary. It’s my day off, and I don’t like birds much, not really. I have a deep and abiding love for all animals, in a desperate sort of way really, but a fondness for birds has always eluded me. I don’t like how evasive they are. I don’t like how they fly away whenever you get close to them, but when you do get close to them, you can kind of tell they’d really rather be farther away?

Years ago, my mom saw Happy Feet and, duly inspired, immediately went out and bought a bird at a pet store. She selected an English Budgie and named it the fanciful “Rupert” to match his genus and refined color markings. After looking at him, sort of sorrowful in his cage for a day, she went back the next day in the effort of finding him a friend. The pet-store owner told her that female Budgies often kill the males in captivity, so she selected a male English Budgie instead and bizarrely, lovingly named him “Faggot Friend,” which was inevitably a hard sell to any friends coming over.* Not that I wanted to be there much, because two budgies in captivity are EXCRUCIATINGLY loud.

“Why is the towel over their cage again? It’s daylight!” my mom would exclaim, coming home, finding the cage cloaked in faux-darkness.

Why? Because I was about to crucify myself on the altar of the gay British punk band these two feathered things were forming, every minute of the day, their near CONSTANT squawking and screaming getting the better of me. I don’t know how people do it! Birdsong is beautiful outside. Budgie screeching is torturous inside, like they’re screaming to get out, and why shouldn’t they be!?

The Wren, The Wren is breathtaking. I brought it to set in the vain hope of reading in between takes and the gaffer picked it up and asked what it was about. To me the perfect book synopsis is: “an old poet, and Ireland, and mothers, and daughters, and generational trauma,” but I realize to most that’s not exactly the winning draw, including to the gaffer, who quietly set the book down and walked away.

I have two kids and a husband that I constantly kiss and hug approximately 783 times a day at home, and here, in my room for one on an island off of Florida, I have no one to do that to, so I’m hugging the 1st A.D. and the MUA too tight with hugs in my giddy 11am bursts of energy. Just brimming over with love to give, trying not to creep out the crew. Where does all this energy go? Not towards birds, surely…?

Today at the nature refuge, I learned that…no, it’s not towards birds. Anyway I only saw two types of birds at the refuge - a couple of ducks (k?) and a couple blue-eyed white Ibises (cooler), who waddled or flew away as soon as my bicycle squeaked closer. Perhaps I visited at a time when most of the birds were napping? I looked into this possibility and found that Magnificent Frigatebirds, common to Florida yet unseen by me today, can take naps while flying, keeping one hemisphere of their brain trained on the flight path, which is not even as close as interesting as this positively APPALLING gular sac they inflate to attract mates (!!!!!!!!!!!!!):

The males beat their bills atop it and use it as a drum to flirt. You can hear its song here:

I did not fall in love with birds on my adventure, nor did I see an alligator. At the restaurant across the street from the refuge, the friendly manager chatted with me.

“Oh yeah, you’re with the rest of the movie crew! There’s an Australian on your crew, right?”

“He’s actually South African.”

“Oh, shoot,” he looked up at the ceiling. “I really shouldn’t have told him to put another shrimp on the barbie, then.” He shook his head, genuinely frustrated.

“That’s okay!” I assured him. “I bet that happens to him all the time.”

“They just sound so alike!”

Not a still from Le Ballon Rouge

“The bird looks me in the eye - he seems to know this is the place to look at a human being - and I look back at him. and with that smart, held connection, the story I made up for him falls away. The bird is no one’s servant. He is not dapper. Words only obscure him: the lipstick, the coral, the chiffon, the glass of port, these are all impositions ons his tiny, incontrovertible bullfinch self. Even the name, ‘bullfinch’ seems a form of littering, like a sticky label fixed to his feathers…the bird looked at me and I saw the bird and I wanted to undo language and let him be.” -the wren, the wren

*In case you missed it, I have also written about my dad’s inane bird story, you can read that here. Does everybody’s parents have IBS (Inane Bird Stories) orrr…? No? Just mine?

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