Birds Art Life Read online

  I hesitated, acknowledging to myself that it was possible and likely my habits of anthropomorphism were unbreakable. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  Slowly the musician nodded his head. Finally, he said, “Okay. It’s possible that birds may sing just for the joy of it.” I don’t know why his response made me so happy but it did.

  JANUARY

  CAGES

  (Australian Finches and Cage Birds)

  On standing in a cage with captive birds and thinking about the daily effort to be free.

  Love can be so glaring and fierce, so full of paranoiac energy, it will obliterate you. The pressure of being an only child, single and inescapably needed, the focal point of too much parental attention, made me want to bolt. As a child, I wished for the decoy of a sibling and the buttressing support of a large extended family. As a teenager, I longed to run away, uncage myself.

  • • •

  In the summer of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran across rooftops with my friend. A neighbor, believing there were robbers overhead, called the police, but we kept running, sliding down a tree, clambering over fences while a siren wailed up the street. My friend (reader of Kerouac and Colette) kept running, her hair streaming through the night. I, on the other hand, lasted only an hour before heading home. I was worried about my indoor cat, about whether I had left the balcony door open. The feeling of ranging off without thought for my family did not sit well with me. It produced guilt and panic.

  • • •

  That was the day I discovered a truth about my temperament and circumstance. My freedom and creative work needed something to radiate against, some pressure to resist, some limit to be overreached.

  • • •

  From that point on, the question was not “How can I flee this situation and get someplace better?” but rather “What can I do with what I have here?” I stopped dreaming of what a person could do with limitless freedom, resources, and time, and became more interested in what a person could do with relative scarcity, in what abundance could be generated with modest resources, in what a mind could create in cramped quarters.

  • • •

  And so, less Balzac, Rilke, Roth. And more Charlotte Brontë, Franz Kafka, Tillie Olsen.

  • • •

  When I met the musician, this question of how a person introduces space and distances within the tight confines of a life took on firmer meaning and a sharper focus. That he had found spaciousness in our crowded city seemed miraculous. That he was willing to lead me through a year of bird finding filled me with gratitude. He made a difficult moment seem more habitable.

  • • •

  I was eager to begin. But the weather did not cooperate. We had a bird trip in mind, but it was too windy. Too cold. Too rainy. So when the musician invited me to visit his father’s aviary of finches instead, I happily went.

  • • •

  The musician’s father, also a “birdman,” had built his aviary back in 1998. With a little ingenuity and some wood and wire, he transformed a one-bedroom apartment in a building he owned into a place where his Australian finches could fly freely.

  • • •

  The musician goes to the aviary three times a week to clean and to feed the birds. He has been doing this since 2009, when his father asked him to cover for him after he suffered a bad fall.

  • • •

  The musician became a bird lover at the aviary. He tells a story of holding a dying finch one day and feeling overwhelmed by its tiny heartbeat. He had never studied a bird so closely before, never observed its delicate and immaculate plumage, and the experience altered him. He bought a camera and a lens and learned how to use them by photographing the finches. One compulsion led to another, and by 2011, he had moved beyond the aviary and was spending as much time in the field as possible, creating an ornithological map of Toronto, studying the behavior and habits of local birds in all seasons.

  So I knew the aviary was important. What I didn’t realize was that his experience with free birds had made him a queasy aviarist. He had grown disillusioned with specialty, fetish birds. He disliked the pet trade, which was driving some birds to extinction by reducing wild populations that were already in decline because of deforestation. What started off as a temporary favor to his father had turned into a burden. But he wanted to be a good son, took this to be an inviolable responsibility, and this I understood.

  • • •

  When I ran away as a teenager I was running from ideas about my character and my future and purpose in life. I was running away from a story about dutiful daughters. I returned because I didn’t know where I would go or who I would be without these ideas.

  “Please don’t be alarmed, I am wearing a sweater-vest,” the musician said as he led me into the building. I climbed the creaky narrow staircase behind him. The sweater-vest was part of an ensemble including a wool cap and plaid scarf that made the musician look like a man with Prohibition-era crime ties.

  The apartment added to the impression of “shady business.” It was cold and spartan. There was a fridge and a long table and stacks of cardboard boxes but not much else. Where the bedroom might have been was an aviary about ten by twenty-five feet. We dropped our puffy coats on the table, and the musician gave me a pair of blue nitrile gloves and led me inside.

  • • •

  The contrast between the cold, derelict room and the warm-blooded chaos inside the aviary was startling. It looked like someone had thrown handfuls of French bonbons into the air. Brightly plumaged birds were flying everywhere—back and forth and up and down. I counted twenty birds. The musician pointed out five different species of finches. There were star finches with bright red faces, diamond firetails with crimson rumps and dazzling white spots, chocolate-colored Bengalese society finches, several gold-breasted waxbills and a female cordon bleu. Each one was a flashy, life-filled extravaganza.

  • • •

  I circled the room, studying the small birds and soaking up the strange, squatter ambience, as the musician moved around the aviary cleaning. There was no apparent joy in it for him. The whole situation contravened the “Law of Fickle Pet Ownership,” according to which it was okay for kids to pawn their unwanted pets off on their parents. But not the other way around.

  • • •

  His father from what I could tell was a serial hobbyist, constantly gripped by new interests. He used to build shortwave radios. Then out of the blue he decided to collect tropical fish. Then one day he abandoned fish in favor of first day covers. First day covers, the musician explained, were envelopes or cards bearing newly issued stamps postmarked on the first day those stamps went on sale. Then he became obsessed with camera collecting.

  • • •

  Admittedly this degree of hobby switching was unusual, and perhaps (in the case of the aviary) mildly irresponsible. But I could also see his father was very caring. His onetime affection was evident: in the perches he had built; in the makeshift birdbath, which had been rigged under the dripping faucet; and, most of all, in the possibly obscene fact that an entire apartment (one that would easily rent for fifteen hundred dollars a month) was the dwelling place of twenty tiny birds.

  Grime and clots of bird poop streaked the walls and furniture. But the birds were well preened and had healthy-looking feathers. There was ample room for them to fly.

  I helped the musician fill the seed bowls in the order he directed. Then, suddenly, it dawned on me I was creating havoc. My presence inside the enclosure had sent the finches into high alert. They were making fierce loops around the room, darting from one end of the cage to the other. Their tiny little wings were beating arrhythmically as they startled from perch to perch, giving me as wide a berth as possible. Wisps of fluff and feather floated in the air. The chirping I had taken for singing was a little too strident.

  It was at this point I also realized the blue nitrile gloves on my hands were not for my sake but for theirs—to pro
tect them from any diseases I might be carrying. The aviary’s feeling of quarantine had confused me. In reality, I was the galumphing invader.

  To see a bird moving as if it’s on fire and then realize you have ignited this anxiety challenges any illusion you may have that you are a benign and low-impact presence in the world. For me, it triggered an awareness I had never felt so acutely before. It gave me a different and more accurate view of my scale and proportions. I can’t say I liked it. Who wants to feel like Godzilla when in contact with other species? But perhaps this is the way it really is.

  Most of the time, we don’t harm birds on purpose. Some of us may kill birds with guns and oil spills, but most of us kill them with our lumbering ignorant love—invading their habitats in bouts of nature appreciation or caging them as pets to adore—or we kill them at a distance through our technologies (communication towers, wind turbines), our windows, our medium-size carbon footprints, or by allowing our cats to roam wild and do the decimating for us. According to a study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, domestic cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds every year in the United States. A separate study from the Mammal Society, a British conservation charity, estimates that the United Kingdom’s cats catch up to 55 million birds a year (a tally based on the “prey items” that cats brought home; it does not factor in kills that were not “returned”).

  • • •

  I stood for a moment and pretended I was a harmless perch. Then I asked the musician to open the aviary door so I could leave. The musician stayed inside a little longer, doing his bird chores as I waited and watched. He was not rattling the birds.

  An old-fashioned but lingering perspective from The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds (1878): “The longing for something to protect and care for is one of the strongest feelings implanted within us, and one outcome of it is the desire to keep animals under our control, which in its due place is, undoubtedly, one of our healthiest instincts.”

  • • •

  The aviary’s plainness and lack of pretense had its merits. It was once common for bird keepers to pay inconceivable sums to build lavish architectural structures for their birds—everything from miniature Georgian mansions to replicas of the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower. This aviary’s wood and wire structure was utilitarian and a little depressing, but at least it was honest.

  The musician moved around the aviary like a housekeeping robot, repeating the same few mechanical actions he performed several times a week, always in the same sequence, out of duty to his father. I wondered if the birds had any opinions about their confinement. Did they envy the free birds outside the window? Did they ache to be released from their long incarceration? Could it even be called an incarceration if they had been bred in captivity? Would they know what to do with their freedom? Was it possible to be cooped up and not even notice?

  • • •

  There are stories of animals that have been bred in captivity experiencing the terror of the open door. It might seem counterintuitive, but captive animals often have the good sense to know their chances of survival in the wild are uncertain at best. The prospect of running away or flying off is simply too painful and frightening. So they stay put in the sanctuary of the cage.

  I understand. I understand getting stuck. I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage. I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors. Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.

  • • •

  The instinct for liberty may be deeply ingrained, but we are all captive in some way to something. We may be held in place by the confinement of tradition or trapped in relationships (family, marital, professional) that grow to feel like cupboards—comfortable, well appointed, but cupboards nonetheless. Or we may be stalled by our fear of immensities and the freefall of the unknown. We may be captive when we choose financial stability over artistic freedom, when we live our lives like agoraphobics, confusing the safety of a locked house with security. The cage of habit. The cage of ego. The cage of ambition. The cage of materialism. The line between freedom from fear and freedom from danger is not always easy to discern.

  It is not easy to be an outside bird surviving by your wits in the wild.

  • • •

  But what happens when you pen yourself in?

  • • •

  A few years ago, while on a retreat in Tulum, Mexico, I met an older Mayan woman who told me my liver contained some trapped fury. She referred to it as my small fist, tu puño pequeño. She gave me a flower that represented this portion of pent-up rage and told me to release it in the ocean.

  Cut to my fourth attempt to send the ceremonial flower out to sea. Foiled by the wind, which kept whipping it back in my face, I waded farther and farther out in my cotton dress, until I was chest deep—laughing, furious—in a froth of wavelets. Fucking go, already, I yelled at the flower.

  • • •

  I think stories of stolen flight captivate us because they’re relatively uncommon. A cage breaker is a beacon. Consider the case of Phoebe Snetsinger, who spent her early adult life in suburban Missouri, cooped up in her role as a housewife and mother of four, always working too hard to please and accommodate others. She began bird-watching when her kids were young, as a way of getting out of the house. The rhythms of an anchored life made her uneasy, so she took long walks to places where she was no longer anyone’s mother, daughter, wife, sister. She kept journeying, though always returning, until she had traveled to the world’s farthest jungles, mountains, and forests. The natural world, she discovered, lay at her feet, open and abundant.

  • • •

  The ceremonial flower eventually floated out to sea.

  • • •

  My own mother tried to escape once. In my seventh year, she drained our family bank account and packed herself, me, and my Japanese babysitter onto a Greyhound bus bound for Niagara Falls. My father was always traveling for work, and she was tired of being alone. She had put up with him, his gambling and work addictions, for fifteen years. But enough. She called my father from a pay phone near the falls and told him she was leaving the marriage. My father pleaded: “Please come home.” I don’t know what else was said over that epic surge of water, but when she hung up the phone, a decision had been made. She asked the babysitter to take a single photo of us standing by the falls and then we boarded the bus back to Toronto.

  • • •

  As an escape it was small and brief, but it left an impression.

  • • •

  I learned then or later that although we may wish for limitlessness, we may opt to cling to limits, choosing known unfreedom over the waterfall of unknown possibility.

  • • •

  In reading about Phoebe Snetsinger, I have discovered she did not actually pursue her bird passion fervently until a doctor diagnosed her with terminal cancer when she was fifty. The diagnosis was premature, and she ended up living nearly twenty more years, but it gave her the impetus and permission she needed. I hesitate to call illness providential, but sometimes it is the only way out when you are a mother, when embracing freedom from domestic expectations is perceived as irresponsible, even monstrously selfish. For Phoebe Snetsinger, melanoma was an appalling portal to a larger world.

  By the time she died in 1999, at the age of sixty-eight, killed in a bus accident during a birding expedition in Madagascar, she had seen and recorded 8,398 bird species, more than anyone in history.

  I don’t know if Snetsinger’s children resented their mother’s frequent absences or the unquenchable passion that came to rule her life. What I do know is that three of the four are now active bird researchers in the United States.

  • • •

  I recently found the photo of my mother and me
standing by Niagara Falls. She is forty and dressed in a black blouse and a white vest, facing a complicated middle age. I look uneasy in a pale yellow poncho. I look worried that I may billow over the falls. She is holding the back of my poncho with her hand. What I understood as a child was that she needed me close by and grounded. What I like to think now, as the mother I have become, is that she wanted us to take off together.

  Now that the musician and I were both standing outside the aviary looking in, the birds were considerably less frazzled. A diamond firetail swooped into the birdbath. Another hopped on the food table. If we had turned off the lights, they would have gone quiet as if the sun had gone down.

  The musician removed his nitrile gloves with a snap, tossed them into an overflowing garbage can. I followed suit. The finches were singing, and as the music softened the room’s hard edges, I noticed the musician’s expression soften too. I could see he wasn’t really angry at his father so much as concerned about the wrongheaded ways we approach the things we love.

  For many years I told myself a story that painted my mother in tragic terms, as a woman who had made unhappy sacrifices, who had accepted wifely duty over artistic fulfillment. Within that mythology, the journey to and from the falls became the emblem of my mother’s capitulation and failure. I quietly blamed her for giving in, for not trying hard enough, for allowing her creative dreams to be thwarted.

  But that was my story, not hers. It was a story that clung to an artificial vision of what it meant to be an artist, a story that allowed me to imagine myself as freer (better, stronger, less frustrated) by comparison.

  In fact, the opposite may be true. Another story might be that my mother did not feel thwarted or locked out of opportunities or locked into obdurate habits or locked onto a quest that would require too much. At my age, she did not feel caged by the obligation to follow a passion that would not necessarily make her happy. She loved art but was fine without it. It did not mark her. There were long stretches when she lacked the time or inclination to look for beauty in the world, and that was okay. She did not berate herself or feel she had somehow failed or proven herself unworthy if she didn’t feel like painting. She made her art lightly, suspending the pursuit of perfection. She made art when there was no one waiting for her to produce. She made art for herself.