Fall is here and birds are passing through. On Saturday errands took me downtown. I didn’t want to find birds, didn’t want to see them broken on the ground. But it’s that time. Time for this little thrush to fly the last time, to fall, to close its eyes and tousle its feathers softly on the way down. Like sleeping.
Curling toes, weightless bones beneath speckles, soft as anything. Like sleeping.
Yesterday I found a perfect, fragile little white-throated sparrow. These round buffy birds have a dandelion tousle of yellow feathers running over each eye to their beak, defining the anatomical feature called the lore.
They look like this.
And rather remarkably like this.
Solange has much to teach us about the fabulous beasts of the world, real and imagined.
This morning a squirrel lay on my doorstep. The tight, secret curve of its ear was the first thing I knew about today. No wounds I could see, just a whole and perfect body that wasn’t living anymore.
Walking the few blocks from my train to my office, a woodcock in the street. Damaged on its way down, thin, wrong-shaped by the time I found it.
I don’t want this to be what today is. The breeze-fine fur of a tail, the lean and stiffening legs, the gnarls and angles in their bodies. So I went looking for them alive, so we can celebrate them alive. Courtesy of the internet: squirrels resourceful and shiver-quick in their movement, moving, alive. Woodcocks dancing, round-chested, prowling, instinct and alive. Thousands, millions, forests full of them living, though I can’t see them.
(Silly music, for all their grave and silly charm.)
This one was really hard.
This morning, with the black air thinned to 28 degrees, I headed out to my weekly ritual of scanning the sidewalks for injured migratory birds. The season is almost over. From last Tuesday’s heady 70 degrees, we’ve plummeted into winter sharp and fast. This massive cold front is the signal to the birds: go now. All to the south who are going to the south; you birds, your time is now. So they’re flying in all the wrong weather, flying despite the wind and precipitation. They’re tired and battered, and they’re not making it through.
| The American woodcock (Scolopax minor), in the snipe family of shorebirds, is among the last birds to travel every year. Sized like a plump pigeon, the woodcock is lushly speckled in brown and cream. Marshy grasses conceal it, where it belongs, but in a Chicago street it’s exotic, a quaint and gorgeous relic, with long luminous eyes that arabesque outward from an exclamatory bill. |  |
Except this one. This one had fallen into a pile of leaves and twigs, half-tucked beneath a low ledge of shingles. Camouflaged and quiet, so that I was picking up a second woodcock who had died on impact, just inches away, before I saw it. Except this one whose ink-flourish eye was red and clouded with new blood. I circled, all slowness, around the block of skylights to approach it from behind, to capture it unaware. Inches apart and it turned, saw me, my net, and rose to fly.
Two broken wings. Trembles and falters in the air, again and again. When it landed, again and again. Then it ran, on bark-lean legs. It ran out of the skylight atrium, under the ledge I bumbled my way over, after. It inched along a thin ledge, with jutting building’s windows to half-hide it. It stopped at the end, with nothing but a construction pit three stories below, and stayed there, stopped there, while I came close again. Awkward in an angle of ledge and railing and window and nothing, with my net held out over the air, straining to reach, seeing it fall with every inch closer.
It didn’t fall. The net dropped down to blanket it. I scooped it up through the thin fabric, fingers folding wings, lowering it into a bag, clipping it closed. We ran to Michigan Avenue to catch a cab to the treatment center, me and my woodcock quiet in a bag in morning-grey rush hour.
The rehabilitator laying out syringes, telling me “It’s been a bad time for the woodcocks.” The bag opening, and I try to read his face, afraid I’ve brought nothing he can save. Reaching in, he comes out with long toes grasping and an open eye. Anesthetic, anti-inflammatory, a great flapping that sends small feathers flying. It tries a bite with that exquisite bloodstained bill. Fingers calm, the rehabber says, “This one is so skinny.” I say “He fought like hell,” hear back “They’re feisty birds,” feel less sick inside. (Thank you, Jeff.)
A day that begins with blood is a strange day. Confronted with your enterprise, people will say “That’s so
nice of you. It’s so nice that you can help save them,” in an engaging tone that holds both true appreciation and awe of eccentricity, in fair measure. For me that’s too much credit. Some mornings it’s bleary routine, drudging as the dishes or the laundry at home. Some mornings a chill dawn bath in futility, a half-hearted meditation on mortality that begins, is forestalled by a sleepy numbness of thought, is shelved until later after coffee, is never resumed.
This morning it was more, and I can’t say why. Maybe it’s the woodcock, my favorite of the many birds that pass through, round and wryly elegant, cryptic-coated. Maybe it’s the dread in all do-gooders, the icy pole a world’s distance from lukewarm smugness, where you fear you do real harm. Chasing a bird with broken wings. Bringing fear, inspiring escape, forcing a fragile thing onto a narrow ledge. It’s been a sick day since it started like this, and I can’t treat myself, can’t heal or tend, can’t release.
For spectacular phenomena in the animal kingdom, the seasonal migration of bird species has to be among the Really Coolest Things There Ever Were. The nightingale’s journey we discussed here of 38 million times its own body length—equivalent to me travelling over 41,000 miles by my own strength—is one typical example of this amazing navigational synthesis between genetic programming, cognitive mapping, electromagnetic orientation, and other skill sets not yet fully understood.
Ancient behaviors are continually adapting to the hazards and opportunities of the changing human
landscape. To watch these forces collide, just picture the major bird migration route of the US, the Mississippi Flyway, which leads 250 species of birds across the Great Lakes to the river and the Gulf of Mexico beyond. And now see Chicago: a mass of skyscrapers positioned right at the juncture of lake and river, spiring suddenly up into airspace.
While many species use the sun to orient, small insectivorous birds like warblers and thrushes take advantage of night flight to minimize energy expenditure and maximize access to food species. And so right this minute, midnight central time, these migratory songbirds are moving closer to the place where they’ll find rest and food sources –or where the skyline’s hazards will end all their migrations.
Rooftop lights on skyscrapers disrupt flight and birds fly toward them, mesmerized, to circle endlessly until they drop with exhaustion. As the sky lightens, mirrored walls will throw back the same soft blue and more will collide without seeing. They may survive, dazed, and turn to evade the building only to batter into another building behind. They may avoid all these hazards and land safely, spot a lush spot of greenery promising shelter and insects, and wing towards it, not realizing that it lies in a building foyer behind transparent glass.
Efforts to protect these birds in the U.S. date back to 1918, with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Under this agreement, handling bird species for any reason is prohibited except by individuals holding a federal permit. Chicago’s unique location has inspired non-legislative measures to supplement national protection. In 2004, it became the first city to turn building lights off downtown during the spring and fall, increasing survival rates. Volunteer organizations have mobilized to patrol the Loop business district, collecting injured birds to provide veterinary treatment before releasing them to continue on their flight. And in 2006, the city partnered with Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation to establish a treatment center in the former Meigs Field airport. By providing triage and emergency care within minutes of downtown, rather than transporting the birds to existing suburban facilities, rehabilitators can give them every chance for recovery.
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So fall has started, and I’m now waking up at 4:00AM to travel downtown, sleepy-eyed and officially-permitted, net in hand, in search of birds on the streets. |
| You can expect loads of updates in the weeks to come—so sleep in, and then check back here to get to know the hermit thrushes, American woodcocks, and whatever else the wind brings our way. | |
