Memories of Birds

A cat ate the first bird I remember. I was four. The bird was much, much younger. We lived in a Long Island town where ground squirrels and ladybugs pass for wildlife and nature wasn't part of our lives. Then one day, the chick – a starling or a house sparrow? - landed in our fireplace. Mom and Dad decided it was our duty to raise this little Santa survivor.

We put him in an old laundry basket lined with towels usually reserved for cleaning the car. Mom owned the smallest spoons I've ever seen; every day my brothers, sister and I used them to feed our baby a few mouthfuls of mystery grub. Tiny ‘cheeps' filled the kitchen as the little guy grew bigger and stronger. The Dibellas, next door neighbors more like family, came over to help. This was no pet, it was a mission. Soon enough it was time to set the caged bird free.

We took it into the backyard. Chris from the next block and the twins from down the street swung by to see the inaugural flight. We stared in anxious wonder as Mom released the fledgling in the middle of our wide-eyed circle. He hopped nervously and indecisively and made some novice attempts at flight. Then, from out of the bushes sprang Lady Jane, a neighborhood cat as dark and evil as the boogie man in the basement. She dashed between our legs and was gone, prey in mouth, long before Mom could do a thing.

A few years later, a new town and a new neighbor. Mr. Warriner began taking me bird watching. I'd wake up weekends at dawn and shuffle across the street to his house for freshly cooked eggs -- "Yes, please." -- and grapefruit -- "No thank you. I don't like grapefruit." He always pushed the grapefruit. I never had any.

After the meal we'd drive to various pockets of woods around our part of Westchester County, NY. Any little twitch in the bushes was a chance to see something new, rare, or familiar. Mr. Warriner called me "eagle-eye" for my ability to spot the bird among the brambles and I blushed with pride. I was amazed he could hear a song and know with absolutely certainty that it was an ovenbird, white-throated sparrow, hermit thrush, or who knows what else.

One day Mom told me I couldn't go with Mr. Warriner because I had Sunday School. It casued the first fight I ever remember having with my parents. I loved these walks.

I heard that Mr. Warriner died somewhere in Maryland not too long ago. Back then he was the oldest person I'd ever met. He must have been older than Moses when he flew the coop.

My brother Eddie once stomped on a pigeon's head outside our neo-retro-modernist middle school. The building was 98% textured concrete, yet the bird had somehow flown face-first into a window. With a broken neck it flopped and wobbled around on the sidewalk, unable to look up, stand up, or fly. Death was coming. My friends and I stared uselessly. Eddie taught us the meaning of mercy.

My first indigo bunting appeared when my parents and I were enjoying a swatch of woods near a suburban parking lot. The sun was high. The trees were bragging about their new leaves. An old, barren trunk waiting patiently to fall rose like a steeple out of the green. Way at the top, perched for all to see, was a brilliant shock of blue and, man, could that blue thing sing. It whistled and warbled and twirled the notes around as if the sound were reason enough to be alive. We had no idea what we were looking at. We just stared and snapped a thousand mental pictures to compare to the bird books we kept at home.

A few summers later the family road-tripped to Vermont to retrieve my brother Steve from a camp where he had spent six weeks feeding mosquitoes and guzzling bug juice. We stopped for lunch and killed measureless time watching a flock of cedar waxwings eat berries and rest up for a journey of their own. Decades later I still look at waxwings in Vermont and wonder where those birds were going or if, indeed, I am seeing one of them again.

Whether it was the birds that kept drawing me outside I don't know, but after freshman year in high school I was canoeing in Minnesota's Boundary Waters on my first trip west of New Jersey. I was with Gene, an old friend from summer camp who had coincidentally gone to my high school, too. We were in the middle of a lake, halfway between wherever we'd started and wherever we were going, and the calm of the day was making itself at home in our boat. A large dot appeared far off the bow.

It flew straight and low, barely fifteen feet off the surface, and grew with every flap. I was pretty proud of my bird knowledge by then, but any American would have known this one: a bald eagle, majestic as a national monument. I nearly fell over backwards as I watched it fly directly over us, the glowing white head nearly close enough to touch.

Our trip went on for another month. We rode horses through unspoiled woods, summitted Teton peaks, slept under a million stars, and shared the solitude as we motored across the Great Plains, yet not one of my photos is as vivid as the image I have of that bird. No eagle I've seen since comes close.

The osprey was like a phantom. All I knew about ospreys at the time was DDT was bad for them, they were kind of rare, and they ate fish. I thought they only lived near salt water. Naturally, then, I was surprised to see one near my college in central Vermont. I was alone completing some errand or other when I noticed him poised in a tree over a small waterfall. Before I could even think, "Hey, that's an osprey!" it was gone. I hurried back to the dorm to tell my friends.

"What's an osprey?" "A what?" "Are they rare?" "Oh. That's nice. Wanna grab dinner? " I don't remember who said what. I just remember that bird, so out of place.

In Florida, on one last family vacation before independent children became married adults, people thought I was playing golf. Instead, I was admiring the egrets, herons, and ducks. On a sabbatical from my dot-com job in 2001, the rest of my tour group dozed while we drove through hours of "nothing" in Kruger National Park, South Africa. I contentedly noted the bateleurs, louries, sunbirds, hornbills, and maybe, but I can't be sure, a secretary bird silhouetted by a low-hanging moon at the side of the road. Other tourists stared at their tenth crocodile of the day, I at the only woolly-necked stork of my life.

When I visited a friend in Trinidad he mocked me but still indulged my desire to visit Asa Wright Nature Preserve. The young woman at the front desk informed us we'd missed the last tour of the day but we were welcome to sit on the veranda above the bird feeder station.

A dozen guests in comical safari gear huddled over the railings to see greens and yellows and blues and reds and vibrant purples gorge themselves on seeds, fruits, and nectar the caretakers put out every morning. Boredom. The eco-tourists were putting another checkmark on their life lists, but they should have earned it.

I've known my wife for four years. The Liz List includes common eiders, kestrels, buffleheads, arctic terns, bobolinks, and barn swallows. Recently we saw a rose-breasted grosbeak. She'd never heard of any of them.

She gets excited when she correctly identifies a robin. It's a good start.