A green heron with a snack
Photo: Chris NeffI’ve been thinking about Burt Lancaster. He played the convict Robert Stroud in the 1962 movie “Birdman of Alcatraz,” a true story that fascinated us boomers. Because of his murderous temper, Stroud was placed in solitary confinement for life. When a sick sparrow flies to his window, he nurses the small soul to health, an act that opens a deep vein of feeling. (“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” muses Hamlet, as he contemplates destiny and death before his duel with Laertes.) Stroud asks for a canary, then another, raises nearly 300, and becomes a world expert on the species. What one remembers most about the movie, however, is the window, the man inside his cell, and the solace of that sparrow.
For people everywhere, whether stacked vertically in city apartments or hewing to horizontal spaces in the suburbs, these months of lockdown have made the world outside the window a new form of theater. While plays, ballets, musicals and opera have moved to the internet, birds are still 3-D—flying, mating, nesting, fledging. This is their usual M.O. from the end of March into summer—a season birders love for the beautiful breeding plumage and spirited song that procreation requires—but in these lockdown months non-birders have opened their eyes and ears to our feathered friends.
Cornell web cam still of a red-tailed hawk and chicks
Photo: Cornell Lab of OrnithologyAir is fraught right now, but not the air that belongs to birds. We want to join them, yet we must be careful in outdoor spaces that contain too many humans. This spring, for instance, New Jersey Audubon’s World Series of Birding, an annual fundraising competition that challenges teams to see or hear as many species as possible in a 24-hour period, changed its rules to cope with Covid-19 (a quarter-million dollars in pledges were at stake). In 2020, teams could not bird together as usual, and did not have to stay within New Jersey. Instead, each team’s members birded alone (or with a family member) within 10 miles of their homes, and did so in flyway states from Maine to Florida. The team I’m on, the Seaside Sparrows, had three of its members in Manhattan—which meant Central and Riverside Parks, brimming with birds on migration, but also heavily populated with maskless joggers huffing and puffing in uncomfortably close proximity. Amazing how everything drops away, even fear, when you get your binoculars on a beauty—a Blackburnian warbler, a white-crowned sparrow—or a rarity such as the male bobolink that turned up that day.
For those not ready to deal with unheeding humanity, open a window on your computer. The live cams on the internet, rigged for intimate views one rarely gets in the field, are a great way to get to know a species. This spring I had Cornell’s cam of nesting red-tailed hawks sitting open alongside my work. The rushing wind, the calling adults, the begging babies, it was soothing to hear and mesmerizing to watch. The red-tails have now fledged, but coastal ospreys, their talons like fishhooks, are still underway with their young, bringing them fresh sushi all day long. The life of the nest is so like our own, especially when sheltering at home.
An osprey catching fish
Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesTurning to bird identification, if your interest in birds is new, you need to get a field guide. It’s even better if you get three: Sibley, Crossley, National Geographic. (Authors Sibley and Crossley have their own websites, offering apps, videos and insight.) And out of respect and on bended knee: Peterson, the granddaddy of them all. Shuttling from one guide to another, comparing images, for example, of that noisy chestnut bird with the white eyebrow and blond breast, darting about like a mini martinet (Carolina wren!), is addictive sleuthing.
Not getting out to bird, feeling rusty and hungry for a chance to test oneself, I looked for birding quizzes online. It’s good for beginners to find out what they know—and don’t know (set a baseline, because you’ve got to start somewhere). It’s a little discomfiting for the more experienced to be reminded of what they’ve forgotten or never mastered. Bird Quiz lets you slowly, gently, ascend levels. Far tougher is the eBird Photo & Sound Quiz. It’s a test by birders for birders and it feels as if someone’s recording your performance into the permanent record—like the SATs. Scary. And yet such delight with every correct ID.
A Carolina wren
Photo: Julio Cortez/Associated PressWindows, of course, are also the portals for “backyard birding.” This means there’s a feeder in the yard and you (and your cat) are clocking the species that come in. It’s citizen science, armchair sport, and endless surprise and satisfaction. You can make it even better. That country-club lawn you’ve saturated with poisonous Roundup—and god knows how many other insecticides and herbicides—does nothing for anyone but your obsessive, HOA-phoning neighbors. Let the lawn go, or at least a portion of its boring, sexless expanse. Start building a habitat around that feeder and plant it with natives—the wise flora that insect pollinators of your region need for their life cycle, which in turn keeps us in crops and feeds the thrilled and thrilling birds. A nighttime bonus? The return of fireflies, hailing “all’s well” with their tiny lanterns.
—Ms. Jacobs is the Arts Intel Report editor for the weekly newsletter Air Mail and is using this summer to focus on gull identification.
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For Solace, Look to the Birds - Wall Street Journal
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