Your Slow and Sad Descent Into Birdwatching
You learn the alphabet from an eight-foot-tall yellow anthropomorphic bird that irrevocably imprints on you. Big Bird may as well be your dad.
You move on to bigger birds (i.e., dinosaurs) and take an intense interest in pterodactyls. This will become the basis for your atheism.
Your mom reads you the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” Your dad reads you the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” Your first-grade teacher reads you—not the entire class, just you—the story of “The Ugly Duckling.” You begin to read between the lines.
You beg your parents for a dog. Instead, they get you a parakeet for Christmas and blame the mixup on Santa. You name her Jessica, and she is your best friend—until you get a dog, at which point you give the bird to your grandma to keep her company. You’re subsequently forced to visit your grandma once a week to clean Jessica’s cage until one of them dies (twenty-four years later).
In college, you watch a documentary about factory farming and become a vegetarian. You stock up on feather accessories. It’s kinda your “thing.”
You live in a godforsaken city where a three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio above a bodega teeming with cats costs a million dollars. This enrages you. So, you channel this energy into something that is both creative and calming: you build a birdhouse. Then a bird-duplex. Then a bird-three-story-Victorian with a mansard roof, wraparound porch, crown moldings, and a turret.
Next thing you know, you’ve built a whole goddam chicken coop, and that leaves you no choice but to buy a few hens on the Internet. You know almost nothing about farm fowl, and it turns out that one of the chickens is actually a rooster, which (contrary to popular belief) crows not just at dawn but at midnight and at noon and at every hour of every day until you off-load him at someone else’s stoop sale.
You no longer adhere to a balanced diet. For you, the food pyramid is not a pyramid but an oval. It’s an egg. You subsist almost entirely on eggs, pairing them with whatever wilted vegetables are rotting in your refrigerator. You make a mean frittata.
You are diagnosed with high cholesterol. You start going on walks with your partner and quickly discover that neither of you has anything left to say to the other, leading your partner to begin simply identifying the objects around you out loud, like, “car,” and “tree,” and “bird.” In an effort to convince yourself that you are not, in fact, in a doomed relationship, you tell your partner to please be quiet so that you can listen to the birdsong (instead of his incessant babbling).
You come to the realization that you probably hate your partner. Naturally, you marry this person, move upstate, and build a tree house. Your neighbors think you’re whimsical.
You develop a deep need for solitude and spend the majority of your time in the tree house, where you suddenly find that you’re able to distinguish between the pa-chip-chip-chip of an American goldfinch and the chortle-deeeee conk-a-reeee of a red-winged blackbird. Before you know it, you’re mimicking bird calls. Your partner tells you that he hates this new habit. Each time he speaks, you pray for a woodpecker to drill through the drum of your ear.
You sit in the tree house and stare skyward as your feathered friends fly away, abandoning you for the next three to four months. You begin to exhibit early signs of hypothermia and rush back toward the house. You slip and fall on some ice, wind up with a hernia, and spend the next two weeks in bed, cursing the winter and staring at the plexiglass bird feeder suction-cupped to your window.
You divorce, become a snowbird, and spend half the year in Florida. ♦
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May 09, 2023 at 01:23AM
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Your Slow and Sad Descent Into Bird-Watching - The New Yorker
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