Study in Perfect (19 page)

We toss our very human experience over the landscape like a soggy net.

There is no caress like a parakeet's, flicking its little blue tongue over a cheek. I've learned the noises she loves: A shushing like
the fall of aerated water from a faucet. Or a sustained squeaky kiss, as if I'd just eaten a sour blueberry. Most birds ignore the standard human whistle, though it's the first thing we do when we see a bird—let out a wolf whistle or a deconstructed “Happy Birthday to You.” But the register is too low, too human.

I open the cage door, and after a few days of sheer terror—slamming into chandeliers, panting on the floor—the bird adjusts to my home, landing deftly on three or four strategic stations. Soon, I coax her onto my shoulder and she rides with me teetering through the house, perches on the edge of my cereal bowl, where she pecks at bananas. At my cheek, the bird is looking for salt. Between my teeth, little scraps of parsley, but I see it as affection. And what is the crime in believing my love will be returned? She sits on my shoulder and suddenly regurgitates a lump of partially digested seed. Perhaps this is her truest expression of love. She wants to feed me.

If I am close to an animal, if I love my parakeet, I will try to dissolve the differences between us. This response is sometimes called “identification,” or “self-extension,” and makes me prone to anthropomorphic explanations. I will imagine her continual head bobbing as pleasure at the sight of me—
yes, yes, yes
. I will name her June for the month she was born.

Here is an extended example of how we've captured another particular species for our cultural shorthand:

I've got to go, can you manage by yourself? Yes, I have my blackbird right here in my pocket
. A blackbird is a nickname for a small black handgun.

Or, a blackbird is a girl who puts on a happy face, but collapses in private:
Have you seen her room? Ever since her sister died, Sarah's been hiding out there; she's a total blackbird
.

FBI, ATF, CIA, or DEA agents are called blackbirds. They'll tap your phone. This is known as “blackbird on the wire.”
Is this a good time to talk? Wait, no, I think I hear something…

A blackbird is a sleek, black, highly advanced U.S. spy plane that currently holds the record for the highest ceiling and fastest plane ever to fly. You won't see it from your porch, or even in the middle of a field. Ever.

Where's Steph? I saw her a minute ago. She must have blackbirded out of here
. To blackbird is to leave a party surreptitiously without saying good-bye. Something to think about when you're tired, when you've had enough of the chatter.

We're a long way from
Agelaius phoeniceus
, the raucous species common to farm and field, predisposed to hassling hawks. We spot a red-winged blackbird swaying on a telephone wire and drag it down, fold it into our slang, our secret codes. The blackbird becomes a versatile tool, employed by criminals, aviators, teenagers, and cops.

Maybe there's more to our urge to humanize feathered creatures—anthropomorphism likely a subconscious reflection of what we share with them, a primitive kinship. Birds can be traced back to a series of reptilian groups called the
Synapsida
, which evolved over an approximately 100 million year period from the Pennsylvanian to the end of the Triassic, when true mammals appeared. The National Human Genome Research
Institute (NHGRI) has shown that chickens and humans have in common more than half of their genes, some two thousand genes involved in the cell's basic structure and function. The avian skeleton too resembles in some ways the human skeleton: humerus + radius + ulna. Femur + tibia + fibula. Cranium + maxilla + mandible. Tailbone. The majority of bones are the same; others are fused or shaped differently.

Birdsong has its parallel in humans. Genes tell both species to learn the language of their own kind, and no other. And neither bird nor baby immediately master communication: fledgling white-crowned sparrows and humans listen before they begin to speak. The sparrow will first sing a short subsong derived from a tutor's full song. The young bird keeps practicing this little bit of nonsense just as infants practice their words. When my daughter Bonnie was little, she fixed on the sound of
cheese
and repeated other words in the same sound family: please, these, keys, peas, leaves. Later—full song, full sentences. “Cheese please! Throw your keys in the leaves!”

Raised in Kentucky, she acquired a slight drawl.
Bye
becomes “Ba.”
Hair
becomes “hay-er.” Sparrows too have a dialect, depending on where they live. Don Kroodsma, reigning authority on the biology of bird vocal behavior, tours the country by bicycle, listening to Steller's jays in California, house wrens in Tennessee, warblers in Georgia, towhees in New England. He recorded and analyzed hundreds of songs and concluded that where a bird learned a song is just as important as a bird's genealogy. Later, he recorded human accents as well and is confident we can tell a lot about where either species was born by its burr, twang, brogue, or nasality.

At his large kitchen window, a retired man settles down in a cloud of morning lint and rumpled skin. He gathers a legal pad, his five-hundred-dollar Montblanc fountain pen, a stained cup of Postum. He combs the backyard for a way into his masterpiece, the poem that finally will make
Yankee Magazine
, maybe even the
New Yorker
. Outside, a line of suet feeders hang from a porch beam, rocked by the larger birds, pecked and beloved by all species. He begins, “The titmouse, all nerves and ambition….”

Birds strike the window at least once a week, falling to the deck in limp feather-clusters. He always checks: dazed or dead, one or the other. To ease his conscience he wraps the dead ones in plastic sandwich bags, stores them in the freezer, and later drops them off at the university's biology department. Unwittingly, he has created the perfect conditions for mold and accelerated rot. He cannot know that an expert folds the head under a wing and inserts the bird into a nylon stocking, which makes a firm but airy case for freezing. He doesn't know his specimens go directly in the trash.

A panel of sunshine breaks into the garden and for the first time he notices the buff patch under the titmouse's wing “like blush on a woman's cheek.” His wife again. Every morning he searches his cabinet for shaving cream and there's her makeup in a heap. But wait, this sounds new: “its crest moves like a retractable surgical knife.” No, “its crest retracts like a miniature box cutter.”

He cannot imagine the flock of birdfeeder poems that alight every day on magazine editors' desks.

Is it possible to watch a red-breasted merganser jut its head back and forth without thinking of Daffy Duck?

Can we observe a foraging pileated without the Woody Woodpecker “car-tune” idling somewhere deep in our brain?

A table is covered with oilcloth, long benches on either side. In neat piles: scalpels, looped flesher tools, curved hemostats, acid brushes, borax/sawdust mixture, needles, thread, cotton balls, and tubs of pink formaldehyde paste. Six students are wearing aprons and sterile gloves, and each prepares herself with a precise mental distance: a hospital curtain in one mind, an imaginary suit of mail in another. One boy summons the nonchalance of nitrous from a dentist's chair, where he managed to be both alert and relaxed.

As if they sat in a street-side café, their leader offers a tray with an array of species to choose from, all of them common: purple grackle, three house sparrows, blue jay, cowbird, tit-mouse, and starling. No one chooses the starling, with its stunted tail and apocalyptic foreboding.

The bird is positioned belly up, and each student blows with little puffs till feathers part and the breastbone is revealed. Along this, the first incision—from tail to beak—feather membrane separated from the body sack and scraped clean till the bird is turned inside-out. It's slow work, careful, as the membrane is easily torn and no one wants to cover a sloppy job with a pile of stitches. Excavating the skull comes next and here the students heap on the sawdust; the smell is something else and plucking brain tissue with a hemostat or tweezers requires a little
more than an imaginary curtain. Two girls have successfully swallowed their disgust but now have a desperate need to go to the bathroom.

It's a good point for a break anyway—sip Cokes in silence—then back to the table. Turn the bird on its stomach and continue gently pulling, scraping tendons, legs, wings, the skin spread out, and finally, painted pink. The rest is home economics. Balls of cotton are stretched and molded around a stick to fill the cavity. Two tiny knots for the eyes. Overhand stitches with heavy black thread, repairs to any torn membrane. One girl, shaping the belly, thinks of the Little Prince's drawing of a snake after it swallowed an animal whole. Bird and snake resemble a kind of rounded desert plateau, or one of those American Indian burial mounds. Still, she is a long, long way from Glow Worm and Ollie the elephant, beloved stuffed animals of her youth.