My first bird feeder was an afterthought. The backyard was barren after years of California drought. I was eager to plant bushes and trees and build raised beds to grow vegetables. I thought a feeder might look nice between the Japanese Maple and a rosemary bush. I believed my love of plants was all I needed until birds started visiting regularly, at first mostly sparrows, finches, chickadees, and the occasional blue jay. They darted quickly to and from perches surrounding a cylindrical tower of seed as they remained vigilant for predators on the ground and in the sky. I could easily watch them from our bedroom window and began to change how I moved through our home just to see them. I’d walk from the bathroom to the window while brushing my teeth. I’d check on the birds on the way to my home office. I’d look to see what they were up to before making the evening meal. They weren’t doing anything unusual, nor were they exotic species. Still, they were extraordinary by virtue of being birds instead of human. I admired their spontaneity, their courage despite small stature, how they weathered the elements and greeted every day with a song.
During the first year of the pandemic, one feeder became five. One bird bath became three. As the accoutrements increased, so did the number of birds, along with gophers, squirrels, racoons, skunks, and rats. To manage, I awakened early each morning to put out fresh seed and water, rain or shine. Every sunset, I cleaned up any remaining seed. As I became habitual in the feedings, more birds began to wait every morning in an old apple tree in the far corner of the yard, or in my neighbor’s overgrown trees lining our shared fence. We established a routine that served us both: they needed food, and I needed to take my mind off my husband working in the emergency department during the pandemic, especially before vaccines.
The garden also flourished, although my dreams of a refined backyard retreat gave way to a new desire: turning my tiny urban space into a wildlife habitat with overgrown areas where birds and smaller animals could retreat when in danger or to find shelter from a storm. (The Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks also discovered our yard offered ample feeding opportunities.) As our yard began to overgrow, I started to call out – a high-pitched “hello-hello”— so I wouldn’t startle the birds and squirrels when I came around a bush or tree as they foraged among fallen leaves.
A few birds would call back to me. This is how we started to communicate. I’d say “hello-hello” in a singsong voice, and someone would chirp back, usually from my neighbor’s trees. It was a novelty that led me to learn all I could about bird communication. Yet the novelty wore off in the fall of 2020 when wildfires turned the sky a menacing orange and the sun never came out; the entire day was a dark orange night. By 11am, I began to worry about the birds. So small, could they make it through the day without feeding? How much did their behavior depend on the rising sun? I turned on the back porch lights, which provided some illumination, although not much. I put out the food with my usual “hello-hello,” but few birds came. Not knowing what to do but having recently read a chapter on entrainment — how birds know how other birds feel by singing their songs — I decided to whistle a tune like the singsong I had used in the past as I focused on letting go of worry and relaxing my body. I thought of my work as a trauma therapist and the importance of staying emotionally regulated in my own body to support my clients’ emotional regulation. I put aside my fears of a day without the sun and whistled loud and clear. Before long, more songbirds showed up, along with a couple of juvenile crows and a few squirrels. They seemed comforted by my presence on the porch, so I lingered a while. I thought of this as a profound bonding experience that would change our relationship. Yet the next day they went back to old habits, keeping their distance until I left the backyard, and the space was their’s alone.
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I have tried to pinpoint exactly when I fell deeply in love with birds. I believe it was when I stopped trying to communicate with words and instead focused on how my emotions might be communicated through sound and movement. In the mornings, as I filled the feeders and put fresh water in their baths, I would sing a song, like Talking Head’s “This Must Be the Place,” Elton John & Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart,” Billie Eilish’s “my future”— songs that felt soulful to sing and grounded me. I still had whistles and singsongs, but I started showing up as human. By not communicating at them, but rather being with them, we all seemed to relax. Sometimes they would join me, crowding the telephone wires and tree branches, some singing their own song, others darting about with excitement.
I have also wondered if my love for birds was driven by my isolation during the pandemic, and perhaps it was. Nevertheless, the birds changed me and became part of me, so much so that when my husband and I were vaccinated and felt safe to travel, flight took on new meanings. Before the pandemic, my carry on was a list of to do’s — books to read, articles to write, movies to watch. Flying was punctuated time I was forced to fill. After years of hanging with birds, I rediscovered the fascination of flight and being so high above Earth. This change wasn’t intentional or planned; I simply found the view outside the plane mesmerizing, as if I had never flown before. Despite all I knew about clouds and their illusion of solidity, I wanted to linger among them, weightless like a bird. There I was, far above my worries, a survivor of a pandemic that took so much from everyone. No one unscathed, yet we survivors kept going, sometimes as if the world had never stopped, even as everything felt different and more uncertain. It was as if a subtle phase shift had occurred and we needed 3-D glasses to detect the lack of alignment, because nothing seemed to come sharply into focus anymore.
In this new world, I kept thinking of a book I read in spring 2019, nine months before the pandemic — The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, by David Wallace-Wells. Wallace-Wells looked at the research on climate change and chronicled pretty much all the nasty changes we can expect in a warming planet — heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, loss of freshwater, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues, economic collapse, climate conflicts, and more. But what about the birds? Their numbers have drastically decreased over the past 30 years. How much worse can it get? Life is certain to become unbearable for all of us some of the time, and for some of us all of the time.
In the quiet moments of the pandemic, especially on the days before there was a vaccine and my husband was working in the emergency department, a high-pitched anxiety buzzed in me, growing louder with each hour he worked. I could soothe myself by sitting quietly by an open window listening to the birds chatting, and with time, I regained inner silence. I decided the world would be uninhabitable for me without birds and their songs.
In my apocalyptic future, I live in my present home, but I am as old as a young Redwood, parched and dusty like a Southern California Canyon, and hunched like a condor as I make the daily journey to our tiny backyard, bagged seed ready for the altar. But there are no birds to greet or scold me for oversleeping. Just silence. Not even crows bitching about who has sentinel duty to keep the hawks from invading their territory, which happens to include our yard. Just silence.
