Birds Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant. Kyo Maclear
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circled the room, studying the small birds and soaking up the strange squatter ambience, as the musician moved around the aviary cleaning. There was no apparent joy in it for him. The whole situation contravened the Law of Fickle Pet Ownership, according to which it was okay for kids to pawn their unwanted pets off on their parents. But not the other way around.
His father from what I could tell was a serial hobbyist, constantly gripped by new interests. He used to build shortwave radios. Then out of the blue he decided to collect tropical fish. Then one day he abandoned fish in favour of first day covers. First day covers, the musician explained, were envelopes or cards bearing newly issued stamps postmarked on the first day those stamps went on sale. Then he became obsessed with camera collecting.
Admittedly this degree of hobby switching was unusual, and perhaps (in the case of the aviary) mildly irresponsible. But I could also see his father was very caring. His one-time affection was evident: in the perches he had built; in the makeshift birdbath, which had been rigged under the dripping faucet; and, most of all, in the possibly obscene fact that an entire apartment (one that would easily rent for $1500 a month) was the dwelling place of twenty tiny birds. Grime and clots of bird poop streaked the walls and furniture. But the birds were well preened and had healthy-looking feathers. There was ample room for them to fly.
I helped the musician fill the seed bowls in the order he directed. Then, suddenly, it dawned on me I was creating havoc. My presence inside the enclosure had sent the finches into high alert. They were making fierce loops around the room, darting from one end of the cage to the other. Their tiny little wings were beating arrhythmically as they startled from perch to perch, giving me as wide a berth as possible. Wisps of fluff and feather floated in the air. The chirping I had taken for singing was a little too strident.
It was at this point I also realized the blue nitrile gloves on my hands were not for my sake but for theirs—to protect them from any diseases I might be carrying. The aviary’s feeling of quarantine had confused me. In reality, I was the galumphing invader.
To see a bird moving as if it’s on fire and then realize you have ignited this anxiety challenges any illusion you may have that you are a benign and low-impact presence in the world. For me, it triggered an awareness I had never felt so acutely. It gave me a different and more accurate view of my scale and proportions. I can’t say I liked it. Who wants to feel like Godzilla when in contact with other species?
But perhaps this is the way it really is. Most of the time, we don’t harm birds on purpose. Some of us may kill birds with guns and oil spills but most of us kill them with our lumbering, ignorant love—invading their habitats in bouts of nature appreciation or caging them as pets to adore—or we kill them at a distance through our technologies (communication towers, wind turbines), our windows, our medium-sized carbon footprints, or by allowing our cats to roam wild and do the decimating for us. According to a study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, domestic cats kill between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds every year in the United States. A separate study, from the Mammal Society, a British conservation charity, estimates that the United Kingdom’s cats catch up to 55 million birds a year (a tally based on the “prey items” that cats brought home; it does not factor in kills that were not “returned”).
I stood for a moment and pretended I was a harmless perch. Then I asked the musician to open the aviary door so I could leave. The musician stayed inside a little longer, doing his bird chores as I waited and watched. He was not rattling the birds.
An old-fashioned but lingering perspective from The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds (1878): “The longing for something to protect and care for is one of the strongest feelings implanted within us, and one outcome of it is the desire to keep animals under our control, which in its due place is, undoubtedly, one of our healthiest instincts.”
The aviary’s plainness and lack of pretense had its merits. It was once common for bird-keepers to pay inconceivable sums to build lavish architectural structures for their birds—everything from miniature Georgian mansions to replicas of the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower. This aviary’s wood and wire structure was utilitarian and a little depressing, but at least it was honest.
The musician moved around the aviary like a housekeeping robot, repeating the same few mechanical actions he performed several times a week, always in the same sequence, out of duty to his father. I wondered if the birds had any opinions about their confinement. Did they envy the free birds outside the window? Did they ache to be released from their long incarceration? Could it even be called an incarceration if they had been bred in captivity? Would they know what to do with their freedom? Was it possible to be cooped up and not even notice?
There are stories of animals that have been bred in captivity experiencing the terror of the open door. It might seem counterintuitive, but captive animals often have the good sense to know their chances of survival in the wild are uncertain at best. The prospect of running away or flying off is simply too painful and frightening. So they stay put in the sanctuary of the cage.
I understand. I understand getting stuck. I understand wanting to make a change while circling around the same neural cage. I understand that sometimes, when you are at a stage of life when you have given yourself over to mothering and daughtering and you get to keep very little of yourself, it can be hard to live with open doors. Yet in an effort to hoard solitude and keep people out, there is a risk that all you end up doing is fencing yourself in.
The instinct for liberty may be deeply ingrained, but we are all captive in some way to something. We may be held in place by the confinement of tradition or trapped in relationships (family, marital, professional) that grow to feel like cupboards—comfortable, well appointed, but cupboards nonetheless. Or we may be stalled by our fear of immensities and the free fall of the unknown. We may be captive when we choose financial stability over artistic freedom, when we live our lives like agoraphobics, confusing the safety of a locked house with security. The cage of habit. The cage of ego. The cage of ambition. The cage of materialism. The line between freedom from fear and freedom from danger is not always easy to discern.
It is not easy to be an outside bird surviving by your wits in the wild.
But what happens when you pen yourself in?
A few years ago, in Tulum, Mexico, I met an older Mayan woman who told me my liver contained some trapped fury. She referred to it as my small fist, tu puño pequeño. She gave me a flower that represented this portion of pent-up rage and told me to release it in the ocean.
Cut to my fourth attempt to send the ceremonial flower out to sea. Foiled by the wind, which kept whipping it back in my face, I waded farther and farther out in my cotton dress, until I was chest-deep—laughing, furious—in a froth of wavelets. Fucking go, already, I yelled at the flower.
I think stories of stolen flight captivate us because they’re relatively uncommon. A cage-breaker is a beacon. Consider the case of Phoebe Snetsinger, who spent her early adult life in suburban Missouri, cooped up in her role as a housewife and mother of four, always working too hard to please and accommodate others. She began birdwatching when her kids were young, as a way of getting out of the house. The rhythms of an anchored life made her uneasy, so she took long walks to places where she was no longer anyone’s mother, daughter, wife, sister. She kept journeying, though always returning, until she had travelled to the world’s farthest jungles, mountains, and forests. The world, she discovered, lay at her feet, open and abundant.
The ceremonial flower eventually floated out to sea.
My own mother tried to escape once. In my seventh year, she drained our family bank account and packed herself, me, and my Japanese babysitter onto a Greyhound bus bound for Niagara Falls. My father was always travelling for work and she was tired of being alone. She had put up with him, his gambling and work addictions, for fifteen years. But enough. She called my father from a payphone near the Falls and told him she was leaving the marriage.