Birds Art Life

by Kyo Maclear

  • • •

  In May, I had not yet read Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, but I would do so in October and be reminded of my son’s fear of falling.

  We live on the flat, on the level, and yet—and so—we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. . . . Every love story is a potential grief story.

  When I read this, I thought, Yes, this is it, the crux of our problem. In Barnes’s spare and beautiful meditation on life’s inevitable crests and troughs, on the things that literally and emotionally uplift us (hot-air balloons, love) and the things that plunge us to earth (the death of a loved one), I found a distillation of my son’s existential chagrin. “Every love story is a potential grief story.”

  All striving may lead to suffering. What goes up must come down, what begins must end. My son’s (and, arguably, my own) hesitancy in the world was a product of extensive foresight mixed with a pessimistic disposition, a perfectionist quality mixed with a sense of inadequacy. This is why we did not have freer souls.

  My son had already mapped out what would happen once he sat on that bicycle seat, and he was tempted to protect himself from the pain and indignity of that experience, even if it meant missing out on some fun. And yet, he was also a boy who had recently fallen twice, unaccountably, while simply standing on the ground (“on the flat, on the level”), which forced him to consider whether one could ever really be in control.

  Barnes: “If being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.”

  What use was having a cautious soul if accidents and rogue elements could still throw him off his feet? What if there was no safe path in life? What if the pain of not doing something was greater than the pain of doing it?

  It was a quandary about bicycles and life.

  In May, my younger son was laying down tracks, deciding what sort of boy to be.

  • • •

  The neighborhood that spring crackled with daring: cyclists riding with no hands, children playing ferociously in the barren field near our house. One boy took a running leap into an aerial somersault. On seeing this, my husband grimaced and turned away.

  In sports such as football and boxing, a little sweaty stumbling is expected—and even welcomed. Then there are sports where the aim is perfection. My husband cannot tolerate the latter. He does not like to watch the Olympics. Not at all. The mere sight of a gymnast at a vault, a diver on a ten-meter platform, or a figure skater preparing to do a triple Axel is enough to make him leave the room.

  “How can you stand it?” he asks.

  It pains him to see a person suffer disappointment or invite potential injury, and he can’t stand the sight of a crowd waiting for a mistake to transpire. For similar reasons, it unsettles him to hear or watch an opera singer falter. Opera is an art of precision, of faultless and divine voices. As much as he loves Maria Callas, at moments her wobble is simply too much for him, she seems too dangerously out of control.

  The American video artist Bill Viola once spoke of “falling” or faltering as the optimal state for making art. John Baldessari said, “Art comes out of failure.” Some artists take pride in striving where they risk failure. Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader: “All is falling.”

  Ader was a maestro of falling. He filmed himself falling off the roof of his house, falling into a canal, falling off a tree. He captured the failure of losing his footing, of being incapable, of facing gravity, of the misguided endeavor. In a particularly poignant work, he took photographs of himself in front of a pine forest, standing and then lying facedown, felled, with a number of trees also felled around him.

  • • •

  In May, one night, while thinking about falling I came across a funny and melancholy dance by Pina Bausch on YouTube. Early into the performance (1980—A Piece by Pina Bausch), a woman begins to skip around the stage in a large circle, waving a white handkerchief. “I am tir-ed, I am tir-ed,” she chants in a lilting rhythm while Brahms’s Lullaby plays in the background. Round and round she continues as real exhaustion catches up with her. Her chant grows halting, her steps clumsy. Her arm quakes with the effort of holding the handkerchief in the air.

  Pina Bausch created this work soon after her longtime companion and closest collaborator, Rolf Borzik, died of leukemia.

  Sometimes we falter not because the ground beneath our feet is unstable but because it’s exhausting to keep moving, to keep trying, to keep performing the same actions again and again.

  • • •

  Strong one moment, vulnerable the next, we falter because we are alive, and with any luck we recover.

  • • •

  Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us—that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

  —Mary Ruefle, from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

  • • •

  In May, waves of migrant birds were passing through the city’s ravines, parks, and backyards. One morning after breakfast my sons and I saw a delicate magnolia warbler in our lilac tree. We huddled by the balcony door and watched the tiny bird with its black-streaked yellow breast. I imagined it weighed as much as a Sharpie.

  That bird had likely come from Central America, resting and refueling in Toronto on the way to its breeding grounds in northern Canada. It might have flown for sixty hours without stopping. I pictured it flapping its short wings and chirping, “I am tir-ed, I am tir-ed,” and all the other songbirds—the 50 million songbirds said to travel through Toronto during spring migration—all chiming in: “I am tir-ed, I am tir-ed.” We can learn something from the scrappiness of birds that come from as far away as the Argentine pampas and the Amazon jungle, from vanishing southern forest homes to equally threatened northern forests. I want to know how to be as undaunted as a migrating bird, how to sustain that perennial fortitude.

  Night after night, an invisible songbird stream passed through the darkness. The birds came so close at times that we could hear their calls, occasionally audible through open windows.

  • • •

  A few days after seeing the magnolia warbler, I accompanied my father to a late-night MRI, a checkup to monitor his cerebral aneurysm. It was his first time back at the hospital since his prior “escape.” A brief visit, I promised. His balance was still off, a slight hesitancy shadowed his movements, but he was a bit steadier. I sat in the quiet waiting room during the hour-long procedure. A large, wall-mounted television played the news. Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, had just touched down after nearly five months in orbit. Three parachutes slowed the spacecraft before it landed softly on the flat steppes of south-central Kazakhstan.

  • • •

  I heard my name, so I looked around and saw my eighty-four-year-old father making his way toward me like a man on a listing ship deck. They’d finished the MRI. His face was pale grey. He said he felt a stabbing pain behind his left knee. I could see in his eyes that the pain was very bad. I took him down two floors to Emergency. “We’re here anyway,” I said with false calm.

  A nurse took us into triage. My father, white-haired and delicate, Roman-nosed, was seated in a reclining chair under another TV monitor. On it, Chris Hadfield, with his receding hairline and trademark mustache, was also seated in a reclining chair. Hadfield was getting a preliminary medical checkup while he readapted to gravity. I watched the doctor cuff my dad’s arm while a doctor on TV cuffed Hadfield’s arm.

  • • •

  My father’s reflexes were poor, but the pulse in his foot was
strong. The pain had started to subside. His face was no longer graven with suffering. The doctor reassured us my father would be fine.

  “What about the dizziness?” I asked.

  “It may get better with time,” the doctor said, looking away. My father took this to mean he was recovering at an infinitesimal rate, a faint promise of rebound.

  As I helped my father to his feet, I felt the true depths of his faltering. I felt the faltering of his body, I felt the faltering of his independence and dignity. He trembled with the instability that came from losing steadying work, the existential shakiness of no longer being in the chase, no longer on the swiftly turning wheel.

  A way of knowing that you have definitively crossed the line into serious old age, writes Jenny Diski, is that your otherwise compassionate doctor tells you there is nothing to be done, that “ ‘you’ll have to learn to live with it.’ . . . You see a virtual shrug that says you are no longer young enough for a resource-strapped institution to be overly concerned with getting you back to full health. There are higher priorities, and they are higher because the patients are younger.”

  Constant dizziness? Shrug. Nerve pain? Shrug. Chronic leg numbness? Shrug. There was nothing to be done. Nothing worth doing. With the sadness of watching a magician take a bow before he has performed the very trick you came to see, we watched the doctor leave. We had exited the land of presto cures and illusions of recovery.

  We walked tentatively to the parking lot. As we approached the road we needed to cross to reach our car, my father—a former war reporter who had once roamed the world, walked through craters, along jungle trails, up mountains—paused to consider the opposite curb.

  The night streets were quiet and peaceful. We drove past a few joggers and some university students smoking outside a pub. We stopped to pick up milk and bread, grounding ourselves in familiar actions. I sensed from my father that he didn’t want me to take him home yet, so we sat in the car savoring the simple relief of being together.

  Chris Hadfield, reflecting on his mission, said, “Who’d have thought that five months away from the planet would make you feel closer to people?”

  I’d accompanied my father on so many emergency-room visits, at least five times when he was at the edge of dying, and every time we left the hospital it was like landing again.

  • • •

  As we sat there in the car, I thought back to taking my father to see a doctor about cataract surgery the year before. The appointment had been in an ancient medical building, and when I returned to pick him up, I opted to take the stairs two at a time instead of waiting for the slow, juddery elevator. As it turned out, the stairs took three times as long because halfway up the narrow staircase I got stuck behind an elderly Greek couple. Very concerned for each other, they held hands as they slowly made their way up the stairs in their gleaming black Reeboks. It touched me to see them helping each other in their matching shoes, but that wasn’t the most moving part. What really got to me was that they laughed the whole way to the top. Every painstaking footfall cracked them up. They grunted and guffawed, until I was laughing too. We laughed as if aging was the biggest prank in the world.

  • • •

  Late one night that May I heard a mournful cooing in the tree outside my bedroom, followed by a sharp whistling of wings. As the mourning dove departed, I tried to listen for the flight sounds of other birds that might be passing overhead, using their calls to stay connected and on course in the darkness.

  I had read somewhere that up to 50 percent of migrating birds die on their journey. They encounter extreme weather, predators, or human-borne obstacles. They leave the South using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate and get swept off their migratory flyways. They cross over large bodies of water or vast expanses of arid land and plummet exhausted after fighting strong headwinds and storms. Migrating requires an immense expenditure of energy. Migrants can lose one-fourth to one-half of their body weight during the passage from south to north.

  Those that manage the main crossing enter cities full of peril. They expend valuable energy and time trying to navigate mazes of high-rise towers and often don’t have the strength to continue—colliding with windows and reflective buildings, bedazzled by bright lights they mistake for constellations.

  In Toronto, as in other cities, volunteers scour the ground of the financial district in the predawn darkness each day. They carry paper bags and butterfly nets to rescue injured birds from the looming stampede of pedestrian feet or, more frequently, to pick up the bodies.

  The volunteers are part of a group called the Fatal Light Awareness Program, or FLAP, which works with building owners to reduce the threats that glass and light pose to migrating birds. That spring I had taken my sons to see their annual one-day display at the Royal Ontario Museum. For several hours, the corpses of thousands of birds killed while traveling Toronto’s skies were laid out on the floor of the rotunda. I pictured them flying into glass, knocking themselves out, dropping like stones to the pavement. Small birds and large birds—ninety-one different species—were artfully arranged in a sad but beautiful mandala.

  The museum teemed with children on March break, and the temporary FLAP display spoke for itself. The group had provided no explanatory text, gave no speeches. Our only help interpreting the display came from two children volunteers standing behind a rope cordon. One of them, a solemn nine-year-old boy with latex gloves on his hands, approached us with a Cooper’s hawk. He allowed us to pass the lanky bird carefully between us. It was soft and cold. Its heaviness surprised me, but then I remembered this was a bird that could devour a pigeon. The boy went away and returned with a weightless kinglet, creating a tiny hole in the pattern. We asked to hold a magnolia warbler, but the boy shook his head and said, “No, that’s enough for today.”

  The boy gently returned the kinglet to its spot, then walked back to his post. There was a faint smell of thawing cadavers. In a little more than an hour, FLAP would dismantle the display. The birds would be collected and sorted into clear plastic specimen bags.

  • • •

  In May, the musician invited me to the annual Whimbrel Watch at Colonel Samuel Smith Park, in Mimico. The whimbrels with their long curved bills and tapered wings come from coastal Brazil, and every year between May 22 and 29, following ancient instincts, they fly over the west-end park on their way to feed and breed in northern Canada. It is considered one of the most impressive migrations in the bird world.

  Since 2009, a volunteer citizen-science effort has mapped the movements and staging patterns of the large and leggy shorebirds, which have undergone a 50 percent decline over the past twenty years.

  When we arrived, a dozen whimbrel counters were already gathered on a scrubby hill by the lake. Among those who had been sitting, waiting, watching since dawn were a retired school principal with a long-lensed camera, a former Sears catalog photographer with an HD spotting scope, and a couple with matching $2,500 Swarovski binoculars.

  The counters had received news that 751 whimbrels had left their wintering grounds in the coastal marshes of Virginia the night before.

  As we huddled together on our windy moor, the air released a waft of catnip. The sun dipped low on the horizon, casting the world in a sweet rusty orange light, which gave the rocks an amber glow. The air filled with gnats as the wind and dusk settled.

  We looked up, up, up again. Then we looked down at ten black-billed dunlins wading off the rocks. The little black-streaked, red-brown birds followed the tide line, retreating when the waves arrived and rushing forward as they receded. I sketched while the musician took photographs. Every now and then the dunlins would startle and swoop in spirals over the water. I loved the way they bent back for the stragglers, moving tight and flexing, then coming apart and spreading wide.

  Suddenly a voice cried out from behind: “Here they come!” We hurried back to our post as the air filled with a choppy whistling sound. I saw a wavering blur transform into a fast dark cloud as a
shoal of whimbrels passed right over our heads. The way their tapered wings pumped without rest showed such earnest effort. They were so close I couldn’t take them all in. But I felt the chorus of wingbeats in my chest.

  A few minutes later, a friendly bearded man named Albert announced the final count: 215—a healthy tally, and yet, given what I now knew about the improbability of flying halfway around the world and making it safely, I couldn’t help but wonder in the blue-tinged twilight about the other 536.

  • • •

  The National Audubon Society list of the top twenty common birds in decline in the United States since 1967:

  1. Northern bobwhite

  2. Evening grosbeak

  3. Northern pintail

  4. Greater scaup

  5. Boreal chickadee

  6. Eastern meadowlark

  7. Common tern

  8. Loggerhead shrike

  9. Field sparrow

  10. Grasshopper sparrow

  11. Snow bunting

  12. Black-throated sparrow

  13. Lark sparrow

  14. Common grackle

  15. American bittern

  16. Rufous hummingbird

  17. Whip-poor-will

  18. Horned lark

  19. Little blue heron

  20. Ruffed grouse

  • • •

  In May, I heard many birders remark that we were seeing the “worst spring migration” in thirty years. The numbers were notably low. We had sudden heat, then icy cold. Was this a normal fluctuation? Was it just a bad season? Was it a sign of something more sinister? No one knew.

  Some declines are natural and inevitable. Some are not. There was a distinction to be made between the regular frailties of birds (their everyday expirations, the losses that occur in the hurly-burly of migration) and the more catastrophic faltering brought on by a threatened ecosphere.

  Deforestation, habitat loss, hunting, pesticide use, urbanization, predatory pets, and climate change . . . The decline of migratory birds is an indication that nature is out of balance. Rising temperatures, earlier springs, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, changing rainfall and drought patterns, worsening heat waves, extreme precipitation, acidifying oceans. In ordinary times, the benefits of migration made it worthwhile for birds. But what about extraordinary times?