Birds Near and Far

A few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started, a paper was published in Science.

The findings: from the 1970s to the current time, about half a century, almost 30 percent of the continent’s avian populations have been lost.

Birds have been disappearing. Not just vulnerable or threatened species, but backyard birds—sparrows and finches. Migrating birds, too, saw a steep decline. Five hundred and twenty-nine species were studied.

When she read the headline citing the Science paper in the New York Times, “Silent Skies: Billions of North American Birds Have Vanished,” she felt the air rush into her lungs and stiffen there. As if her lungs were stones that had just been frozen.

Sandhill cranes are still relatively abundant. But of the world’s fifteen crane species, ten are threatened with extinction.

Language and Erasure I

Hyginus writes in Fabulae that Mercury invented several letters of the Greek alphabet after watching the patterns made by cranes in flight. She likes that idea—that human language could be inspired by birds. That letters and languages can be found in the sky.

Tasting Salt

Their son refuses to wear any shoes besides flip-flops these days, and in the February chill, his feet are cold. Up the trail, she carries him on her back for a while, her hands wrapped tightly across the bare tops of his feet. When they run into a couple on their way back from the spring, they learn that the cranes aren’t there; the rains haven’t come, and there isn’t enough water.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have to semi-shout this information across the wide dirt path.

Indeed, the ground is parched. The grasses blonde and brittle, the white mud dried and curled into little puzzle-pieces. The soil shines with a white crust; looking closely, you can see little glittering crystals. She crouches down and tastes it, thinking she probably shouldn’t. It’s gritty, sulfurous.

But then the kids are kicking off their shoes and tumbling down little hillocks of scrappy grass, stomping down knobs of dirt. They skid down the crushed earth, shrieking, then studiously extract little curls of mud, arrange the fragile polygons.

Impermanence has new meaning these days. She recalls reading that the oldest-known crane fossil dates to ten million years.

The Crane Wife I

She bought the book on eBay, but it came from a public library. With the little pocket to grip the checkout card. The cardstock littered with stamps. Dates that have existed but are now long past. How many different kinds of hands had turned these pages? There’s a stamp in large letters on the inner pages: WITHDRAWN.

She wanted to find the same book her mother read to her when she was a child. Her son likes the page where the man finds the wounded bird in the snow. A brushstroked flurry: you can’t tell if the swishes are snowflakes or feathers. Its wing is pierced by an arrow. Very gently, very carefully, the man draws out the arrow and tends to the wound.

“But Mom, how could he have heard outside?” Her son asks the question after she reads that the crane’s dragging wing had made a rustling sound.

She wasn’t sure. “Well,” he decides, “it would either have to be very quiet, or the man would have had to be listening.”

After the man removes the arrow and releases the bird, late that night there is a tapping at his door. A beautiful woman appears and begs to be his wife. He’s overjoyed. Gently he takes her hand and leads her inside. But he’s a poor man. So his wife tells him she will weave for him. Weave a cloth of the finest silken fabric. Of course, there’s one agreement: he cannot watch her do it.

Vulnerable and Endangered Cranes I

Most crane pairs extend their wings, and leap and pirouette when performing their courtship dance. Blue cranes also run in parallel, the female taking the lead. Hooded cranes circle each other when courting, tossing grass and feathers into the air. When wintering in the Gulf of Texas, whooping cranes eat wolfberries and blue crabs. Red-crowned cranes have a patch of skin on their crown that turns bright crimson during mating season. Sarus cranes are the tallest flying bird, measuring almost six feet. When young wattled cranes are in danger, their parents shove them into tall grasses to hide. The heads of grey crowned cranes and black crowned cranes display tufts of stiff, gold-colored feathers. Siberian cranes fly more than three thousand miles during their migration and can live more than eighty years. White-naped cranes are the only cranes that have a gray-and-white striped neck and pink legs. Cranes can be found on every continent except South America and Antarctica.

Dream People II

Lake Bunyonyi, “Lake of Little Birds,” is found in southern Uganda and is home to East African or grey crowned cranes. When she was a student at Makerere University in Kampala, she traveled by boat to Bwama Island in Lake Bunyonyi. It was lushly beautiful, full of green terraces thatched in places with wild blooming poinsettias. On the island, she met a group of people affected with leprosy—wards of the island church and the last members of a leprosy settlement dating back decades. They were cured, but most were blind and terribly disfigured. It was clear that at least some were still in pain. One woman—a double amputee—noticed her, and reached out to her with hands that had mere stumps for fingers. “Please,” the woman said. There is no other way to say this—every last Lugandan word she’d been learning stuck like glue inside her throat, and she tried to give some money to the woman but couldn’t bring herself to touch the woman’s hands. The crumpled bills fell to the ground and she stood there, stupidly, helplessly, watching the woman scrabble for the money in the dirt.

Rowing back to the mainland, she felt the kind of shame that makes your body feel like it’s being boiled. There had been a bird—a single East African crowned crane—standing in the shallows, watching as her paddle dipped into the lake. From that moment on, the image of the crane and the woman became inextricably linked in her mind.

They moved the settlement from Bwama Island years ago. It is all but erased. But now that woman and the crane are some of her Dream People. They return to her. And she remembers.

The Crane Wife II

Lately, she’s been thinking about the way the suffering of more-than-human bodies is erased.

The whooping cranes electrocuted by power lines in Florida. Poachers cutting off the wings of demoiselle cranes in Zhob Valley and cramming them into boxes to be sold as pets. Siberian cranes dying of pesticide exposure in the Liao River. Blue cranes found poisoned in the Overberg.

She wants to understand the structures that allow this to happen. Structures so normalized they’re nearly invisible. And the stories that make these structures persist.

For example, if she was the husband in The Crane Wife, would she have noticed? Would she have asked? If she’d seen the wife emerge from weaving—each time paler, thinner, withdrawn?

The violence of that page when he finds her, her suffering no longer hidden. The door ajar. The crane with her head thrown back, the spattered blood smeared across her wing.

Didn’t he suspect she was the crane? That she was plucking her own feathers to weave him his cloth?

After all, the fabric seemed to glow with a light all its own.

Dream People III

While listening to music on her iTunes playlist, there is a sudden eruption of sound. It takes her a moment to realize it’s the call of an East African crane—something she’d downloaded while researching crane species. A momentary scrap of sound. A fragment of a bird call from the past. Then the music played on. What if the Dream People of our future are the extinct birds of our past?

The Crane Wife III

Last week, she opened a box of architecture drawing supplies that she found at the thrift store. She was looking for a midcentury desk lamp. Instead, she came home with a little kit of architecture stencils for the children: colored pencils, blueprints.

Inside one of the notebooks, she found a child’s diligent sketches. She likes the untitled, four-tiered pagoda best—it’s exquisite and cleverly rendered in lavender ink.

The pagoda makes her think of The Crane Wife. And how one              

inhabits a story. The pagoda is a story too. The way that human thought is a story.

Story #1: The couple lives in a four-tiered pagoda. The husband, once poor, now possesses a house that the neighbors whisper greedily about, has a strangely beautiful wife. But it is not enough; he’s saturated with his neighbor’s greed. The wife grows paler, the sunlight sluggish. His sleep grows shallow, dreamless. He discovers his wife is a crane because she kills herself trying to weave for him. Instead of grieving, he starts to hunt. Not to eat but to skin and mount the birds. Until at night, his bedroom swarms with the silhouettes of dead cranes.

Story #2: The husband has decided to place mirrors in the four-tiered pagoda so that every corner may be stunned with light. Except the husband notices that his wife would rather stand at the windows than the mirrors. That’s when the cranes begin to collect on the lawn, the eaves. As if they’re drawn to the house, magnetized by it. It’s impossible to scrape their droppings from the graveled paths. One morning, he wakes up to find his arms are stippled with tiny barbs that later become feathers, then eventually, wings.

Story #3: The wife has died. Her body has been carried off by birds. The husband, disheveled by grief, devotes his life to building a bird sanctuary that will later welcome poets. Those poets will write poems of the future that will mostly be about species of the past. Birds like fruit doves. Snowy owls.

Story #4: The wife refuses his ridiculous request, kicks the husband out of the pagoda, reengineers the entire structure to be biophilic. Pollinator plants for butterfly migrations, berry bushes for birds, compost for the earthworms. In the winter, even in subzero temperatures, she’ll trudge out of the house with two buckets to feed the red-crowned cranes.

Story #5: The plants have taken over the house, seeded the stone garden Jizos’ heads with moss and rivulets of roaches. Ectotherms and humans have vanished. Slushy clouds obscure the sun. Thistles sprout improbably from the ceiling, the middle of the staircase. The only birds left are holograms.

Story #6: Do you see? It could be any story now. In which story are the red-crowned cranes, the black-necked cranes, and Siberian cranes saved? In which story do they vanish? Stories, as philosopher-writers

Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew remind us, “do not just recount connectivities; they also weave new ones. They are about forging relationships, about learning to see and understand, and, as a result, about being drawn into new obligations and responsibilities.”

She folds the blueprint and stuffs it back in the little box, the pagoda now a watermarked blueprint in her own mind. Who are you that’s invented this house that now inhabits me? Where are you now?

She feels so moved by these diligent creations of an unknown young person that she can’t throw the sketches away. So she takes them from the notebook and hides them in her letter drawer.

Vulnerable and                                        II

Dream People IV

She lives within walking distance of her local zoo, and some mornings, visits the southern white rhino enclosure. The space is sprawling; most people don’t look past the rhino and its pool of mud. But in the corner is the feeding station for a pair of East African cranes. Every species in the enclosure—the southern white rhino, East African crane, and Speke’s gazelle—is endangered.

Sometimes, we forget that a species is actually composed of individuals. These two cranes—a female and male, though not a mated

pair—are named Tina Turner and Sly. Tina is in her forties and much older than Sly. Both like to boss around the Speke’s gazelles. Both have

crowns of golden feathers that the sign mentions are useful for hiding in tall grasses.

She likes to watch them walk. Their careful precision. The way they

can bend a leg backward and balance on the other without falling. The deliberate splay of each foot when it meets the ground.

The Crane Wife IV

She doesn’t mean to diminish the story in any way. She still finds it provocatively strange and alluring in its melancholy pronouncements. And she would argue—along with scholars and other lovers of the tale—that the primary emphasis is cautionary, a story meant to expose the pitfalls of human greed.

Yes, that much is clear. But she’s interested in the nuances, the substories, the narratives so seamless they seem transparent. Fragments that have lodged in her and other bodies without their noticing.

For example, in the book she owns, it’s fascinating that what makes the crane wife finally fly away is not that the husband asked her to do the weaving but because, as the crane wife says to him, “You looked upon me in my suffering.” In other versions of the story, the crane wife leaves not because he sees her suffering, but because he finds out she’s a bird.

Meaning: in this version, she would have stayed, even on the verge of dying, had he not looked in on her weaving the cloth? She would have stayed if she had just been able to suffer silently?

Which may not be the worst thing she’s heard. But also may be the worst thing she’s heard. The thought of any living being suffering silently is ultimately problematic too.

Inbreeding Depression

In her conservation genetics class, they studied the genetics of small populations. How deleterious recessive alleles—genes that cause deformity and reduced survival, among other difficulties—become more prevalent when populations are small. Not only can this increase extinction risk, it also means that individuals in an isolated population can become more sickly and vulnerable.

It’s a devastating thought: not just the extinction of a species, but the idea that even before the last individual is lost, the final remaining individuals of that species can be diminished, made sickly, abnormal.

Dream People V

Her Dream People are quiet. That’s what used to make them so terrible. They could find her anywhere. She will not lie: she used to hate how they made her feel. Impotent, helpless. But now she’s no longer so afraid of them. To lose her Dream People would mean losing the resonance of memory, would be its own kind of erasure. Now, she tries to treat them with tenderness. Bringing them to the light as if they are books made of elemental things: air, and water. Tries to notice their subtle textures and strange fragilities, the different ways she is asked to leaf through their pain. Maybe there are some texts we’re meant to read over and over. Maybe there are some ghosts that change us only by continuing to return.

Language and Erasure II

When writers talk about erasures, they use words like “deconstruction” and “symbolic effect.” When biologists talk about erasure, they use words like “extinction risk” and “inbreeding depression.” But when she thinks of erasure, she thinks in smaller, more subtle units. Those fragile interactions and shifts in the relationship between human and more-than-human species that will no longer exist. No small pause to notice a butterfly passing. Languages being wiped from the sky. Here’s the problem with extinction: it can happen so quietly that one doesn’t notice. Species suffer silently then disappear.

                            and                             III

Language and Erasure III

She likes that word “except.” It makes her think of what poet Srikanth Reddy says about poetic erasures. That “there are countless texts hidden within any text,” that “when you erase a text, you’re ‘unearthing’ possibilities of phrasing, voicing, and thinking that are already embedded but somehow buried or hidden within the language.”

So, one can think about the silence of a space in which cranes disappear, their suffering invisible. And one can think about a space in which the text can be shifted. A space in which whooping cranes have been brought back from the edge of extinction, rural farmers have fed red-crowned cranes during harsh Hokkaido winters, and the flyways of Siberian cranes are protected.

It makes her remember a story she’d been told in Uganda: one hot summer day, a chief had gotten lost while hunting. Dying of thirst, he asked several animals—an elephant, a zebra, and a gazelle for water. Because he’d hunted them, they refused to help. Then, a flock of cranes flew by. When he asked, they’d brought him water and led him home.

To reward the cranes, he gifted each of them a crown made of gold. But they came to see him without their golden crowns the following day, complaining that the other animals had jealously stolen and destroyed them. So the chief called his court magician. Where the magician touched each crane on the head, a crown of golden feathers grew.

                                                      Cranes IV

Ponds

She and her family drive to a different location. Out to effluent ponds next to a golf course, which is really not a golf course unless you can imagine a driving range chiseled out of a mealy swath of sand.

And there they find them.

Hundreds of sandhill cranes clumped in groups just inside the pond. Their gray plumage reflected in the pond’s dark mirror, their necks and wings stretching and collapsing like curls of smoke.