Wren

it has turned me to air, it can fly right through me

it is only fitting that today I saw three Bewick wrens, low in the bare branched bushes along a wall.

Three!  It is as though I were suddenly wealthy, such featherings, such tails and eye stripes.

as if I were invisible

all twittering

the final trespass

Last winter, in Seattle’s biggest snow in a decade, the wren in our garden greeted me from the brush pile

In the snow, as beautiful and bright as ever

And here, they say, is why the wren is the King of the Birds, and why he is hunted midwinter.  This wintertime vitality, the slipping low appearing and disappearing, the voice, like a monarch’s.

Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered.

Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence’s Hunting the Wren is a very  nice place to go if you want to learn how the sweet winter wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, transformed into the symbol of the king of the birds, the winter sacrifice, compounded with Christ.  The resurrection in a cauldron, the cages and the wrenboys. And all the mumming

Money I want, money I crave.

If you don’t give me money,

I’ll sweep yous all to your grave,

And bury the wren at your door.

The idea of the wren hunts has bothered me ever since I learned of them.  It is not the same as a bothering of other sorts of hunts; or of the consuming of small song birds in small towns in Europe (with napkins over the head, as Willie likes to remind me).  That’s something else entirely.

It is the archaic and strangeness of the custom tied in, wrapped around, confounded with what our relationship (Homo sapiens sapiens I mean) is to the wren (in this case Troglodytes troglodytes)–currently and thousands of years ago.  And it is the wren herself, to me the little Bewick’s Troglodytes bewickii–does she see me and can I possibly see her?

Again and again I stumble into the abyss, one abyss, between me and her (and all those other abysses, between her and the winter wren, between the winter wren and the house sparrow haunt this one deep chasm).  I want to be able to encompass her into myself and to offer her to you but she is utterly apart and separate and of course, I have said this before, you grow wearing of my ravenous longing.

The poor wren

The most diminutive of birds, will fight,

Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

All is the fear and nothing is the love;

Enter the cauldron, your bones will rise again: the bird has flown out of reach and I am, to be quite honest, relieved.  She is safe and she is apart from me and I shall be nothing to her today.

They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly

The other problem with the wren hunt, apart from the central and biggest problem, that of the animal other and my desire, is the sheer complexity of its accumulated rituals and debris: all the skeins that criss-cross with the wren at the center.  I am pulled to the hunt by my attraction to the creature; I am also pulled by this sense of the depth (albeit short in biological terms) of time it represents.  It holds more meaning to and is more revealing of this winter-time darkness than the Christmas rituals bought and sold at market.

Put in your hand, pull out your purse

and give us something for the poor Wran!!

In all its multitudes, in the multitudes of species (more than 80), in the multitudes of individuals–these sweet and individual birds

little wren, that many a time hath sought

Shelter from showers, in huts, where I did dwell

the multitudes of humans making some sort of contact, albeit one of opening the door to death (and isn’t that generally the case when we try to go there, we are murderous) with the other and with other spaces of existence.

I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren

The multitudes of travels between here and whatever the beyond is: the wren is as much in thrall as we are to the space between life and death.  But we will make her a symbol and she will be the creature to travel back and forth and tell our futures and bring us news of those we’ve lost for we are impotent without her.

In the forest on the branches and the clotheslines
a fierce little wren singing loud, and high
while his eyes, insisting on their own life,
gave legs to the lie
that there was world, and time
to grow old in its light

———–

As ever, I am a thief

quotes are from Denise Levertov, Larry Levis (thank you Debra DiBlasi for sharing this poem), Irish Wrenboys, William Shakespeare, Waterford Wrenboys, John Clare, Emily Dickinson and Shearwater

Owling, Ule

My hair will not turn white

for I crawled out of the womb of machines,

someone had strangled

her snow-white sister

I wanted to share this with you:

Yesterday I went for a run (as I am wont to do)–I took the path through a local Park.  I can run the path and feel like I am in the woods for a moment before I leave the park and run up to the kid’s school (and then make them walk home–which at times is fabulous and at times is unpleasant).

On the trail I saw

first:  a Bewick’s wren

second:  a barred owl

third:  bare branches against the sky with small gold leaves fluttering on a smaller tree below

This was, for some reason, a sublime combination.

the bells of the one

and only world.

Perhaps it was the cold.  It was 0 degrees Celcius and there was indeed ice.

Perhaps it was the absence of the police– the death of Maurice Clemmons.

Perhaps it was just being outside.

just whose world is forbidden to me.

Or maybe it was the damn owl, sitting low to the ground, on a fallen stump near the creek, where unfrozen water beside the dark bare trees.  I am always so very pleased by the sight of a wren, of any species, and the wren prepared me, though he/she hid so quickly, I knew she/he was there.  The owl swiveled her/his head and I imagined the silence of his/her flight.

I am not a good ornithologist and so I had to look up the owl species when I got home.  My ignorance was indeed bliss.   The pretty creature was a barred owl.

If I didn’t open my eyelids

Of course, barred owls are kicking spotted owls out of their habitat.  Or rather, they are expanding their range into the contracting range of the spotted owl–and in these ranges they are aggressively taking over habitat used by the spotted owl.

(I wouldn’t have seen the rope).

Life is linked to violence, so says Matthew Calarco.  But that doesn’t help me now that I am stuck with the sense that that gorgeous barred owl is yet another verminous creature pushing another species extinct.  (and what does extinct mean?  it means never again).

The barred owl is of course, only expanding its range because it can survive in areas opened up by humans–city parks, secondary growth.  Spotted owls do not do well in these environments–nor do they do well when sharing ranges with the barred owl who are more aggressive and will kick members of the endangered species out of suitable breeding grounds–at least according to a collection of anecdotal observations.   They are, to quote The Smithsonian Magazine, “bigger and meaner.”  And when the barred owl moves in, the spotted owl moves out.  Of course, one favored approach to managing the problem is shooting the barred owls.

If I had the word

Isn’t that always the way we deal with our problems–just shoot it. I’ve written about this before in light of that far more objectionable (by many people’s standards–though not necessarily mine) beastie–the feral cat. I find the issue of the human-caused collision of species other than humans to be extraordinarily troubling.  It is hard to sort through and I believe that for the most part our ethical responsibility to all individuals involved is elided.  At the same time, for the spotted owl, it is triage time–as they are essentially currently cycling towards extinction.

(I wouldn’t misplace it)

if I had no thistles in my heart

If you have a better way of thinking about this– a way that will reduce the fraught sense I feel about nearly everything (this harms that–that harms this–careful where you step) let me know, it’s gotten harder to talk myself out of these ethical conundrums, despite the fact that I ultimately have no practical involvement with most of them anyway.

(I would put out the sun)

I will neither be shooting nor facilitating the movement of the owl I saw yesterday–but then I wish him or her godspeed; so perhaps I am more committed than I’ll admit to you or to me.

Often I’ve wished

for the quiet of angels

and hunting grounds filled

with the powerless cries

of my friends.

*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*

quotes are from Ingeborg Bachmann, Calarco’s comment is in The Death of the Animal

Chicken

 

This is the sweet chicken we will adopt on Tuesday.  Note the blue tape–her wing was splinted in an attempt to rescue it after she was attacked by a raccoon.  Unfortunately, the infection spread to her bone and she is now a one-winged bird.

That is ok with me.  She is sweet, and chickens are walkers and runners for the most part–though they will fly to roost.

They are like quail–with their small heads and large beautiful feathery bodies.

This chicken may or may not lay eggs. She was “donated” to our Bird and Exotic Veterinary clinic when the folks who owned her did not want to pay for treatment.

That is OK–I understand and I am lucky because we now get her.

Here is the difficulty.  My husband is not particularly fond of birds in general and if we have chickens, he would like have fresh eggs.  To be honest, I am tired of buying eggs from provinces unknown–free-range never means what you think it does, nor does humane.

I do not want to order birds through hatcheries, I do not want girls that exist as a result of the inhumane death of roosters (a charge leveled at hatcheries such as McMurray’s) or chicks that have to be sent through the mail.  I will not “just not think about what happens to the roosters”–something posted time and again on “backyard” or “urban” chicken discussion boards.  But in Seattle, we are not allowed roosters, and currently, the local animal shelters do not have birds for adoption (the flush is usually right after Easter when folks discard their cute little chicks by the bucketfull) and I need a friend very soon for this girl.

I have mentioned to people that I would like another bird or two. Unfortunately, I also said I wanted a rescue bird, which I now know was a mistake.  I received an email last night from a local chicken person suggesting perhaps I am “into rescue” and that I might want to rescue two chickens that are currently nonproducing and due to be “sent to the slaughterhouse” in a few weeks.

Of course, I should not “feel obliged.”

Please explain to me what being “into rescue” means?  Sounds a little like being “into bondage” and would I like some handcuffs (they aren’t working but look good). Alternatively, it is yet another demeaning way of talking to a person committed to the emotional and financial burden of adopting animal others in need and of being aware of all of the details of how, where and why we have particular types of  animal others in our lives.

Here is what makes me feel terrible– I want one chicken at least that lays eggs.  And because of that I feel I am trying to square the circle ethically.  I should just suck it up and take the two hens.

But this is what I also feel:  if you are in possession of your own backyard flock you owe the birds that produce your eggs the respect to see them through to the end–whether it be by your own hand or not.  Otherwise, all you are doing is smoke and mirrors without real commitment.  (I will add that serious financial constraints change the dynamic in my eyes but that then you must seek a rescue organization rather than send your birds to a dubious slaughterhouse to be killed)

So what should I do.  We have room for 3 birds right now, and I can buy a laying chicken from a local who doesn’t cull anyone.  But what about those two girls–I hate the thought of the ride to the slaughterhouse and what the slaughterhouse itself is like.

 

I am sure you are not particularly horrified by this.  Our take on chickens is that we don’t treat them or see them the way we do “our pets.” Our dogs and cats in particular.  “It’s a chicken” people always exclaim when I talk about the splint on our California chicken’s leg after we saved her from a predator (she and her friends moved to live with my parents when we came up to Seattle and they wouldn’t give them back after we bought a house).  Like that should explain why taking her to a vet is silly.

The logical extension of the argument that we should treat chickens differently than dogs because they are less intelligent is that we should treat people with cognitive disabilities differently, assume they suffer less, provide less care for them, from people without apparent cognitively difficulties.

Of course, there is always the argument that having our backyard flocks is far more humane than buying our eggs and meat from factory farms–and of course I have to agree with this.  But, at the same time, I do not think the horror of factory farming releases us from our own ethical considerations–just as the fact of all the raped and killed as a result of the horribly brutal war in the Congo doesn’t mean hitting people that annoy us (including family members such as children) with a stick is OK because we are not gang raping them in front of a four year old child.

But now I’ve pissed you off, haven’t I, because I’m talking about “people” and “animals” in the same breath so I am a crazy misanthropist.  (This despite the fact that–horror of horrors people ARE animals). (and by the way, before you go off on me, how many of you have donated time, food or money to your local food bank, or fostered a child through CARE or given your time to help local children, or talked to the guy panhandling on the corner rather than turning away because you don’t want to get involved).

So now you’re mad, and so am I– I’m still angry about that innocuous email, about the two sweet hens headed to the slaughterhouse.

 

Birds near me

She creates and federates

Without a syllable

(Emily Dickinson)

All the little psittacines in my office sleep.  Like little balls, the cockatiels fluff their feathers  and tuck their heads while Wiggie, the blue-crowned conure, alternately watches me write and closes his eyes.  They are rimmed in white skin–the eye ring–with bright orange irises and, like all parrots, remarkably expressive pupils.  What he does with his eyes stands out as when he pinpoints his pupils in apparent excitement or pleasure over a particularly good piece of food, or as now, when he closes them and all I can see is white.

I have been working at home at my little desk in the room with the birds.

Do you believe they feel grief?

And is this grief?–is this missing a creature that you trusted to preen your head–to sit close?

And when Wiggie releases his head and simulates regurgitation is it for me?  Or is it for Redbird whose ashes we just received.

I’m not burying him in the rain.  And bulbs are peaking up in the little pet’s graveyard–just in time for the first frosts.

There is, by the way, a little wren, outside the window, on the cypress.  No she/he’s gone.  Bye!

Bird in bird out bird in bird out–without

I am writing a paper about embodying an animal other in a fictional other.  It makes me cranky because it is such an elusive thing.  I am afraid that I am asking too much because I can’t find it in any living texts.  I am not talking about building a story through empathy–like Watership Down, perhaps–nor am I talking about the human watching his/her animal other of  choice–nor the totemic human in animal others skin.  I am talking about producing a piece of work that sees through the eyes of the tetrachromatic, UV viewing, oil droplet exploiting, strange little parrot that sits cleaning his foot on the perch just over there.

Without parrot, without eyes, without oil, without human, without skin

Wouldn’t it take a sort of impossible language?  An impossible leap of the imagination?  Or could it be done?

without heart, without Homo, without language, without word, without constraint, without capture, without tree

I believe its shape would be one of mysterious, difficult proportions.  It would be a written work that would take some patience and some overcoming of fear because it would not be written the way anything else has ever been written.

without nest hole, without father, without mother, without hair

would you please write this narrative and prove that it can be done? (Preferably in time to include it in my paper…)

without feather, without skull, without little beating heart

within

Ashes

Ashes denote the Fire that was–

Redbird’s ashes wait.  I will pick them up when I take Wiggie in for the vet to recheck.  We will open the box and touch the ashes–, put them in the ground of the little cemetery we created for the critters when they die.  The children have placed logs and stones and notes and other objects to protect and feed what they feel are the spirits of the dead pets.

They like to sit in that space and play games with the dead.

Revere the Grayest Pile

Anyway.  I will not bore you with a discussion of mourning.

For the Departed Creature’ sake

that hovered there awhile–

*&*&*&*&*&

What I will bore you with is this: Parrots Should Not Be Pets.  I have, of course, stated this in an earlier post.  But I feel compelled to write about it again, because of the youtube videos and the bird store I’ve exposed myself to in the last week.

My antagonism towards the idea of parrots as pets arises first, of course, out of the abuses that these animals suffer through commodification, including illegal trapping and transport, poor breeding practices and unfortunate pet store situations. The long life-spans of these animals (30-100 years) and the difficult aspects of their care means that many many people who purchase them mistreat, neglect, and abandon them (which is why we now have 3 previously discarded cockatiels).

These problems with the parrot pet trade are all a given.

What has been bothering me lately, probably because I am only now able to reflect upon my inability to really connect with Redbird (or at least make a narrative for myself that would suggest we connected, in the way I do for other creatures living with us), are the folks with good intentions–the people that love their parrots enough to put their videos on youtube.

With the nonhuman animals with which we live, we create empathetic stories about their internal lives.  We base these narratives on the creature’s visible/auditory behavior and our own experiences of the world.  These mesh and become what we see/hear/feel when we experience these creatures.

This narrative is inevitably flawed, however, because it emerges out of our consciousness.   It makes assumptions about the way the other/the animal lives in the world (exists, perceives, etc.)  It is not, in truth, a blueprint for the animal’s actual experience.

What you will notice in the youtube videos is the typical infantilizing of the pet birds.   The infantilization of pets is not a new observation on my part–folks have discussed this for centuries.  It is a logical extension of the human-dependent nonhuman animal relationship.   However, to me there is something profoundly different about this behavior when it is directed towards domesticated animals (who are already, in some ways, infantilized in form and behavior–selected for those behaviors that will make them more amenable to us) and when directed towards animals such as parrots.  Parrots are by no means true domesticated animals  They are not, for example, like animals who actively choose to live with us (the many stray cats that have shown up at our various residences across the country, for example)

The parrots:  we can not fulfill them.

So these videos disturb me–it is clever for a parrot to mimic–a clever parlor trick.  But where did this mimicry come from and what does it mean?  Few seem to ever consider this.    This behavior comes from the parrot’s own ability to process, interpret and generate auditory signals as well as the incredible importance of these signals in the complex social life of these creatures.  The parlor trick is nothing–try the parrot in the wild navigating the rainforest across various social ranges with through regions of varying vocal dialects.

And envision the amount of physical space a parrot traverses–from the smallest budgerigars flying across Australia to the largest Macaw traveling across South American.  Their flight is something clipped, curtailed, destroyed, removed when they become our pets.  A dental technician told me once about her pet bird, whom she loves truly and honestly.  The bird was bred in captivity and has never flown. “He does not know that he could fly so he does not miss it,” she said to me.   Even if she hadn’t been poking my mouth with sharp objects, I wouldn’t have told her how said that is.

Ironically (or not so…), I stopped at her bird store–(looking for gifts for my infantilized birds)–with the kids.  We encountered rows of parrots, stacked upon each other in small cages.  This is a “good” bird store–they do not buy illegally trapped birds, they babysit birds when people go on trips…blah blah. The large birds are housed alone–a macaw caught my eye and reached his bill through the cage–he wanted to touch me with it gently.

He will live 80 to 100 years if he is not overly neglected.  He will be passed from person to person and cage to cage.  Someone will make him talk.  Someone will love him.  Someone will die or move.

There was a rainforest.

——

Quotes are from Emily Dickinson (as usual).

My Wild Parrots–An Obituary

I borrowed a tear from the water
And wept it again and again

Redbird or Reddie, our cherry crowned conure, our Aratinga erythrogenys died last week.

And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped

He was not a young bird.

I cannot see that you are not me

He died of kidney or heart disease. I was in bed, sick, when he died. I heard him yell for supper, as he did every evening, and fell back asleep.

Willie found him dead some time later. And Wiggie, his housemate–I would say his partner–there on the perch they shared on the top of their cage must have known. When we took Reddie away, he did not yell.

I have written about these birds before, here. Go there if you want to know more about them. This is just a little remembrance.

Redbird lived with us since I was eighteen (for more than 21 years). In no such intimate relationship with any other creature have I felt so distant and helpless. Redbird did not like me. He did not like my husband nor did he like my parents. He did not like people. He liked/loved Wiggie. We introduced him to Wiggie as I was leaving for college and could not take Wiggie into the dorms. He and Wiggie bonded, but Wiggie always retained a fondness for me and other humans.

Redbird did not like this and because their relationship was more important than our relationship to either of them, I never did what I might have to tame Redbird–separate them. Keep them isolated from each other and force Redbird to accept me or my husband or some human, as a surrogate mate.

If you want your bird to bond with you you should not allow him/her to have a close avian friend.

So, Redbird lived and died disliking and, to some extent fearing, everyone except Wiggie. This sense of him as a cipher haunts me as does my inability to grieve over him in the way I would with another creature to whom I had bonded. My grief is about the sense I have that his life was so diminished by his being turned from a wild creature into a pet–and my complicity in this, ignorant as I was in 1988, diminishment.

This is how I soothe myself. He may have been a cipher to me but he was not alone. He and Wiggie loved each other and they had each other, from outdoor aviaries in warm California to a heated aviary in Washington, to, when they became too old to be outside, a cage inside our house.

It was on the perch on top of this cage that he and Wiggie played out their last days together, like two old men rocking on a porch watching the world go by and periodically making comments.

Is this sentimentality on my part? Anthropomorphism? Of course, but I have nothing else except this with which to comfort myself. It is pathetic, I suppose.

the fool steps out of his image

But I have to tell myself something because I have to create something for Wiggie now. What he has is an absence–though his is less horrible than Reddie’s would have been, had Wiggie gone first. Wiggie can spend time with us and seem to enjoy it and the only way it works is if I create stories and assumptions–trying to read him but filling the spaces I cannot interpret with something of Homo rather than Aratinga.

lights a candle in bright sunlight.

What Reddie brought–what I stole–was this deep sense of other that I could not penetrate. The other of a wildness robbed–deep time and space in one little bird. Wiggie has this too. So do they all

desire to see the invisible

Reddie
RedBird
before 1988 to 2009
RIP

*********

quotes (except for “if you want your bird) are from Inger Christensen

Currently posting The Quail Diaries Cuarto

Head over to The Quail Diaries for the next few days as I will be posting entries while I am trapping and observing the sweetly beautiful Callipepla californica.

Revision to my earlier naive secessionist stance

I no longer want to secede from the union–I am no longer a social anarchist. I admit, that sentiment, voiced earlier on this blog, was very naive. It also dismissed the hard won maintenance of a union of states–what was the civil war.

I apologize–

I may be frustrated by the leviathan that this country is–the squandering of beauty, the unwillingness to educate or be educated…. Rather than stop there, my misanthropic streak should have taken one step further and recognized that the problems of the whole would be reproduced in the pieces, only with borders. It is the horror of those additional borders and of the potential for attempts at takeovers, at land grabs–wars between states because they are no longer one country but several little countries.

It would probably be horrific.