The first spring after Owen and I moved into our new house, we realized we had made a terrible mistake. In order to preserve the view from our deck, we had installed glass panels. These gave us a beautiful vista over the woods and lake, but were a deadly trap for birds. One week in the very early spring, as the first migrants appeared, we found three dead birds on our deck.
This was very disturbing to us, because we live with birds, two cockatiels and two parakeets. I love my pet birds for being active, melodious, colorful and affectionate, at least they seem affectionate, but saying so involves attributing human characteristics to animals, and that just doesn’t fly among critical thinkers, so to speak.
Still, our flock does seem attached to us. They pay attention when we say their names. They squawk when they hear us walk through the house and peep with seeming concern when we leave the room. They groom me; the parakeets stand on my head and preen my hair, from roots to tip, and the cockatiels pick at my freckles. They prefer being with us to being alone. I am their favorite perch, but it was on Owen’s lap that Pearl nestled down and laid an egg. The tiels march up to our unoccupied fingers and drop their heads, imploring to be stroked. When I kiss them, they close their eyes and tilt their small faces toward us in what seems a lot like pleasure. Hennie even clucks with quiet delight when I rub his head. Because we give them comfort and pleasure, could they have some sort of affection for us?
Of course, you might argue that vocal communication, loyalty to a protector and mutual grooming are merely behaviors to ensure the well being of the flock, not evidence of devotion. However tenderly I feel for them, and however receptive they are, I can’t say that they operate on affection as well as instinct. I can’t prove that they have a heart in anything but the cardiovascular sense.
So, I love my birds without knowing if they reciprocate. Whether their behavior is motivated by instinct or affection, I take pleasure in their company, their beauty, their grace, and I transfer some of this affection to the wild species moving with speed and strength through the treetops.
To protect the outdoor birds from our trap, we put hawk cutouts on the glass, and the next week we were saddened to learn it hadn’t been sufficient. Despite our efforts, we found a beautiful jay on the deck. It was big and heavy and a luminous blue with sharp black and clean white markings. It had a broken neck. Disgusted at our glass rail and at every bird-killing building in America, I threw its body off the deck into the woods below.
Later that day, Owen called me to the window. “Come to the wake,” he said. A raucous chorus of blue jays was sending up a mass caw. A half dozen of them were gathered about twenty feet above where I had thrown the dead bird. One at a time they swooped down toward the body. Returning to their perches, they kept up the noise. One robin in the flock raised a much sweeter song. Was it my imagination that it said, “Cheer-up, cheer-up, cheer-up?”
What function can it serve for birds to gather around death? Was this a display that those tiny brains and rapid hearts had registered a loss? To me, it seemed that we all shared the same grief. But when I stepped out onto the deck, they all flew away. I am, after all, human.
We put planters against the glass rail, and now pine trees warn the wild birds that our deck isn’t a throughway. We have had fewer strikes. Indoors, human-avian relations are at a high point. I believe that our flock is more than a functional collective. It is a community of three species bound by affection and familiarity. The outdoor flock doesn’t include people, but even so, I wouldn’t say that its relations are impersonal.
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