Rara Avis

A male cardinal came to the yard yesterday, and I gasped. That plumage! That crest! That bossy look! Yet I didn’t always find cardinals gasp-worthy. At our feeder in Maryland, as many as a dozen would show up together. Here in Vermont, aside from the occasional bluebird, our birds excel more by their song than by their plumage. Thrushes and warblers dress in drab brown and beige, so as not to distract from their music. 

But now that our winters are warmer, a cardinal will sometimes decide to stick around, and the locals take photos of the flatlander bird, and post them on Facebook. If things keep going as they are, we’ll soon wake up in the mornings to the cacophony of visiting macaws. And no doubt, the first glimpse of that outrageous blue-and-gold, or red-blue-and-yellow plumage will stop us in our tracks, and cause us to reach frantically for our phones. But if the macaws choose to stay, soon their level on the exoticism scale will plunge to that of the blue jay (which you must admit is a pretty sensational-looking bird, when you see it for the first time).

I was squirrel-deprived as a child, and couldn’t get over, when I first met a gray squirrel, its twitching treble-clef tail, the bold look in its eyes, and the almost human way it used its hands. Now of course I hardly give squirrels a glance--unless there is a black one, in which case my sense of wonder returns unabated. 

But back to birds. Woodpeckers—downy, hairy, and red-bellied—love my feeders, but other than buying them suet cakes by the case, I barely notice them. Yet despite my tendency to wilt in the heat, I would trudge through the wilds of Arkansas if I had a real hope of seeing that holy grail of birders, the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Instead, why can’t I marvel each morning when the downies and the hairies and especially the red-bellieds (whose belly is barely pink, but whose head is a spectacular orangey-red) come to demolish the suet, flinging off bits of it that adhere greasily to my window? Why can’t I rejoice in their dailiness, their reliability, their familiarity? Like the rest of my species I harbor an unfortunate  prejudice in favor of the rare and extraordinary—the black swan, the white stag, and Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes. 

This preference for the exceptional is so ingrained in us that it must have survival value. The sight of a ruby-red strawberry in a field of boring green, and the subsequent burst of sweetness in the mouth of some Australopithecus grandmother must have cemented in her this taste for the unusual, which she then passed on to her descendants. 

So maybe there is survival value in preferring what is rare—physical survival at least. But what about the survival of sanity? We have evolved to be like magpies, disdaining the pebble in favor of the diamond. We have lost the ability to honor the everyday, and require ever sharper stimuli in order to attend—more color, more sound, more apps. Wouldn’t we be more at peace if, in this season of enforced seclusion, we put aside our binoculars and collector’s nets, and learned to truly see the acorn, the sparrow, and the moth? 

Despoiling the Amazon

When my parents and I lived in Quito, Ecuador in the 1950s, the Amazon jungle wasn't what it is now: fragile, endangered, dying the death of a thousand cuts. Instead, it was a dangerous, fierce, human-hating place that you had to vanquish, or die.

The Ecuadorian government would sell you hundreds of acres of forest for a few sucres. But only fools took up the offer. One of them, the husband of my math tutor, had accepted the government's deal and was now rotting alive (mosquitoes, amoebas, leeches, niguas that would crawl under your toenails and there expand until the nails fell off), getting drunk and going mad in his hacienda in the sweltering forest east of the Andes. Every night, while he slept exhausted after a day of chopping  paths with his machete, the jungle would stretch green tendrils over the newly-cleared ground, and within a couple of days, the path had vanished.

The only people who could survive in the forest, we were told, were the native tribes--some of which had never been seen by white people--who were forever fighting each other and shrinking the heads of their decapitated enemies.

Nevertheless, my parents and I did occasionally dip our toes in the ocean of green that extended from the eastern slopes of the Andes all the way to the Pacific. And whenever we parked our 1944 Dodge on a village square, the inhabitants would approach, offering samples of the local fauna for us to buy.

For the first trip, however, my parents decided to trust the public transportation system rather than the old Dodge. We rode in a colectivo, a kind of minibus crammed with people and their parcels and  chickens. As soon as we arrived at our destination, a scarlet macaw was thrust into my mother's hands by its eager owner. The bird was the size of a half-grown hen, all head and massive beak and trailing tail feathers. His plumage exuded a curious, acidic smell. He perched on a broom handle, and when jostled uttered blood-curdling shrieks. To us Europeans, accustomed to starlings, sparrows, and the occasional hoopoe, this was the most extraordinary bird we had ever seen.

As for the macaw, the moment he saw my mother he fell passionately in love. All the way back to Quito, as the colectivo bounced on the cobbled Inca roads, whenever we tried to relieve my mother of the bird and the broomstick he would begin his ear-splitting protests, not stopping until he was restored to her.

In Quito, he lived on a perch in the backyard. Whenever my mother came out the kitchen door he would flutter down from his perch, waddle over to her, and rub his head against her leg, his eyes half-closed in ecstasy. He never had much use for the rest of us. He lived for a good while, and then we found him one morning, dead of a chill, or of longing for his native jungle, or of unrequited passion for my mother.

On another trip to the Amazon we ended up with a pair of toucans in a cage made of twigs. They were very young and obviously sick, and they barely made it back to Quito before expiring. They were succeeded by a sloth, who was so disconcertingly slow-moving that one day we concluded he was dead. My father drove him to a taxidermist to be stuffed but, just in time, the sloth blinked and languidly extended one long arm, and was reprieved.

At about this time the second violinist of my father's quartet was given a meltingly adorable ocelot kitten, all broad paws and wide eyes. Since the three single members of the quartet shared a house with my parents and me, I was sometimes allowed to pet Pepita, who all too soon morphed into an intractable dragon, spitting and clawing at whomever approached her. At one point she contracted an infection, and it took the entire quartet to hold her down (taking care not to injure their musician's hands) and administer the sulfa drugs that the vet had prescribed.

The final, most extraordinary acquisition was a marmoset. We had just arrived in the then small village of Puyo and were standing in the perennial tropical drizzle when a man approached and said, pointing to a woman behind him, "I have an animal for you." My parents, in the course of our travels through those impoverished regions, had occasionally been offered children, and they thought for an alarming moment that he was referring to the woman. But when she lifted her long, black hair we saw, perched on her shoulder, a tiny monkey the size of my hand.

I was so instantly besotted that I couldn't utter a sound. My father looked at me, handed the man some coins and, wonder of wonders, the little monkey was mine.

In the jungle between Puyo and Baños, February, 1956 

Back in Quito, the marmoset turned our house into her personal amusement park, swinging from coat to coat in the hall closet, detaching with great effort the inner soles from our shoes, undoing my shoelaces as I sat doing my homework, and stealing pencils which she would heft over her shoulder and hide in a corner. At mealtimes, she would hold a single banana slice with both hands like a hamburger and munch away. When the sun went down she would snuggle under my sweater, uttering soft, bird-like twitters. At night she slept next to me on a doll bed, inside a sheepskin bag that my mother had made for her.

She lived with us for two years and then, one day while my mother and I were at home, she fell into the toilet and drowned before we could rescue her. Her death left me as bereft as if I had lost a sibling.

Often at night I think about that trail of little dead bodies that we left behind during our years in Ecuador. What were we thinking? The fact is, we weren't. Or not in the way that we now think about animals. We fed them and housed them and gave them rudimentary veterinary care. But we didn't think about their needs as truly sentient beings, capable, like us, of missing the companionship of their own species, of languishing for lack of freedom, of perishing of nostalgia for home.

Except for some breeds of marmoset, all our former pets are now on the endangered species list. By 2030, if the present rate of deforestation continues, more than a quarter of their jungle will be lost to logging, mining and oil drilling. If you think of the planet as a living, breathing organism, the desecration of the Amazon will be equivalent to cutting off half of one of its lungs.

The macaws, toucans, sloths, ocelots, and marmosets will die, not one by one like they did at our house, but by the millions. And when all the green has turned to brown, we will know that the human race has finally vanquished the Amazon.

Final Pets

Next to the chapel in the nursing home where my mother died earlier this month stood three large bird cages.  Their doors were open, and on a perch beside each sat a cockatiel.  The birds fixed us with their round eyes and chattered, furling and unfurling their crests.  Periodically, one of them burst into a wheezy, geriatric laugh.  A snow-white dove, looking like a soul of the departed, pecked at seed inside one of the cages.

I stood awkwardly before the cockatiels, wondering if I should somehow make conversation with them, when a magnificent cat, a Siamese/Persian blend with long white hair and blue-gray "points" ambled in, his tail held high.  Unfazed, the cockatiels kept up their chatter, punctuated by the wheezy laugh.  The dove didn't even look up from her seed.

Before disappearing in the direction of the chapel the cat allowed me briefly to scratch its head.  He was not, I was told, the only cat in the building.  There were also two dogs around somewhere, elderly small poodle mixes, whom I did not meet.  And next to the main entrance there was a large aviary where a flock of parakeets flitted among the branches while on the floor beneath them a covey of Chinese button quail scratched for seeds.

Have you ever seen button quail?  I am now obsessed with them.  They are tiny (four inches long), chicken-like birds with elegant feathers.  Watching them I decided that when I get too old to care for my hens I'll switch to button quail, which I will keep in the house.  True, their eggs are ten times smaller than a chicken's, but by then I'll be tiny too, and won't need a lot of food.

My mother spent her nursing home years in the critical-care area, where animals were not allowed.  But on Sundays she was hefted into a wheelchair and wheeled to the chapel for Mass.  I hope that as she went by she caught a glimpse of the cockatiels.  Perhaps their raucous shrieks reminded her of the big red macaw that we had during our years in Ecuador.  He was head over heels in love with her, would have nothing to do with anyone else, and whenever she appeared in the back yard would fly down from his perch, waddle over to her and, with his eyes half closed, rub his enormous beak against her leg.