Coming Home to Roost: Some Birds I’ve Known

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Nature is where yokels lived, idiotikos, as ancient Greeks used to call the unfortunates who lived outside the polis.”—Charles Simic

“A leaven of wilderness is necessary for the health of the human spirit.”—Eliot Porter

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—5/23/11—First, a brief appreciation: Swifts fall from their nests and fly for up to three years—eating, drinking, sleeping, and mating before coming to rest.

Commercial jets sometimes strike vultures at an altitude of seven miles.

In 1952, a Manx shearwater was taken from its burrow in Wales, blindfolded, banded, flown to Boston, 3,200 miles away, at a right angle to its normal north-south migratory route, released, and discovered back in its hole twelve days later.

A human who “ate like a bird” would have to consume over a hundred pounds of food every day.

Swallows migrating across the Mediterranean often take a ferry, and storks utilized the Bremer Pass Tunnel crossing the Alps until barriers were installed.

South African weavers illuminate their communal nests with fireflies embedded in the mud.

And the testimony of parrots has been admitted in court.

To paraphrase Thoreau, God did not send us into the world without some spending money, and birds, some lighter than a dime, comprise one of the larger gold coins in our change purse.

When my mother wanted me to pick up my clothes, she would tell me, “It’s a bad bird, Skippa, that dirties its nest.” That frowning analogy is the earliest connection I can recall to those compulsive creatures I was urged to imitate. Frankly, as a youth, I was more interested in bird flight than their housekeeping habits. At age five, I soared off a “runway” in the back yard and broke my wrist when I hit the “tarmac.” The hard part, I learned, is the math: takeoffs and landings are always divisible by two.

The next folder in my mental bird file is the robin I winged with my slingshot. Without thinking, I loaded a stone, pulled back the rubber bands, and let it fly. To my horror, the robin I’d targeted was now dragging a bloody wing through the leaves. It hobbled off before I could catch it in the underbrush where, Mother told me, it was probably eaten by one of the neighborhood cats. For weeks, I made an extra effort to get up in time for Sunday school.

The effect on my Presbyterian conscience was not short-lived. When my father flew off to Korea for a year, my Uncle Bob, himself a pilot appreciative of a good wing man, assumed the role of surrogate. When he discovered I’d never been hunting, he decided that was a hole in my education he should cork. So off we went on several duck and dove hunts in west-central Georgia. I fired away merrily at every bogey that invaded my airspace, but few were surprised that I never bagged a bird. Carnivore that I was, my heart just wasn’t in it.

A decade or more passed before I developed a mature appreciation of birds. Either I was too busy getting educated, or the pressures of work and a new family left no room for wildlife. About a year after we moved to Clemson, however, the retired-dean’s wife discovered my latent interest and gave me a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s legendary bird guide. Roxie, as everyone called my benefactor, had a life list compiled over 40 years of birding, so she was the perfect companion to help me distinguish the Tennessee warbler from the Nashville.

Her husband Howard, my former boss, was not the birder his wife was, for he loved telling stories of hunting passenger pigeons in upstate New York. Roxie was horrified, of course, because today the species is extinct. The passenger has gone to join the dodo and the Carolina parakeet in that distant Eden where no hunter may trespass.

As my life list approached 50, I realized that I’d never seen a ruby-throated hummingbird, or hummer, as our friends Marge and John Idol called them. These suburban dwellers had two virtual pets who returned every spring to their front yard after wintering in the Yucatan. The Idols had named their hummers Henrietta and Humphrey, and what a tempestuous pair they were as they flashed about the red plastic feeder like a scene from Carmen. After watching a performance, my wife went straight to Wal-Mart and bought a hummingbird feeder. Before long, we had our own Henrietta and Humphrey jousting outside the kitchen window. They were soon joined by Henry and Hannah.

After observing the hummers and seeing a colleague’s tumbler pigeons in action, I began to get the bird bug. But before I could act, our son surprised us by giving my wife a Quaker parrot. We remembered T.S. Eliot’s implicit warning not to give a cat a pedestrian name, so we waited a few days until Hurricane Felix came churning up the South Carolina coast. By that time, our olive-drab parrot had revealed his true colors by tearing the covers off some of my books and pecking a hole in an interior door, so we named him Felix because, while he brought a measure of happiness, he would bloody your ear if you were foolish enough to play pirate with him. In the two years we had Felix, we tried repeatedly to teach him to speak, but true to his Quaker heritage, he only spoke when the spirit moved him.

Finally we felt we had to give Felix back to our son, who had a large screened porch where the bird could fly and socialize with two other Quakers—Pete and Deano. Personally, I had no regrets giving him back because a caged bird is so contrary to nature. It was more than enough to feed the wild birds in our back yard and make birding a part of every trip we took to the coast or the mountains.

Though usually indifferent to man, birds have a way of enriching human experience if one takes the time to notice them. Visiting my father-in-law’s grave in Germany, my wife and I heard a cuckoo calling in the nearby beech wood. Immediately it acquired the name “Otto,” and every mention of a cuckoo since has evoked memories of Otto, both bird and man.

Something similar happened at my Uncle Joe’s funeral, set among some cedars and pines in South Georgia. As the minister was finishing the service and the pallbearers were rising to lift the casket, a bird, perhaps a swallow, did a perfect imitation of a Stuka dive bomber over the mourners. It happened so fast, no one had a good look at it, but everyone said the same thing, “There goes Joe!”

I think my favorite bird memory, one I awarded three stars on my life list, was my first and only sighting of a pileated woodpecker over the Chattooga River. My son and I had just canoed through Big Shoals and were enjoying the green water backed up by the next set of rapids. As I leaned back in the stern, I witnessed “his most serene Birdship,” gliding overhead. The “Lord God bird” in his scarlet skullcap flew downstream a hundred yards, oblivious to our cries, and then banked off toward the Georgia side of the old-growth forest. We saw it take perhaps 20 strokes with its magnificent broad wings, just enough to do the job. It had been a hot day and, Lord knows, this bird, master of all it surveyed, was in no hurry.

We capsized coming out of the Narrows and ran Bull Sluice twice, but that pterodactyl from the Triassic had set the day in amber.