Bex O’Brian

My father, binoculars raised, stance that of a pointer, would say, “Look girls, a blackcap chickadee!” My sisters and I would dutifully peer into the thicket, but the woods around our log cabin in the Quebec countryside were dense, and chickadees are seemly an invisible bird. Frustrated by our inability to spot the teeming nature all around us, he eventually gave in and built a birdhouse, which attracted the same three types of birds, the noisy, bossy blue jays, the aforementioned chickadees, and sparrows. We lost interest instantly. But my mother kept a wary watch on the daily fluttering. She hated birds. Much to my father’s annoyance. She never explained the reasons for such enmity towards them. (She also hated Maya Angelou which leads me to believe it was just her being willfully irrational).

Just as cats always find the laps of people who hate them, Mother attracted birds. They shat on her. They flew into the cabin, crashing wildly into the windows, never finding the open door. If a bird in the house means death, there shouldn’t be one surviving member of my family. Once, we were in the nearby village getting ice cream when she spotted a lake gull eating a discarded piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken sold in Quebec by Scott’s Villa de Poulet. “Bloody cannibals,” she muttered. Evenings, when the bats came swooping down from the eves as we ate dinner were the worst. “At least they know how to leave through an open door, Mummy,” we tried to soothe the trembling woman under the table.

Knowing this, I don’t know what possessed me to one day take my allowance and trot down to the pet shop to buy a budgie. I set him up in the living room where he happily hopped about his tiny cage, kicking birdseed all over the living room carpet.

I had planned a welcome ceremony, but Mother came home late, and I was in the kitchen eating beans when I heard, “Oh, Christ, what has she done?” The next thing I knew, her bedroom door slammed shut.

“Mum?”

“What in god’s name is that thing in the living room?” she asked from the other side of the door.

“A bird? My bird?”

Perhaps as a child of the Blitz, she had every reason to fear things that came from the sky.

In due course, the budgie met the same early death as all my other pets. When Mother was home, and she mostly wrote from home, she insisted that the cage be covered. To a bird, that must be a living death.

A couple of years later, my older sister brought home a puppy. At least Mother couldn’t flush him down the toilet.

Eventually, Mother moved to California and lived in one of those low-slung boxy apartments that look out onto a small swimming pool. She had one plant, which she thought might like living outside her front door. No sooner had she put the plant out than a bird (not sure what kind) moved in and laid eggs. Mother was outraged. For weeks she had to skirt the far side of her door every time she went in or out. Worse, this bird showed up year after year. “Why don’t you take in the damn plant if you are so freaked out?” I asked. She never did.

As fate would have it, I fell in love with and married a man who wrote bird poems in his early incarnation as a poet. For a birthday present, his friends once presented him with a tiny box that, until it was opened, hopped magically on its own across the dinner table. Parakeets. Somewhat mystified, Charles let them fly free around his office, coating all his books in copious amounts of bird shit.

Like my husband, I have a fondness for birds. They aren’t a passion or anything, but I note the dawn chorus, like to watch the red-tailed hawks that circle above Prospect Park in Brooklyn and feel sick if any bird crashes into our windows.

A few years ago, I was invited to go to Australia to help a friend look for new out-of-the-way places for committed birders to visit. When I arrived, I decided that the birders should stay in Sydney. For a New Yorker, that city was like stepping into the aviary version of the Island of Dr. Moreau. Everywhere you looked there were pelicans, sulphur-chested cockatoos, honeyeaters, kookaburras, noisy miners, and ibises but most prevalent of all were the Australian magpies. One magpie, in particular, knocked me for a loop. Phoning my husband, waking him in my yesterday, I screamed “This bird! This bird!” You can’t put much over on Charles, who has spent years writing about animal cognition. “Yes, darling, they are known as flying apes. Smarter than a two-year-old child.”

I can still see that bird perfectly in my mind’s eye--he was walking along the sidewalk holding a fascinating conversation with himself. He’d say something, stop to consider, nod, continue on, laugh, throwing his head back, stop again, seemingly disagree with his latest pronouncement, waddle a few more steps. I followed him for a good two blocks enthralled, feeling for the very first time that ineffable thing, a bridge between species. But it was even greater than that; it was familiar.

“Mum?”

Before this bird, I never knew any sentient being who liked to talk to herself more than Mother. I’d hear her in her office, the kitchen, the shower, falling to sleep, cracking herself up, arguing, reciting poems, working out her own sentences. She yelled to the radio, screamed at the TV. The words never ceased, until the day she did.

Was this then a crazy cosmic joke?

“Mum?”

 The magpie turned, cocked his head, regarded me a long moment, then flew off.