1. Indigo Bunting
Description:
Small body with a stout beak; plumage colored a deep indigo around the head, slipping into a sublime cerulean blue on a gradient continuing down to the tail, though this is a deceptive blue, for the indigo bunting lacks any blue pigment—the blue is merely a trick of physics, a diffraction of light through microstructures in the feathers
Notes:
But color, like beauty, is not an intrinsic, invariable property. It’s a point of connection—the connection between light, a percept, and your eyes catching the surface. Think of the iridescent sheen of a pigeon’s collar, which ripples a green, purple, and blue that elevates this common urban bird to the level of something electric, even heavenly. And maybe you didn’t foresee a pigeon angling the mind towards heaven, but then you’re walking down a gray, linear street, and this radiant, flickering patch of violet-emerald on a pigeon’s neck captures you in your thoughtlessness, and suddenly you’re pulled back into consciousness, you remember your own senses, and the world that dizzyingly supplies them. It’s enough to turn a commute to work into a meditation on nature: aesthetic shock. When a bird induces this effect to its extreme—so extreme that you lose control of your body, perhaps wobbling at the knees or crying or feeling your heartbeat like the first time you were in love—the birdwatchers’ term for it is a “crippler.” The indigo bunting was my crippler: it appeared to me shortly after you left for good, as I was aimlessly scavenging through Central Park for something, something to calm my heart, but at the sight of the bunting it instead began thumping like a hundred gunshots puncturing through a cellophane of sky.
2. Blackburnian Warbler
Description:
A flaming pixie flashing through the lattice of trees, a comet with wings: intense, fiery orange throat and tiger-like stripes cresting down from the head
Notes:
When birders describe the sensation of encountering a crippler, their language verges on erotic. In Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, Julia Zarankin describes becoming transfixed with a yellow-headed blackbird: “you can’t look back, you’ve fallen in love.” Upon a Pine Grosbeak landing on her finger, ornithologist Laura Erickson’s “heart thumped at top speed for a long time after.”1 Or, extending back into the literary annals of the Romantic poets’ fixations with avifauna, from “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “I have never heard/ Praise of love or wine/ That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.” I was with you when I saw the Blackburnian Warbler, or, more precisely, you pointed it out to me, dancing spark-like atop late Spring. I could have myself grown wings; I fluttered with fervor. I turned immediately and kissed you, I wanted to grab you all over, our bodies hot and excited, rife with elation, ripe to dive into sensation, and you fucked me in the woods so hard that I was left, suitably, limbless. Eroticism depends on the unexpected, in the way that perhaps you didn’t expect this birding notebook to turn its focus towards sex. But birding tells us a lot about what excites, what stimulates: how the body’s fluctuations can’t be strictly delimited or premeditated, how desire overtakes order. Often the most striking bird is not one you were looking for on a birdwatching quest, but one that appears on the commute to work, or during the throes of heartbreak, or simply meandering Central Park with your mother. A cherry blossom stumbled upon is infinitely more beautiful than a cherry blossom sought after. Rather than mapping and scheduling every encounter, one must train the senses to tune into their surroundings, to be attentive to the flicker of a wing. In the world of gay dating apps, I’ve come to hate the Grindr-induced habit of endlessly explicating turn-ons and kinks, mobs of “into?” sweeping screens like barking gulls on the shores of floundered desire. In this way, I’d like to create an app to replace Grindr called Cripplr: an app in which, instead of algorithm fatigue and browsing through a grid of dull, ordinary birds, it would show you one potential match at a time—someone close within your radius—appearing at random intervals, waiting to be discovered. Like a rare bird sighting, you’d have a limited frame of time to engage with the match before they’re released into the stratosphere. If fate works in your favor, love might alight, or at least a flood of rapture so divine.
3. Peregrine Falcon
Description:
Seen from below, with its monumental wingspan outspread, a crucifix diving in the air; a striped underbelly suggests that the divine works in tessellation, that patterns, too, are a painstaking arrangement of nature
Notes:
The precise peregrine falcon nosedives from a baluster on 86th Street and strikes its beak straight into the body of an unassuming pigeon below, swooping upwards with the victim limp in its maw. Nature is violent; all metaphysicians tell us that. Angels eviscerate angels. What’s called “love at first sight” is the equivalent of being struck in the chest by a speeding falcon. It’s hardly love at all, it’s crippling, it’s an assault. “To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak… Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak” (Woolf).2 It’s a blow to the legs, a crushing against the chest, not merely to see someone, but to see into them, to want what’s inside of them, and yet have to bear its distance and ephemerality. It throws you off balance, it tangles your intestines. “Beauty will be convulsive or not at all,” writes Andre Breton.3 This could have been a tagline for the birdwatcher’s field guide, or at least a forewarning. It could also be a warning for love, not that love can be avoided, not that a bird can be precluded: it flies into view with the quickfire of a dagger between the shoulder blades, followed by a slow collapse as you turn, punch-drunk, disoriented, registering only after the fact that you have been stabbed, and you want nothing more than to discern the culprit and to take them down with you to your slow, dizzying death. More often than not, the culprit (the crippler) flees as fast as you’ve noticed him, and you’re left wounded gazing up at a vacant sky.
4. Ovenbird
Description:
A Dadaistic lifeform; Cornell Lab calls it “rather chunky,”4 I call it commanding, surprising, contradictory as the olive felt and Berlin-club-chic double mohawk juxtaposed on its head, though most avant-garde of the ovenbird’s constellation is its oven-shaped habitation, moulded of mortar made masterly of mud, more typical of the MoMA than Central Park
Notes:
Post-cripple is a difficult state to reconcile with the haunting of initial rapture. As violent as the effect of crippling is, it’s also the most alive you’ll ever feel: touched by sunrise, all heartbeat and desire. But the heartbeat will inevitably modulate itself, and the birds will fly south. What to furnish from the loss of its novelty? Robert Frost, in “The Ovenbird,” characterizes the ovenbird as somewhat melancholic, a witness to dissipation and outgrowing, for it sings solo in mid-summer after all the other birds have stopped singing. “The question that he frames in all but words/ Is what to make of a diminished thing.” Some lie there and let the sun take their form. But I don’t want to be formless; I just want to be mouldable, to collapse and start anew, like the mortar nest of the ovenbird. I want to mix summer and winter into a malleable mucilage, from which I would craft an opening and wait for something to emerge. I can be patient and wait for you to emerge. Crippling is fleeting but not hopeless. It lies dormant in the nests of parks, in the summers of loneliness, under dust and in between sunsets. At a party, you push through crowds without talking to anyone, because the drugs don’t do it for you anymore and the music isn’t hitting, and the room’s steam is congealing as a muddy dull essence that you’re wading through until you make it to a window and fling your head out to get some air. Then there, staring back at you from the railing of the fire escape, is a night bird with glowing eyes, and you feel high again for the first time since spring lost its sense of surprise.
5. Great Egret
Description:
The white-veiled seer of Central Park, long serpentine neck that plunges under as it ruffles its plumage over the waters of man-made reservoirs with the knowledge that all artificiality is merely an acceleration of possible becomings, which can destroy or create in a single stroke
Notes:
The Great Egret indeed sits at the intersection in time where destruction and creation ripple out through the bird and the birdwatcher alike. In the 19th century, the Great Egret was just shy of extinct because humans had killed them in such vast numbers for the collection of their pearlescent plumes. In a creative act, as so often refracts from destruction and undoing, the Audubon Society was founded to save the Great Egret from its endangerment. Indeed, it was one of the most successful conservation efforts of ornithological lineage. We should count our blessings. We should toast to the recurrence of spring. The way that time ricochets. We are not yet young (the paradoxical nature of crippling). On the last day I saw you (precisely a week from first meeting), you mixed me an Aperol spritz and said, “Let’s toast to our time together,” and your eyes leapt through time. To the moment that we met, at which point I was convinced there would be no notable presence of desire between us. It was a delayed kind of crippling, the way that a bird sometimes doesn’t appear spectacular until it takes flight and its feathers iridesce in the sunlight. Yes, when we first met, I was not yet young, you had to knead it out of me, the body memory of defenselessness. I was eight years old, I think, though my memory softens integers. Let me put it this way: it was my first time sticking my tongue in the cold mouth of a soda can tab, just to see if it would get stuck. It was the first summer without Ringo, our dog who was killed by a car, and without food stamps, long before I moved to the city, far from the borders and birders of Central Park. It was my first time at the river without adult supervision—I was there with my best friend, T., and his older brother, and the sun beating down on our bodies like a kickdrum. I’m scared to venture into the river’s capricious waters, which are especially vigorous that afternoon following a week straight of downpours. Something waits, hungrily, beneath the water’s surface. T. is already in the water, and his brother, still perched ashore, goads me to go in with threats of perceived wimpishness, so, slowly, I wade forward, lodging my feet between stones to keep balance in the river’s swift waverings, and T. embellishes me with a glittering splash. As I turn around to conquer my dignity in the eyes of T.’s brother, his brother pulls down his swim trunks to come skinny dipping, and with his naked immaculate body shimmering shameless in the meeting of sunlight and river spray, my eyes diffidently drift down to the tangle of shadows where in the unshy light gleams his sizable penis. Instantaneously, the white oracle of a Great Egret crosses between our bodies and dips its blade-like beak into the limitless river surface, forming a brief screen between me and T.’s brother’s pelvis, and my knees falter as my heart grows faint and I tumble lawlessly into the riverbed. My first crippler.
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1 https://blog.lauraerickson.com/2012/01/
2 Virginia Woolf, The Waves.
3 Andre Breton, Mad Love.
4 https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ovenbird/id