For the Birds

For the Birds, by Claudia Hinz

I became a birder out of desperation in the early days of the pandemic, on an afternoon when the hours felt both flabby and flimsy, so that I couldn’t tell you if it was one o’clock or almost dinner time. Tuesday or Thursday. Until that day, I’d always been a little jealous of my husband’s fascination with birds. He can identify all the different types of ducks in the river. Spot birds of prey on posts along the highway. He picks out the dark shadow of a heron nestled in branches when all I see is another poky branch.

His attention requires patience and a willingness to wait in silence, alert and expectant. I, on the other hand, have never been patient. And sitting in silence felt impossible. How could I be quiet in the face of often paralyzing fear that my husband, a doctor on the front lines, would contract the virus? In the face of fear for my elderly parents, frightened and alone. Grief for my children over their lost semesters and time at work, and their long separations from their partners. Sadness for those who could not afford, like me, to barricade their children against the virus and keep them safe at home. Where were the signs of hope? Signs of an end to suffering and relief for those hurting? I couldn’t sit quietly, but I was willing to look. On high alert, I was suddenly paying attention.

In the Hebrew Torah, Jews are called upon to listen. “Hear, O Israel,” are the opening words of the central prayer, the Shema. Jews recite the Shema when they wake and before they go to sleep. The prayer is the last thing Jews are supposed to say on their deathbeds. The final word of the Shema is “eyd,” meaning witness. In reciting this prayer, we are responding to the Divine call: you are my witnesses” (Isaiah 43:10). Praising the Divine demands a lifetime of bearing witness. It is the foundation upon which we resolve to live compassionately, in community with fellow humans, and as stewards of animals and the earth.

Witnessing requires many things but foremost, I believe, it requires patience, the quieting of our own voices, and ultimately, love. Love of the Divine (whatever that means to an individual), self-love, love of one another, and love of the world around us because if we do not love the world, our city, our neighborhood, our backyard, why bother to look or listen? Looking and listening assume that there is indeed goodness and beauty waiting to be experienced. It strikes me that even the acts of looking and expecting to find goodness and beauty are rooted in privilege, not to mention the luxury of living in a community in which a mother doesn’t worry about her child’s safety. Even with privilege, love of the world is a big ask right now: our planet is on fire. Our country is still at war with a pandemic and ravaged by racial injustice, violence, iniquity, bigotry, and divisiveness. But here I was looking, gazing up, not in some spiritual, God-in-the-clouds way, but up to the trees in my own backyard, and I began to see them everywhere. 

The Northern Flicker is a massive woodpecker. Some call it a pest because it can do serious damage to siding and eaves, but it hard not to admire this Dapper Don. From the neck down the Northern Flicker looks like he’s heading to a formal in a suit of spotted feathers. He has a gorgeous pinky flush on his neck, the gorget, I’ve learned it’s called, and a hint of red in its blue crown.  

I refill my bird feeder. Cedar waxwings arrive in pairs. They perch on the long branch above the feeder and survey their surroundings. They are aloof, snubbing the company of the other birds. Their elegant crowns remind me of the birds on Egyptian cartouches, the birds that escort souls to the underworld. 

One day, a sun alights on the branch next to the feeder. I gasp, fumbling for my phone to snap a picture. I can’t get to my phone in time, so I am left to gaze at the Western Tanager. His yellows and oranges are from an entirely different climate, but he is native to my area. I was just lucky enough to be looking. 

The more I look, the more I see them everywhere. It feels like a good omen that there are so many fussing around the feeder. Even the little brown birds, LBBs my mother-in-law calls them, drab and with unremarkable songs, form a feisty society. I catch myself smiling at their mid-air hip bumps as they knock others out of the way for a turn at the feeder.

Before masking up to go into the grocery store, I am stopped by the elaborate song of a House Finch, perched unseen, broadcasting his operetta for all to hear, a song so long that eventually I have to go inside to shop for dinner. He is still going strong when I emerge.

One afternoon, I am startled by a buzzing at my ear. An emerald-colored Rufous hummingbird zips between the red geraniums. I’m exhausted watching him. So much work to stay aloft. I look up the Rufous and learn that each year this three-inch-long bird travels nearly 4,000 miles from Alaska or Canada, all the way down to Mexico. All on those paper-thin, frantic wings. This prompts me to look up one of the longest migrations of any animal on earth, that of the Artic Tern. Every year, it makes the 20,000-mile round-trip journey from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle.

Over the course of the tern’s lifetime, it will travel approximately 1.5 million miles, the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back three times. The moon. And back. Three times. On a particularly low day, I tell myself that I can be a little bit like the Rufous and the Tern and find inspiration in their stamina, recognizing that the journey is long. Long and short. Every day, there are choices about how to make this journey. A choice to stick in my ear pods and hear another podcast about the pandemic or listen for the tapping of a Lewis Woodpecker high in a tree. Every morning, another opportunity to recommit to pay attention and bear witness. 

The poet Rumi wrote that “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Some days, there is so much pain we physically cannot make our way into this posture; we cannot kneel because our bodies, our fear, our grief render us incapable. But maybe tomorrow or the next day, we will be able. And if we are, we might discover that bowing down is one way to bear witness. We might find that in kissing the ground we express and experience love and a readiness to receive the gifts of this earth, both the tools and thrills of this journey: stamina and resilience. Patience. Wonderment. Beauty and joy. And maybe, one day soon, healing and peace.

This is where the essay might end, bent in prayer, lips to the ground, with hope for healing and peace. But we do not live our lives on our knees. At some point we must stand and continue our journey. Once we have borne witness our eyes are open to the beauties and horrors of our world. And so here is another choice before us: to rise up and go forward to do nothing less than change our world. For the birds. For one another. For our planet.—

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Category: On Writing