Just birds

Kent meyers

I. Pigeon Motel

Someone had installed weird wire clumps on the ledges outside the apartment building’s windows. They looked like metal cacti or tiny weeping-willow trees. I asked the friend I was walking with if she knew what they were, but even as the question left my lips the answer came to me. They were pigeon irritants, meant to turn a four-star pigeon motel into a shack with moldy rooms near railroad tracks. The wires sprang up from a common root, then bowed down, weights at their ends moved by the wind, brushing the cement. My friend scoffed at my question. “To keep pigeons off,” she said. “It’s stupid. Let them be. They’re just birds.” I agreed. We let weed eaters rage, lawn mowers roar, herbicides work their way into our blood. Why this misplaced inventiveness applied to creatures as innocuous as pigeons? They’re just birds. Yet I couldn’t keep a thought from pressing into my mind: No. They’re not just birds. I didn’t speak the thought, though. It came to me unbidden, and I didn’t know why I thought it.

II. Ditch 

Near the small Minnesota farm where I grew up, pigeons roosted beneath the drainage ditch bridge and exploded from their roosts in the girders if I dropped a stone into the water from above. Their clapping wings echoed off the ditch’s grassy banks, and their fleeting images, in myriad colors, flickered in the water as they rose. That drainage ditch, though a man-made thing, was full of turtles and frogs and minnows, with fox and badger dens riddling its fifteen-foot-deep banks. It ran for miles, draining eventually into the Wabasha Creek and then the Minnesota River. Along with the tile that formed an underground skein, it domesticated a land that had once been swamp and marsh and shallow lake full of deer and elk and bear, heron and egret and swan and crane. Now, only small and elusive creatures remained, finding refuge in the ditch’s grasses and offering to my siblings and me mystery and surprise, beings going about their lives beyond human control.

When I was twelve, the county commissioners decided the ditch needed re-dredging. A dragline appeared near town. I was fascinated by how steady and powerful it was under its spew of hard black smoke. The ditch, my father said, had silted up. The dragline was improving it. I was puzzled. The water flowed just fine, and the minnows flashed away in hectic health, and the turtles floated with all proper complacency down the cool current. Nevertheless, I assumed someone knew more about the needs of ditches than I did. It wasn’t until the dragline passed our mailbox that I understood it was a death machine. It turned an entire refuge ecosystem into a single-purposed thing. What remained was just a ditch.

I had to beg off the job of picking up the mail. I couldn’t bear to see what the ditch, in its just-ditchness was—a muddy gash where a brown liquid oozed. I felt physically sick. I couldn’t disconnect the rhythms of my body from the destruction of a place that had poured cleansing light into my pupils and laved my hands with pure, soil-filtered water, and that supported living things that dropped coos and chirps and rustlings into my ears. I felt impoverished and stricken and stolen-from, powerless and mute. I existed now in a landscape where almost nothing lived but corn and soybeans and domestic animals, and it was nine miles away to the river, and I was only twelve. My entire world was worn-through, threadbare. I didn’t know the phrase sick at heart nor that the heart could make you sick, so, ashamed, I kept my shock and sickness to myself, and my anger at the adults, even my parents, who felt no loss and thought the world improved because a thing within it had been reduced to a single purpose and intent.

Before the ditch was ravaged into a just, the pigeons that had roosted over it were always more than just birds, too. They were their reflections in the water and their clapping wings and their rush of being out of shadow into light. They were what soared away in the sustaining air over the flashing minnows and sudden frogs, over the hidden, the waiting, the tiny, the possible.

III. Squab

Sometimes on weekends when I visited home from college, a friend who had remained in the community to farm hosted an evening meal, usually burgers or steaks or bratwurst, but a few times what he called squab. We’d arrive at his old farmhouse in the thinned-out light of winter evening and have a beer in his barren living room, sitting on the wooden floor with our backs against the walls. When dark had settled our host would fetch pellet guns and flashlights, and we would walk across the frozen gravel to his barn. We climbed into the loft and then up the stacked bales to cast the flashlights’ beams into the rafters.

It wasn’t sport, but to our credit, we didn’t feel it so. It was instead the primal stage of meal-gathering-and-making. The roosting pigeons fell out of the flashlights’ beams in a series of almost silences: the gun’s release of air, the night wind scraping shingles, pellets against feathers—a quiet violence barely louder than pepper on eggs, and then out of the grayish light a gray shape dropping and a sound in the dark below like a pill falling on carpet. We climbed down the stacked bales to find the dead pigeons splayed or sleekly reposed, not just messy pest and not just birds, but exotic cuisine, squab, as my friend proudly but imprecisely insisted. On a board laid over sawhorses we cleaned them under the blue mercury-vapor yard light, their warm guts steaming and the yearning eyes of farm cats glowing, and feathers drifting away like snow, and then returned to the house where we feasted on potatoes and pan-fried pigeon breasts.

IV. Deer and Dove

Every evening deer appear in my yard from the floodplain of Spearfish creek, which runs out of the Black Hills behind my house. I have a seven-foot-high fence around my garden, chicken wire around all my trees. Before I realized what was happening to a ten-year-old linden, the bucks had killed it by scraping the velvet off their antlers against its bark. When I pruned my lilacs I had to drape them in nylon mesh because every new leaf they produced was eaten. If I plant a new tree, I allow time to build its fence that very afternoon, or by morning it will be a nub. If I slacken my protections for a day, beautiful things—roses, bee balm, once a vulnerable redbud—disappear overnight as if by thievery or magic.

One early morning while I wrote, sitting on a deck chair under the fading stars, bundled against the chill, a doe came in fits and starts and bowings of her head right up to me and sniffed me head-to-knees, her florid breath shiveringly warm against my cheek and wrists. I remained still, feeling her nearness as a gift. Had she turned from me to my potted flowers, though, I would have scrammed her away. The deers’ over-density of population has led to nasty diseases like Chronic Wasting, which eats holes in their brains, and Bluetongue, which swells their tongues and creates a vicious, unquenchable thirst. A few years ago when I kayaked the Redwater River, it stank with bloated carcasses. Perhaps for the sake of the deer themselves, the city should start a depredation program, which other nearby towns have done over the protests of those who insist that the deer running through the streets, even though they’re running through streets, their pointed hoofs clicking and racketing, are just deer. What is a deer, though, without an effective predator prowling downwind, keeping it in check and filling its deery imagination? The mountain lions, in a strange and prejudicial imbalance, are killed if they follow their prey into the city streets, their threat more palpable if not necessarily truer.

We have so little guidance concerning how we should relate to the creatures that occupy our world with us. I long for the clarity of myth. Science’s specificity only masquerades as clarity. Knowing kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, or biochemical makeup and evolutionary history, does nothing to help me know what pigeons really are, or deer, or for that matter the invasive Eurasian collared dove. All over the Black Hills the collared dove’s harsh, staccato call has replaced the drawn-out music of the native mourning dove. Is the collared dove just its muscular presence, swift and fleeting overhead, or is it more truly the absence of the species it has crowded out, dredged from the air, confined to memory? I don’t know whether the collared dove is beautiful or ugly. I don’t know whether I appreciate or detest it. I waver. It’s not just bird but something more, always, and always something less.

V. Story

Anyone who lives in South Dakota knows the myth of White Buffalo Calf Woman. The story is both specific to the Lakota people and their traditions, and a story shared and known by all, an infusion of imagination from the Lakota into the entire culture of the state. I can’t remember when I first heard it or how many times I have heard it since. Very briefly, here it is:

Two young men, hunting, saw a mysterious figure appear in the distance, dressed all in white and walking through the prairie grasses toward them. As the figure neared, it clarified out of the distant haze into a beautiful young woman. One of the men recognized her as a spiritual being and in respect turned his eyes down, while the other saw only sexual opportunity. He attempted to assault her and was destroyed. The woman told the other young man to return to the people and teach them to honor her. If they did, she would sustain them. He looked back as he began his walk and saw a white buffalo calf galloping away.

Even paraphrased that simply, the story demonstrates the kind of clarity I mean—the power of the buffalo as a living force, its mysterious and impenetrable otherness and aloofness and yet intimate kinship with us, its power to give or take, the boundaries we must maintain in our relationships with it, the so-clear notions of propriety and limits, all reinforced by the story’s other teaching, of proper sexual relationships. Science can express nothing like this, that wrenches human listeners into alignment with the natural world and its wild and roving other species, that recognizes the human power to molest and ravage but also insists on a deeper power and intelligence emanating from a sustaining, inviolable source that must not be tampered with and in respect toward which the human animal can only turn away its eyes.

Such a story told about the deer that enter my yard might give me clarity in my dealings with them. It might reassure me that my fences are not built on greed or selfishness and that my love of cool shade and flowers and the taste of fresh tomatoes is as worthy of a place in the world as is a deer’s satiety, and a proper counterweight to compassion. Or the story might tell me that too much compassion toward the individual animals that I know is a failure of responsibility toward the species; or it might tell me that I’m wrong to behave as selfishly as I do, and that the doe that greeted me with her breath that cool morning was showing me a more gracious way to be in relation to her people.

Without a story, I’m on my own, making up my relationship with the deer day-by-day and erratically. I don’t know what a deer is—not just a deer but a creature integrated into relationships of which I’m a part, of which we all are parts, but about which we’re mostly ignorant.

VI. Amaranth

Palmer amaranth is one of the most-feared of the new super weeds. A sub-species of the pigweed I used to pull from my father’s soybeans, Palmer amaranth grows eight feet tall, produces hundreds of seeds per plant, and grows in any soil. What makes it a super weed, though, is its resistance to glyphosate herbicides. Glyphosates inhibit an enzyme most plants need to produce proteins. A few plants, however, produce proteins through a different path. This genetic trait can be inserted into the DNA of domestic crops, primarily soybeans, making them indifferent to glyphosates. A field of soybeans planted with such genetically modified seeds can be sprayed indiscriminately, leaving a perfectly weed-free field.

This amounts to a direct insertion of human technical thinking into the deep interior workings of the natural world. As just an act of human genius, I find it amazing, brilliant. But it is an idea that operates, as it were, under spewing, hard black smoke, relentlessly single-minded. The first time I saw a field treated with glyphosates, it spooked me as an apparition might: a pelt of pure, antiseptic soybean-green covering the land. I never liked walking soybeans to pull weeds, but you cannot help but learn respect for the tenacious, insistent, living power of the plants you’re pulling, which speaks in crackly, root-break whispers of a compulsion to live that has to be considered as part of your equation of effort and intent. And always you look back upon your labor before returning home and discover you have missed some weeds, that for all your peculiar, human powers, the plants have their own, for which you can never fully account. Doing such work, you learn an un-arrogant gaze. What I felt upon seeing that first field of glyphosate-treated soybeans was something very different gazing out: a belief in human powers, yes, but more: a belief that human powers were enough, were sufficient, were isolate, alone.

Palmer amaranth, however, has discovered the genetic variation that makes a plant indifferent to glyphosates. Row-crop fields planted with a single species appear to it as empty ecological niches. Agronomists are predicting scenarios where Palmer amaranth, unchecked, reduces corn and soybean yields by seventy percent, vast field-sheets of the weed unfolding, imitating as in some kind of warping mirror the single-minded plant monocultures from which they arose.

Our oldest myths, as Sean Kane has argued and as the White Buffalo Calf story shows, contain warnings that the natural world has its own intelligence that should not be tampered with. Science, interestingly, is revealing the factual truth of the pre-science, or prescience, of those ancient myths, showing us how that intelligence operates through pathways of natural selection and evolution, a slow but vast-and-inventive form of thinking. The brilliant single-mindedness of our own thinking has roused that autonomous intelligence, poked it into activity. The very designation “super weed,” like “super-bug,” suggests a near-godlike status in our imaginations, as if these species—Palmer amaranth or antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria like MRSA—have arrived from beyond our ordinary earth. In some sense they have—not from Krypton but from a natural world prodded by our technical thinking into an imitation that has produced seemingly alien species.

It is hard to keep one’s thinking straight when considering the maze of invasions and counter-invasions that have led to the crisis of Palmer amaranth. Amaranth, unlike the soybean, is native to the Americas. The invading Spanish outlawed it to weaken the Aztecs, for whom it made up much of their diet. There are those who consider it, like quinoa, to be a crop of the future, high in nutrients and energy, low in required tillage and care. Pigweed is not just pigweed. It is amaranth, too. Depending on the stories you tell about it and the uses you make, it could be a feast like squab or, as it was for the Aztecs, a food of the gods. Destroyed by an invading people, it is resurgent now, generations later, threatening waste upon the primary food sources of the culture that invaded. But is that threat just threat, or is it promise too? And is this all just a story of rational and scientific cause-and-effect? One might believe in curses or in sustaining prayers breathed into a handful of seeds by a dying Aztec priest who opened his palm and, still murmuring, tossed the seeds high into the sweet, windy breath of his gods.

VII. Starling

In 1890 Eugene Schieffelin released European starlings into Central Park as part of a plan to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare into North America. Starlings now number a devastating 200-million on this continent. I hate starlings. And yet:

A few years ago, in the trees that line the banks of Spearfish creek behind my house, thousands of starlings congregated. Their gathering thrilled and troubled me. The sheer energy of it, the growing loudness as they came and came felt like a power carried from the depths of earth and time. All that chatter and babble and thousand-glasses-shattering of voice. Was there a single bird silent within that reach and plain and solidity of sound? What comfort before the coming night does starling call to starling ear provide? It was wondrous and thrilling and frightening. There were too many of them, they filled the trees like dark baubles and bowed the branches down, and they had never done this kind of thing before. It seemed a rupture from another realm, a force pouring into the common world I knew, with a vast, uncontrollable hunger. Then, after weeks of vibrating evening air, they disappeared in a single day, as if sucked back from where they’d come. I was greatly relieved, and I missed them.

VIII. Stitch

Several years ago my wife and I visited the North Platte River in Nebraska during the spring waterfowl migration. I have always been fascinated by the vast movements of animals on earth, from the wildebeest of Africa to the caribou of Canada and the six-million-strong thunder of bison that in two great herds used to wander North America. The cranes and ducks and geese that descend on the North Platte are such a movement, stitching the hemispheres together, as Aldo Leopold thought of it. There is no simile in the modern world to make sense of the living things pulsing and changing and shifting in all three dimensions, rising beyond the capacity of sight into the high blue in layers, in ribbons, in moving constellations, as if a great wind had shattered a city and thrown it in particles into the sky, except that above the North Platte it all intent, multi-purposed but connected, bird and birds and thousands of needles piercing the blue, dragging invisible threads that renew and restore, balance and love, continent to continent, atmosphere to water to land. It pierces the chest, too. It throbs with a unity one feels within, a fullness, a yearning, a heart-stitch.

One evening we stood on a bridge over the North Platte and watched cranes come in from the fields to their roosts on the river. Only repetition can capture the sense: they came and they came and they came and they came, for the hour we stood there they came and beyond, until we grew stiff from watching, long, ragged flocks that took shape in the distance and followed the river and passed over, descending, while another in the distance took shape and passed over, descending while another took shape. It was nothing I can name, not even as experience, which puts us at the center. We were witnesses only. Just witnesses. Whatever it was, it went on beyond us, and the world felt right.