Avian Synchronicity My Life with Birds. by Calli Mulligan
Avian Synchronicity. My Life With Birds.
I was 5 years old and my family had recently moved from Canada to Massachusetts. One day my mother took me to check on a robin’s nest she had been following. Mom suspected something had gone wrong, and it had. I remember looking into the abandoned nest with the too thin and inviable eggs still in it. It was the late 1960’s; I didn’t fully understand my mother’s explanation at the time, but I still have a clear memory of a DDT truck going down our street, trailing its misty cone of poison.
I wasn’t allowed to be outside at those times. My mother had been deeply affected by Rachel Carson’s books and always kept them in a prominent position in our house. She took me to a museum exhibit about industrial pollution, and the film images of oil soaked birds really stayed with me.
I spent countless happy hours paging through my mother’s paperback guide to eastern birds. I always paused at two birds in particular—the cedar waxwing, which I thought must surely be the most elegant bird on Earth, and the ivory-billed woodpecker. I couldn’t comprehend the reality of extinction in connection with a modern bird. How could we humans allow this to happen?
One year my mother planted sunflower seeds outside the kitchen window in the hope of attracting birds. When a flock of chickadees came late that summer, Mom got out her Kodak Instamatic and took a picture through the window. I didn’t know it then, but that rather blurry little snapshot would become a permanent exhibit in my mind’s eye museum of precious childhood moments.
My mother died when I was a teenager, and I couldn’t comprehend that reality any better than I could the possible extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker when I was a young child. In some ways I probably still can’t. My mother was a wonderful person, an extrovert with an easy, unanxious, graceful sociability. She was a talented artist, and could read books voraciously and quickly. I am intensely introverted, anxious and skittish by nature, and dyslexic. It took years after her death for me to accept that my Mom didn’t completely understand my unusual temperament. She always tried to challenge my introversion with the hope that I would overcome it. I tried hard to do so, but of course I didn’t change. I couldn’t, and my efforts created a lot of suffering. It took too long for me to understand and embrace myself.
When I look back now, however, I feel certain that my mother’s inner experience of birds was very close, perhaps identical, to my own. I think often of the moment late one night, a few months before her death, when Mom brought me to the back door to see an owl she’d spotted in a nearby tree, just within the glow of the outside light. We didn’t even think to try to identify the owl. It didn’t matter—my mother and I were united within that hushed, magical, resonant quickening of the heart that contact with wild things creates.
And so it has been throughout my life. Whenever I hear a chickadee or an owl, or think of that little photo, or see a new bird I’ve never seen before, I really feel my mother’s presence; I feel us smiling together. At age forty I finally saw not one but a large flock of cedar waxwings; I needed no field guide to identify them—they were as gorgeous as I’d always imagined. Later that year, while out walking on the anniversary of my mother’s birthday, a Townsend’s warbler (a new bird for me) landed on a low branch only a few feet from my eyes. For a few minutes it alternately preened and glanced at me, allowing me to study its gaudy plumage without binoculars. Two years later—same walk, same anniversary—I saw my first Kingfisher. Because I am so shy, I was squeamish about posting my personal experiences with birds on the internet, but on the day I began writing these sentences last year (Sunday Feb. 13th), the "Wordle" word was ... ROBIN. Another of the many luminous moments of avian synchronicity that have graced my life.
When my husband gave me the Sibley guide to birds, I began with the letter A, with a group of birds I’d never seen and knew little about—the albatrosses. This chapter captivated me and I read many other articles about these birds online. For several days thereafter, persistent images of giant Wandering Albatrosses soared through my mind’s eye. With wingspans of over eleven feet and body length from tip to tail of over four feet, the Wanderers are among the largest birds on Earth. They evolved over subantarctic oceans without human contact and are remarkably, poignantly curious about our species. One day the images I had been seeing suddenly coalesced into one male Wandering Albatross. With an electric, arresting force, this bird’s life story came to me as a magical realism tale filled with love, loss, myths, and legends. An entire albatross mythology floated up out of the unconscious sea, and the beginnings of a novel were born.
In hindsight I think that the image I formed of a giant albatross soaring alone over a vast stormy ocean connected very powerfully to the lonely, motherless child still deep within me. It took two years for me to settle upon the name Haumanu for my fictional Wandering Albatross—I thought a southern hemisphere bird should have a southern hemisphere name, so I combined the Maori words for wind and bird. Only much later did I learn that Haumanu as a single word has connotations of safety and protection. It felt so right to me.
Peaceful sanctuary is what we all search for within ourselves and the outer world, what all wild creatures are now finding hard to come by. How will albatrosses and other pelagic birds survive if their ancestral nesting atolls and islands are submerged, if the populations of fish they depend upon become less reliable? In evolutionary time the decades ahead of us are but a nanosecond, but we know that big changes are coming. We already see birds trying hard to adapt—shifting their ranges, their migration and nesting habits, but can they change quickly enough? Last summer across the Pacific Northwest chicks threw themselves out of nests because the heat was unbearable. The most highly specialized species will probably be most vulnerable to extinction.
In her oft-quoted poem Emily Dickinson describes hope as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” She goes on to say that “never in extremity has it asked a crumb of me.” I still have moments of wonderful, mindful reverie with birds and nature—moments that make me feel hopeful—but of course mindfulness is not all warmth and light, and I feel the disquieting sense of foreboding growing stronger. I believe that hope is now asking something of us all. Every day, no matter how seemingly small the action, we all need to find new ways of helping our biosphere. As we humans are learning to celebrate our own diversities of life experience, we need to mobilize all our different perspectives to create real hope.
by Calli Mulligan
