Flighty Thoughts

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Life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.  My apologies if I’m bringing back bad memories of high school biology, but I’m doing an experiment.  It has to do with the class level.  (I have to confess that this has become more complicated since high school since there are a lot more of them than I remembered.)  Specifically, I was thinking of those of us with backbones (which seems to exclude many congressional Republicans these days), namely fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal.  I read somewhere—I can’t recall where; I seem to be reading all the time—that the only other order of animals that human beings see every single day, apart from other mammals, is birds.  I suppose some of this depends on location, but it seems to be true even for landlubbers who don’t work in zoos.  I’ve been watching, however, to see if I do see birds every day.

I work in an office with two windows, one facing south and another facing west.  There are trees outside the west window and during spring, summer, and fall birds are abundant.  Yes, I see them every day.  Winter, however, is a bit more dicey.  Songbirds famously either migrate or retreat into more sheltered places for the season.  The other day, during a cold snap, I got to thinking I hadn’t seen any birds at all.  The only thing that rescued the allegation was that I remembered I saw some birds that I startled out on my jog, before it was fully daylight.  The rest of the day I keep my peripheral vision on alert for any motion outside my windows.  Late in the day I saw a crow dart between two trees.  I do see birds most days, but I’ll be keeping a watch this winter for birdless days.

It’s not that I want to prove this author wrong—I can’t even remember who s/he was.  No, this experiment is driven by pure, naked, curiosity.  I’m pretty sure that the author wasn’t writing in a literalist tone (that’s more of a problem with my wiring).  The point that was being made is that people pay special attention to birds since they are so prevalent in our world.  They’ve adapted from conditions of arctic to desert and they can get around many obstacles that might prove troublesome to our class, even bats.  I know that I rarely see amphibians, reptiles, or fish.  Certainly not on a daily basis.  So birds do seem to be top of the class, and, so far, I have seen at least one every day since reading this from a fellow mammal.

O Levels

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Out jogging last week, I was thinking about a harsh interview I once had.  It was in Manhattan.  The woman interviewing me made no attempt to hide her disdain.  I’m not sure if it was for me personally or what I represent.  She did not smile at all, not even for the usual niceties.  She asked me whether I was better at speaking or writing.  I said they were about equal.  “No,” she briskly corrected.  “Which is it, one or the other?”  This came to me while jogging because I was reflecting that public speaking and writing are really the only two things I’m any good at, and I have worked on both for my entire life.  These years later I still can’t say which is stronger.  That was appreciated by my students and fellow scholars in my teaching career, if reviews are anything to go by.  I like to communicate.  (My wife might say too much so.)

Owls are difficult to spot in the wild.  Just last week I’d seen only my second in some sixty years.  This was a screech owl.  It’s not unusual to hear them when jogging at dawn.  This time my right ear picked up on it more than my left as I jogged past a grove of trees.  I looked but saw nothing.  The trees were budding and some had small leaves already.  I reckon I’ve seen my fair share of bald eagles.  They’re large and they’re pretty obvious when they’re in the area.  Owls are more secretive.  Good at hiding.  I reached the end of the path and turned around.  As I reached the stand of trees, now on my left, it screeched again and I saw a blurred flapping of wings as it disappeared in flight.  I couldn’t identify this owl in a line-up, but then again, that’s not something I’m good at. The voice is distinctive, however.

The person hiring is a bald eagle.  Bold, aggressive, and sometimes literally bald.  I’m more like that screech owl.  Their public speaking is distinct and isn’t really a screech at all.  I can’t speak for their writing ability.  Life is our chance to come to know ourselves.  We may think we have it figured out in our twenties, but each score of years makes you question past assumptions.  Two things I always thought would be part of my career—public speaking and compelling writing—have both fallen by the wayside.  At least professionally.  What we say to others has an impact.  Especially if we’re eagles.  All things considered, however, I would rather be an owl.

Photo by James Toose on Unsplash

Pet Theory

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We don’t have any pets.  At least not beyond the spider near the sink that I don’t have the heart to release outdoors in winter temps.  But I have had.  I think the reasons our pets mean so much to us is that they’re like people in so many ways, but nonjudgmental.  They accept us with all our quirks and despite occasional—generally unintentional—neglect.  A recent family text chain about the sad occasion of having to put a dog down got me musing about my history of pets.  We get remarkably attached to them.  Growing up we had dogs, cats, birds, turtles, guinea pigs, fish, and we tried a short-lived attempt at hamsters.  My wife grew up with a cat but became allergic after leaving home, so we had to avoid furry pets when my daughter was young.

We had fish, hermit crabs, and a bird.  The bird, a parakeet named Archie (short for Archaeopteryx), was with us at a difficult time.  Things weren’t going well at Nashotah House, but I had no idea that I was in the cross-hairs.  Archie was a suspicious bird.  We tried to get him to talk (mostly “nevermore”) but he wouldn’t.  I tried to get him to perch on my finger—my Mom could get birds to do it—but he only ever bit me.  Still, he was part of the family.  When the seminary axe fell, he moved to two different apartments with us, remaining solitary but stolid in tumultuous times.  In the second apartment he stopped singing.  My daughter thought something was wrong, but we knew from a previous trip to the vet that we couldn’t afford another.  I was unemployed and my wife had to look for a better-paying job.  Then I found Archie dead.  That day is still, all these years later, very difficult for me to think about.  How we cried.  How we snuck back onto land owned by the seminary to bury him in the woods.  How empty our small apartment felt.

Emotions are difficult things, but they’re what bind us together as humans.  We all know loss and sadness.  Many of us have poignant memories of pets who, although we supposed we’d outlive them always thought they’d be there at least another day.  Is there anything that brings us more together?  We think anyone who doesn’t shed a tear at Old Yeller is somehow not really human.  Certainly less human than our adopted animal family members.  How wonderful not to be judged by someone who knows us perhaps better than we know ourselves.

CSI: Backyard Edition

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Dateline: January 24.  Location: Backyard.  It was clearly a crime scene.  There were prints in the snow.  Blood.  Signs of a struggle.  The marks hadn’t been there the evening before, so I knew I was looking at a recent offense.  Two indentations in the snow, about 10 yards apart.  Too far for a small animal to have leapt.  A third impression, closer to the second.  Clear feather imprints in the snow.  Earlier on the day in question, I had observed a hawk in the white pine across the street.  Two angry blue jays strafed the interloper, but he appeared unintimidated.  He fluffed his feathers and surveyed the area, including, I presume, my back yard.  In his own time he left, in an unmarked flight.

In the morning, rabbit tracks.  The first impact had been violent.  Debris had been raised from under the snow blanket and scattered toward the southwest.  No footprints leading away from the site.  This led me to conclude the victim had been lifted into the air.  But why the second impact site?  There had been a struggle.  The victim, presumably of the Lepus genus, had tried to make a stand.  The second impact site had bits of blood toward the west.  Neither of these first two scenes of investigation bore any indicative hints to the identity of either the victim or the perpetrator.  I did not have the means to test the blood.  No tracks led from either impression.  The third site clearly involved a struggle.

Impressions of feathers, spread at least two-thirds of a meter across, remained clearly visible in the snow.  Between these wing prints evidence of a scuffle.  Perhaps an argument ensued.  No feathers or fur remained on site.  I had to piece this together before the snow began to melt.  What I am labeling site 1, the initial strike, was near a bush under which rabbits are frequently observed to rest.  A hawk, confident of its ability, swooped down in the night and apprehended the rabbit.  The victim fought back, enforcing an unscheduled landing.  Site 2.  Blood was drawn.  Site 3 was an easy rabbit’s leap from site 2.  Perhaps the rabbit escaped.  The wing and claw marks on the snow suggest that the victim did not survive this third attack.  No solid physical evidence could be recovered.  It was just too cold outside to go and look personally.  I am not paid enough to do that kind of work.  Or I could have it backwards.  Site 3 could be the initial strike, but my reconstruction seemed more likely  Either way, the backyard would, however, never feel safe again.

Or Plastic

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I’m no fan of plastic.  When looking for a house a non-negotiable with me was vinyl siding—nope.  In our neighborhood several houses have plastic fences pretending to be wood. I dislike materials pretending to be something else.  I was dead-set against such a thing, but our house came with a lot of neglected outdoor woodwork.  The fence was wood and had been stained, probably just before we moved in.  Then the carpenter bees arrived.  Local pest control will spray for them, but they come back each summer and unless we have the pest store on speed-dial the bees will find new things to damage.  See, the problem isn’t just the bees.  Woodpeckers, which as a kid always seemed exotic to me, love carpenter bee larvae.  I’ve watched a downy woodpecker hoping along the fence, knocking until it finds one, and then hopping a few feet further to repeat the process for another.  (If you’ve ever watched a woodpecker at work you’d not doubt animal intelligence.)

My wife and I talked it over.  The fence was in poor repair to begin with (another thing our house inspector missed).  I finally came around to seeing why plastic might be the best solution in our case.  Not for me, but for resale value.  The former owners had a thing for untreated outdoor wood.  They’d built a new back porch, but didn’t paint or stain it.  When the carpenter bees noticed, I painted it.  I couldn’t reach the ceiling, though, being short of stature.  Well, this year the carpenter bees have gone for the ceiling.  And the downy woodpeckers have followed them.  Now, when I hear knocking, I have to run downstairs to the back door to frighten off downy.  I will buy a paint sprayer to paint the ceiling, but the bees have had a head start this summer.

So I was in my office and I heard a tapping, as of a woodpecker gently rapping.  I ran downstairs and threw wide the door.  To my surprise, nobody was on the porch.  I went back to work.  Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.  I followed my ears to the front door.  Yes, the tapping was from out front but daylight there, nothing more.  I stepped to the edge of the porch.  More tapping.  I leaned over the railing and looked down.  A rare, and large, pileated woodpecker was going at the fence post.  I was about as startled as she was.  My wife was out on an errand and when she returned home she found selfsame woodpecker working elsewhere on the fence.  I’ve learned my lesson.  While wood looks nice, and is natural, it will soon be paper thin if we don’t do something.  It’s a big fence.  And the only option to paper is, unfortunately, plastic.

Hooting in the Dark

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Animals fascinate me.  I picked up Martin Windrow’s The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living with a Tawny Owl at a used book sale.  Honestly, the cute photo on the cover swayed me.  Although some animals like living with humans, and although I grew up with lots of pets, I’ve tended away from that.  Reading about how an owl became a close companion to, and lived a good life with a human was somewhat bittersweet.  In the wild Mumble (the owl’s name) would’ve likely lived a far shorter span.  But I do wonder if she missed out on the challenges that make life rewarding.  (I sometimes wonder the same about those born rich among our own species.)  The struggle is part of nature inside us.  And although this book is generally fun, it does raise some deeper questions in my mind.

When describing the natural life of Tawny Owls, Windrow notes that they have an ability, not understood, to adjust their brood sizes by the amount of prey that will be available during a given year.  Such things always give me pause for a couple of reasons.  One is that we seem to assume we have all the data—that we know all that can be known of our world.  Animals prove that wrong time and again.  The other reason is that we are convinced there is no, for lack of a better term, spiritual world.  Or maybe better, paranormal existence.  Might it not be that owls have some ability to know the future?  Some people seem to have the ability to predict some short-term developments with accuracy.  Perhaps we’re missing something is all I’m saying.

In the end, however, I was surprised how Windrow couldn’t quite bring himself to reject a materialist view of her death.  I’ve had pets die on me—one of the reasons that I have no desire to “own” one—but as Windrow writes it, the relationship grew humdrum before Mumble’s death.  He had to work and she had to perch.  We do tend to take those closest to us for granted, I fear.  Life is so busy that we have to try to squeeze family in next to the demands of capitalism.  So the story towards the end winds down to a kind of “I had a pet owl but I had a life to live too” kind of narrative.  I’m glad to have read the book and I learned a little bit about Tawny Owls.  But I was also left reflecting on some of the larger implications.

Feathers and Flight

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Bird identification must be one of the trickiest activities known to humankind.  My office window overlooks a small segment of a porch roof that is popular with birds.  Whether it’s pecking at some invisible specks on the shingles or dipping a sip from the gutters, they stop by often during the day.  Maybe my brain wiring is odd, but since I was a child I wanted to be able to identify correctly any animal I saw.  We had a few of those Zim Golden Nature Guides that I poured over like a second Bible.  I would study page after page, repeatedly, until I could identify just about any critter I came across.  It seemed, in those days, that all birds were sparrows, starlings, or robins.  There was the occasional blue jay or cardinal, but usually it was the more ordinary, less colorful variety.  Birds are symbols of hope.  Their lightness and ability to fly are what human dreams are made of.

I’m not an avid bird watcher, but I do try to identify them.  I see bald eagles occasionally, several times a year usually, and plenty of red-tailed hawks.  Once in a while, however, a smallish bird hops by that resembles nothing in my field guides.  In frustration I turn to Cornell University’s bird identification app, Merlin.  Almost never can they find anything like what I saw.  Maybe it’s because the app asks the wrong questions.  Never do they say “was the tail long, medium, or short?” for example.  Things you’d actually notice.  They do ask where you saw it, and “on the roof” isn’t an option, let alone “on the roof overlooking my porch.”  I saw an interesting bird the other day that was all gray.  Bill and all.  I saw it next to a starling, from which it was clearly distinct.  It wasn’t in my book and it wasn’t on Merlin.  What could it have been?

This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Strangely, bird color isn’t always a reliable indicator of species although this is what the viewer tends to notice first.  To make positive identification takes close observation of details most people don’t immediately catch.  The more common species are seldom an issue, but the less showy kind are often more difficult to identify.  This strikes me as a life lesson.  We may all know who the showiest are, but those more modest of our avian friends likely live lives of greater satisfaction without people constantly chasing after them.  At least I imagine it so, since I can’t find a write-up about them in my identification guides.  But I can still watch them and gain hope.

A Bird’s Life

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Among the early signs of spring are birds.  Cold and silent, winter mornings have their own form of beauty, but hearing the birds is cause for hope.  The bird world looks cheerful and peaceable but it is a competitive and often harsh place.  My office window looks out onto a porch roof and a stand of trees across the street.  Electric wires constitute a part of the scene as well, giving birds plenty of places to alight and negotiate their bird business.  Like humans, birds are vulnerable, particularly when they’re young.  While teaching at Nashotah House, walking home from chapel one morning after a thunderstorm, I found a baby bird, not yet fully fledged, dying on the sidewalk.  I glanced up and couldn’t see any nests.  I’m not much of climber anyway.  Not knowing what to do I scooped it up and took it home where I could put it in a box.

I didn’t have an early class that day so I called a wildlife rescue center.  Being the days before the internet took over, this was a matter of looking it up in the yellow pages.  We piled the family in the car and drove it down.  They’d told me to keep it warm and try to comfort it.  My daughter held it.  Once we got there they said they weren’t sure if it would survive.  It was weak and chilled, but they would do what they could to revive it.  For several days we all worried about that hatchling.  I thought it might’ve been a finch because of the beak, but otherwise we knew little about it.  Several weeks later the rescue center called.  Our rescue was ready to be released—did we want to do it?

They handed us a brown grocery bag that weighed next to nothing.  “Open it when you’re outside near where you found it,” they said.  Back on campus we opened the bag and our foundling flew off so fast we could barely see it.  Adult birds, confident and socialized, seem more sure of themselves.  They perch out in the open even though hawks scan the area, and even the occasional eagle.  They go about their bird business with a confidence I sometimes envy.  They don’t worry about a 925.  They know what nature’s about.  They may have survived a near-fatal childhood.  They may have pushed siblings out of the nest to have thrived.  They peck and flap at each other in their efforts to mate.  And, above all, they carry spring on their wings.

Sky Dwellers

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If the atmosphere’s an ocean, we’re all bottom-dwellers.  Ancient peoples populated the sky above with incorporeal beings, starting with a god, or gods, at the top.  Beneath that great being were other, for lack of a better term, spiritual beings.  Angels, etc.  Eventually, the lower you got in the sky, the heavier bodies became until those of us bound to our planet by gravity (for which they had no concept) were pretty much stuck on earth.  Although this may not seem like it, it was an early form of scientific thinking.  Birds fly.  The first thing you notice upon lifting a bird, is how light it is.  (Bird lifting may be rare to those of us in modern times, keeping the wonder intact when we actually encounter it.  I was once handed an owl-hawk or some such raptor, at a street vendor stand at Stratford-upon-Avon.  As the handler slipped the glove on and asked me to hold my hand out, I prepared for like a five-pound bag of flour.  Instead I could barely tell that the bird, larger than a bag of flour, was even there.  “Light, isn’t he?” the vendor asked.)

Back to science.  If birds, which are light, can fly in the air—some at great heights—it must be that sky-dwelling beings are lighter.  Lighter than birds.  In the Middle Ages, in Europe, this proto-scientific thinking was applied to theology.   Monastics and scholastics tried to determine what exactly spiritual bodies were made of.  Keep in mind that their world consisted of a basically flat earth with a very large dome over it.  That dome had layers—the sun and moon lived in one, the stars lived in one, and then spiritual beings all the way up to God (since monotheism reigned by then).  Stories of angels and demons mating with humans circulated.  How was that possible if they were pure spirit?

It stands to reason that clouds also inhabit the skies.  It doesn’t take much of a scientist to associate heavy clouds with rain.  Logic suggests clouds are made of water.  Perhaps then spiritual bodies were some kind of vapor.  Lighter than air they inhabited realms far above the clouds.  They descend by gaining weight, perhaps like clouds.  These otherwise ethereal beings would be unknown to us, they dwell so high.  They have to come down to deal with us.  There may be realms even lower, but if the atmosphere’s an ocean, early science suggests, we are indeed bottom dwellers.

Winter Waiting

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The waiting, as Tom Petty knew, is the hardest part.  Along the slow turning of the wheel of the year it’s now light enough to go jogging before work.  That won’t last, however, because Daylight Saving Time is imminent and will set us back a month in the illumination department.  Also I haven’t been able to jog because the massive snowstorm we had a couple weeks back dumped over two feet of snow on the jogging trail and it hasn’t melted yet.  I miss it.  The jogging, I mean.  I’ve become one of those people who never the leave the house and I see how difficult it is just waiting.  Waiting for the snow to melt.  Waiting for the vaccine.  Waiting for the light.

I’m no psychologist, but I have to wonder if that isn’t one of the greatest stresses faced by the many stir-crazy people who’ve been shut-ins for pretty much a year now.  For us this snowstorm took away the little mobility we had.  Getting out daily for a constitutional put me in touch with nature, at least.  Now nature is under a thick, crusty white blanket, slumbering away.  But the birds have begun to return.  With their avian wisdom they’ve seen the end of winter.  Suddenly this past Wednesday they were here, bringing hope in their wings.  Birds have long been symbols of freedom—we’ve got a couple bald eagles in the neighborhood, reminding me of that.  A far more ancient association was that between the bird and the human soul.  The ability to soar.

We may still be mired in winter, but time is inexorable.  Relentless.  As the globe wobbles recklessly back toward the warmer seasons we need to take responsibility for our part in global warming.  Ironically these freak storms are the result of an overall warming trend.  The weakening of the jet stream that allows cold northern air to drop snow in Texas and storms to cover much of the rest of us all at the same time.  The pandemic has helped clear the air a bit.  At least we’ve rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, and we’ll try to begin undoing the damage to our planet that the last four years introduced.  It will take some time, of course.  By now we should be experts in biding our time.  The snow will melt.  The light will continue to grow.  I will get back out on that jogging path again.  But for now we wait.

Unnatural Nature

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It began as an odd sort of noise.  I had the study windows open during the morning of a heat wave and I heard a small, but metallic noise coming from the roof outside.  My study overlooks part of the first floor roof and slinking to the window I saw a sparrow trying to pick up a roofing nail.  We’ve had the roofers over twice already since we moved in a couple years back (and will have them again), and some of the nails from their work on the second-story roof landed here.  I’ve noticed sparrows pecking at them before.  Instead of skittishly flying away when I came up—I was only about a yard away—she still tried to lift the nail without success.  She then flew even closer to me, snatched up a different nail, and flew off with it.  Sparrows have, of course, adapted well to human dwellings, but what would a bird be wanting with a nail?  Surely not to make a nest?  It wasn’t even shiny—it was a rusty old one from the shingles replaced—since everyone knows birds are attracted to bright objects.

I’ve been a close watcher of nature my entire life.  This isn’t the same as being an outdoorsman, but when I can see outside, or when I do spend valued time outdoors, I look closely.  I always keep an eye out for animals on my daily jogs.  And I watch animal behavior through the window when work isn’t too pressing.  Still, I wonder about what a sparrow could want with a nail.  The next-door neighbors moved out a couple of months ago, and I watch the sparrows on their porch roof.  With no human activity nearby, they frequently gather there.  They seem to be picking up bits of human detritus—even pulling at, it looks from here, nails.  Now this behavior has me a little worried.  I’ve read about sparrows before and despite their innocent looks, they can be very aggressive birds, even attacking and sometimes killing larger perching fowl.  The idea of them weaponizing themselves is disconcerting.

Intelligence in nature is one of the last features many scientists want to admit to the the discussion.  There seems to be too strong a supposed correlation with shape of the physical brain and the ability to “think,” it seems to me.  I don’t know what the sparrows are planning, but clearly it involves gathering rusty old nails.  Even as I was writing this I noticed sparrows chirping aggressively.  Looking out my window across the street, I saw that a squirrel had crawled across an electric cable into a bushy roost where there must’ve been a sparrow nest.  Sparrows began flying into the fracas from all over the place, loudly chirping.  I couldn’t see what what happening because of the leaves, but the squirrel soon rushed out with a whole flutter of sparrows in pursuit.  Perhaps he’d discovered their plan with the nails.

Now, the next order of business…

Thoughts While Flying

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Uh-oh!  I seem to be airborne.  All that’s in front of me is concrete.  If I don’t do something, my exposed hands will hit first.  Tuck, and try not to hit your head.  Still, on impact the first thing I do is look around to see if anyone saw that.  It’s embarrassing to trip and fall, especially when you’re old enough to be avoiding that sort of thing.  I jog before it’s fully light out, however, and the sidewalks can be uneven.  Just in case anyone’s watching my Superman impression, I immediately climb to my feet and resume my pace.  I’ll be sore tomorrow.  As a jogger since high school you’d think I’d have this worked out by now, but you’re never too old to learn, I guess.

The amazing thing to me is just how much you can think in those fleet seconds that you’re actually in the air, about to hit the ground like a sack of old man.  That’s exactly what happened, though, from the split second I felt my toe catch in an unseen crack and felt my balance give way.  Taking additional steps while trying to straighten back up sometimes works, but my top-heavy head was too far out of sync and my feet were sure to follow.  Your memory of such things goes out of body and you watch yourself comically flying, without the grace of a bird, toward an unforgiving substrate.  Such is the fate of the early morning runner.  I don’t have time to do it during the day.  What if someone emails and I don’t answer?  They’ll think I’m slacking off.  Remote workers!

Despite the occasional spills, I’ve always enjoyed this form of exercise.  In the post-Nashotah House days while still in Wisconsin I’d sometimes do nine miles at a time.  Whenever I’ve moved to a new place I’ve gotten to know the neighborhood by jogging around.  Even if it’s not fully light you can see plenty.  (Although the cracks in the sidewalk aren’t always obvious.)  I tend to think about these things as life lessons.  Parables, if you will.  One of the deep-seated human dreams is that of flying.  Birds make it look so easy, and fun.  A human body feels so heavy when it impacts the ground.  I suspect that’s why we find gymnasts so fascinating to watch.  As for me, I’m just a middle-aged guy in sweats and wearing glasses.  And even as I head home I’m already thinking how remarkable the number of thoughts are in the few seconds while in flight, somewhere over the concrete.

The Birds

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While waiting for the bus, now that it’s light out that early, I like watching the birds. They have complex interactions and so many different styles of flying. They have ways that are a closed book to our species. From human eyes they seem so playful that it’s difficult to believe they participate in a struggle for survival. Evolution tells a different story, of course. Living not far from the great human nest of Newark’s Liberty Airport, it’s not unusual to see an engineered flying machine soaring high over their avian heads. Which, I wonder, are the better fliers? Birds, after all, evolved. Flying wasn’t planned, as far as we can tell. Although not so much around here, some birds don’t even fly.

I once read—many years ago and I can’t recall where—that if a person were to fly they would need an enormous chest to beat the very large wings they’d need for lift-off. Birds, apart from being naturally aerodynamic, have hollow bones which make them a touch fragile, but less tied to gravity. Our planes and jets, unlike the escape vehicle in Chicken Run, don’t flap. Bernoulli’s law keeps them aloft, along with some meticulous engineering and heavy fuel consumption. Humans may imitate nature, but they supersede it when they can. Still, I have to wonder why, if birds were a special creation as our literalist friends claim, God didn’t make them more like a plane.

Holding your wings out stiff all day, I’ll allow, would get pretty tiresome. Still, if you’re designing a critter to fly you might as well go with the best parts available, right? If not, I’m going to have a talk with my mechanic and ask for some of my money back. Birds, for all their charm, are very good illustrations of evolution at work. Dinosaurs taking to the air is so poetic that it has an organic feel. Flying is a great way to escape your land-bound predators. That step from long leaping to flying may be a doozie, but it seems to explain the shape of birds better than any intelligent design. Among bipeds, though, only one claims the place of being god-like in shape. Having said that, there are some flaws that a good biomechanical engineer might address. But then, who said God majored in engineering? When I went to college I was firmly under the impression that he’d majored in religion. And that, as many engineers might suppose, is for the birds.

Weather for the Birds

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As Christmas nears so does a warm front, dashing hopes of a white Christmas in New Jersey. Well, at least there are no tornadoes coming. The weather, as my readers know, has long been perceived as a divine barometer. In a time when patience is wearing thin with religion, and weary headlines ask if it will ever finally disappear, our animal cousins seem, as usual, to pick up on clues more readily than we. An article on the BBC science page describes how a set of tagged golden-winged warblers vacated their nest a day before a tornado struck. Scientists suspect that the birds—and likely other species of birds as well—picked up the infrasound of the tornadoes that is well below human hearing range. Sensing the danger, they flew nearly a thousand miles, stopping just south of the storm’s track.

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Of course, tornadoes don’t last an entire day. If the birds fled that long in advance, they couldn’t, I suspect, have heard a tornado that hadn’t formed yet. Since I’m no scientist, I’m not really qualified to offer an explanation, but I do wonder if such behavior isn’t related to consciousness. Several books that I’ve read recently have explored the concept of animal consciousness, and although we are reluctant to admit them to the realm of the self-aware, I wonder how long we can deny it. No doubt, if the birds fled (and returned after the danger had passed) there was an intentionality to their actions. Jealous of our intelligence, we must find a way to explain that animals can predict natural disasters of many kinds long before humans detect their more obvious traits. Our technology gives us seconds, or minutes, of warning. Dogs, cats, and birds know well in advance. But we are the superior beings here.

One of the problems with consciousness is that we can never get outside our own. Other people act in ways similar to us, and describe similar mental states, so we assign them the same kind of consciousness we have. Animals, not using human language, also act in similar ways to us. We call it “instinct” and continue on to the truly important stuff. I have no idea if birds can detect infrasound; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they could. Without the ability to place it in the context of danger, however, I doubt they would take a thousand mile vacation just after their annual migration. We could learn a lot from our fellow creatures, if only we’d admit them to the conscious club and not the food club. And perhaps they might be able to explain to us why, despite all we know, religion never seems to go away.

Two Sparrows

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Once I found a baby bird blown from its nest. Many future priests had walked by already that morning, not even noticing. At first I thought it was dead, but then it lifted its head weakly and opened its beak in a soundless cry for its mother. Afraid to touch it, I pulled on some gloves, took it home and called the local animal rescue center. With my daughter keeping the chick warm in the backseat, we drove down the country roads hoping the little thing would survive at least long enough to get professional help. When the trees leafed out and the air warmed up that summer, I received a call from Animals in Need. The bird had survived and was ready for release—would I like to let it go near where I found it? They had worked hard to prevent habituation, and I brought the bird home in a paper grocery bag that it occasionally tested to see if it could find its way out. With my daughter, I opened the bag in the woods and the bird was gone in a flash. We barely saw it as it flew to freedom.

If I were a rich man, well, I guess I would run for president. Perhaps it was being overseas for a week, but the presidential race seemed to fall from the news with Santorum’s demise (if ever I believed in divine intervention, it was on the day he dropped out of the race). Of course, those in Britain who knew me wondered about the carnival characters running for the “most powerful man” job. So we’re now left with a very wealthy man who’s just like the rest of us. Ironically, I’ve been thinking about the Bible—an occupational hazard—and wondering when the ideal of Jesus’ teaching was forgotten in the haste to become the richest Christian on the block (or empire, as the case may be). The disconnect couldn’t be sharper between the man who said that if you wanted to please God you had to give all your material goods away and a man running for public servant has more money than the last eight presidents combined. And Reagan was no slouch on the financial end. Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.

I can’t remember the last time I felt valued by a politician. At least the Democratic candidates attempt the lessen the suffering of the poor a little bit, but I still see people sleeping in the streets. The roller coaster that is the economy demonstrates its unfeeling course as some get rich then plunge to the depths only to soar out of them again into sunny spaces. According to the Gospels, Jesus said not a sparrow falls to the ground without God knowing it. Apparently that little bird I was privileged to rescue was part of the divine plan. That guy sleeping on the subway grate over there trying to keep warm? Well, the politicians apparently can’t see him, and I wonder if the God who watches the sparrows has noticed either.

Not a sparrow (golden pheasant)