For the Birds

“Do you hear that?” Dad stopped his fork midway between his plate and his mouth, one evening at dinner and – mouth still gaping – turned to the window.  “Sounds like an axe?”           

Our kitchen overlooked a wooded yard, hayfields, and two ponds. “It’s a pileated woodpecker!” he continued, pressing his finger hard against the window, while the rest of us wiped condensation off the glasses that held our fruit tea. By the time my dad was fifty, he’d dropped out of high school six times, gotten his GED, and attended five colleges. When his company offered to pay the tuition of employees for continuing education, he took the plunge once more and began studying birds.

“There it is!  See its hat?”

At the time, I was more into watching the newest Cindy Lauper video. The problem with birds is that they’re small.  And they fly.  So when Daddy spotted rare birds sitting on “that limb,” I was never able to find them before they darted away. He’d, of course, tell us their diet and habitat, but by that time, the bird would’ve flown off and my disinterest would’ve turned into the self-absorbed frustration that comes with placing an inordinate value on one’s own time. I rolled my eyes as he identified birds by their calls and hung hummingbird feeders every five feet on the porch.

Just a few days after he spotted that woodpecker in our yard – or was it more?  It couldn’t have been more than a month or two – I noticed my dad was holding a book with a blue bird on the front of it – a bluebird or a robin?  I couldn’t tell.  A couple of blonde kids grabbed the book and ran my way.

“Look, Mom,” they said running to me.  “PaBob gave it to me.”

“No, to me!”

In what seemed like a few moments, “Daddy” had become “PaBob” and my interest in MTV had been replaced by sippy cups and Spiderman.  Apparently, my Dad figured those kids who, through a twist of fate and marriage, grown up in New York and Philly should be interested in flying things that weren’t pixies or superheroes.  It almost embarrassed me for him. After all these years, he still was under the impression that birds were so mesmerizing. We dutifully took the book home, and listened to the CD attached to the back cover (a recording of each songbird) one afternoon while laying in a sunny spot on the floor.

“The Eastern Kingbird.”

The NPR voiced woman announced each bird song with the placid voice of someone who has never watched Keifer Sutherland disemboweling a terrorist in a single episode of 24.  I showed Austin the photo of the bird while we listened to its song.  We turned the page.

“The Eastern Wood Pewee.” Her lulling voice was in stark contrast to this bird’s song -- a long, drawn-out peeee-weeee.  If people were named the same way some birds are – by the sounds they make -- my husband wouldn’t be “David,” but rather “I’ll-get-up-in-ten-more-minutes” French.  (My daughter and son would be “He-hit-me” and “She-hit-me,” respectively.)  Dad used to shush us in the woods and whisper, “Do you hear that cardinal?”  My mom complained that he could hear a wren from a mile away but couldn’t hear her request to take the garbage out if she asked him from across the table.

To my utter surprise, my son listened to every song of the “top one hundred most popular song birds in North America” before going out on our balcony.

“A bird!” he exclaimed breathlessly, flipping through the pages of his book.  “Let’s see…  it’s blue with a red chest…. That means…” he used all the deductive powers his five year old mind possessed, and -- since he couldn’t read a lick – proclaimed, “it’s gotta be an eagle!”

Austin’s avian interest really, um, took flight, and he’d ask me, “Have you ever seen a cedar waxwing?”

“Sure,” I’d respond.

“Tell me the story.”

Of course, there never was a story.  Birds in the south were just ambient noise, part of the rural soundtrack -- I noticed them less than I’d notice an air-conditioning turning on in an apartment. Sometimes I made something up about evading an angry waxwing by car-jacking an armored vehicle carrying diamonds and getting chased by police, but his curiosity was never quenched. 

“Why is the goldfinch not called a yellowfinch?” he’d ask.

“What’s the difference between a crow and a blackbird?”

“Are all geese Canadian?”

Finally, we headed to my hometown where pre-cut cedar pieces of a bluebird house were already stacked on the porch waiting for us to assemble. Soon, Austin was on the porchswing next to PaBob, binoculars pressed so tightly he resembled a raccoon when he removed them from his face. Sitting there with them, I noticed our yard was not the quiet sanctuary I remembered.  Instead, it was dominated by loud, talkative birds… the avian equivalent of a Jerry Springer audience.

My dad used to take care of an eagle’s nests in Tennessee, after one was discovered on his employer’s – a paper company’s -- land.  He banded the eaglets’ talons to monitor their health, and brought school children out on field trips.   Over the next fifteen years, more than thirty baby eagles come into this world, all under the careful eye of my father.  I vaguely remember him proudly taking me out there once, but I’m sure I was less impressed than I would’ve been had he done something exotic, like carry a briefcase.

That week, we climbed into my dad’s vehicle whose true color was obscured by mud and had pieces of tree jammed into the external crevices.  When I climbed in, a perturbed spider gave me a dirty look before going back to raising its family under the passenger seat.  I breathed in deeply the smell of dust and Deep Woods Off.

 “Look up in that oak tree,” Daddy said, pointing.  Austin bounded from his car seat, binoculars around his neck and bird book in hand.

“Um, you’re going to have to be more specific,” I said, not knowing my oak trees from the Oak Ridge Boys.  I explained to Austin that Pabob loves trees even more than he loves birds, and his eyes widened doubtfully, as if it weren’t possible.

Two eaglets perched on the side of a nest.  We sat on a ridge for an hour, hoping the mother would return to feed her babies while Dad regaled us with interesting facts about eagles – their wingspan can be as large as seven and a half feet, a man can stand on the edge of their large nests, they aren’t bald until their third birthday…  While we waited, I suddenly heard a tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping sound.  “Do you hear that, Dad?” 

Austin sat upright, excited.  “What is it? What is it?”

“Do you think it’s a pileated woodpecker,” I whispered, remembering those moments I unceremoniously blew off years before.  I tried to shake off a tinge of sadness, like you feel when you realized you should’ve gone to a party that was already over.

We sat there silently.  Daddy looked up in the sky, Austin flipped furiously through his book to the pileated woodpecker’s photo.  Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap… then silence.

Austin jumped every time it started up again, and we scanned the other trees expectantly.

Finally, Daddy shook his head and said, “I can’t hear it.  My ears aren’t too good anymore.”

All weekend, I noticed little things, like if Austin asked him whether a certain bird was a vulture or a hawk, he’d say, “yes.”  His ears were damaged when he was young, in the Marine Corps shooting without protection, but I hadn’t noticed his hearing being this bad.

“Daddy, Austin wants to know if you’ve ever seen a hawk,” I’d enunciate, acting as a liaison.

“Sure.”

“Tell me the story,” Austin shouted from his car seat.

“Well, once I had to shoot one….” he began, “that had a wingspan as big as my Jeep…  It was attacking…” 

Dad didn’t have to concoct stories.

“Have you ever seen an owl, he wants to know?” I’d relate.

“Tell me the story,” Austin shouted excitedly.

“I once saw an owl bully an eagle out of its nest.  It was early one morning when…”

That week, we went to the Wal-Mart parking lot late at night to see night hawks eating the bugs around the tall lights and spotted blue herons at the lake. We saw hawks being chased off by crows, and Dad even taught Austin to whistle the call of the quail, which quickly became a secret code between them. Whenever they were in the same crowded room – at Cracker Barrel, the movies, or at church --  Austin would whistle bob-WHITE, wait, and giggle uncontrollably when he’d hear Pabob’s whistle in reply.

The night before we were to leave, we were all exhausted from all our avian adventures, and I heard Austin crying in his bed.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I’m crying because Pabob likes trees more than birds,” he wailed. 

I scooped him up and tiptoed down the stairs to PaBob, to clarify whether he did, in fact, have a preference.  Daddy was sitting in a recliner watching the news when I brought in the bleary eyed little boy.

“Austin’s afraid you like trees better than birds,” I said slowly, to underscore the emotional stability at stake – apparently, he simply wanted to love the same things PaBob loves (and wasn’t ready to tackle botany until after kindergarten).

Pabob touched him on the head and assured him, “Oh, I like trees mainly because they give the birds a place to build their nests.”

Austin nestled happily back into my arms, and I struggled back up the stairs with my forty pound ornithologist.  I wondered how I’d keep up with his interest in birds – he already was able to distinguish between the species better than I – if I said, “Look a crow!” he’d invariably say, “You mean that purple martin?”

I put Austin back in his bed, pulled the sheet up around his head to protect him from the dark, and whispered, “I’m glad you love birds so much.” He saw things immediately that took me a long time to see.

He opened his eyes and looked at me, before turning over and going to sleep, “I don’t love birds,” he said, groggily.  “Mostly, I like hanging out with Pabob.”