Birds — Melissa Nunez
I used to be the kind of person who didn’t like to run very far or very fast but could when called upon, for emergency situations—if I were being chased. I liked knowing I could create decent distance between myself and my would-be assailant. But I am not that kind of person anymore. In pursuit of reattaining this reluctant racing form, and because the lure of local wild increases as I age, my husband and I have been using our limited time together without our children to walk and bike the trails of the nature center nearest our house.
The first time we went to Bentsen State Park feeling near weightless and free, not bogged down by the water bottles and snacks and double-wide jogging stroller or countless quests for the closest restroom, we realized we had made it halfway down an unfamiliar trail without a map. The trails we have travelled tend to be clearly marked, we cross the occasional directional arrow, and from what we remembered most of them were designed to loop around and then lead back to their entry point, though they were not without the occasional fork. Out on the main paved path the trees are at a distance to allow clear view overhead, and even those mature enough to arc only gently kiss across our view of sky—bright light filtering easily through limbs and leaves.
But here, within the denser wood, in the stillness of silver shade, it was easier to imagine the possibilities. Traipsing towards what we believed to be the outlet only to find ourselves curving, still curving, locked in endless looping. Where trees entwine and limbs extend in effort of gulping lateral space and limited streamlets of sun, layers of archways lead to a golden beyond of clearing or the deeper darkness of thicker brush and hollows—pathway portals to shadow worlds. Dead, dry grass amassed among the bases of trunks and fallen branches, folding over and lacing together to create a beige blanket built for burrows. As our shoes crunched gray gravel, we sometimes heard the hush of movement along sloughed blades. The occasional lizard scattered at our steps, but the variable size of holes and hides, the ones apparent to our eyes, could house any number of creatures—roadrunners, thrashers, wild turkeys. Maybe more. As we stepped over fur-filled scat and muddled tracks we felt the weight of unseen eyes watching as we walked.
~
My mother came to stay with us for a month after she fractured her kneecap. This was just after we rescued a bird believed abandoned by its previous owners in a local playground. A blue and white parakeet we attempted to acclimate to our home and prime for hand training each evening. My mother’s injury kept her bound to the bed, secluded to her room at the beginning of her stay to prevent risk of further damage to the swollen, sutured limb, but once she was a little more mobile, we invited her to sit in on the sessions. She was wary at first, but then agreed to observe the effort.
“Just don’t let it close to me,” she said.
“Why? She’s just a little bird.”
My children, eager to stroke a wing or tail feather, perhaps even the gap of featherless skin at axilla peeked at preening, did not understand this hesitation. At most she nipped at us a bit, the small but hooked beak yet to break any skin. But my mother had watched The Birds and did not trust even one solitary avian creature. No matter the size. She refused to interact with the bird outside of her habitat. Without the safety of separation provided by the white wire bars. Where the puffing up of feathers and squawking at unannounced presence appeared playful. The open beak stretching out to meet any fingers, should they choose to invade her enclosure, indignant but harmless.
“You have to see it,” she told me. “Then you’d understand.”
But I already had an inkling of the menace she was meaning.
~
We come for the birds. Many nature preserves in our area are known for the feeding stations set up for the viewing of both native and seasonal species. All along the trails we see them gathering at the feeders, some flitting in and out of view as they collect their seeds to go. Others perching atop the planted branches, attempting to claim ownership for a while. Still more darting and diving, sounding calls accompanying the kinetic commotion to clear themselves a spot. As we move from gleaning glades to bird blinds of Bentsen Park the signs are everywhere. The warnings this was to be the last day of feeding. The reason for the season’s end: a parasitic species—a small, hunched crowish creature of more predatory posture, dark profile and red eye most prominent on the poster.
The bronzed cowbird takes advantage of the abundant food and congregated birds to deposit as many of its eggs as possible in the nests of others. Poaching prime real estate for their progeny without the invested labor. Absorbing energy and resources meant for others. A bird that likes edges, the crossover of ecosystems, we have seen them clumped in twos and threes along the power lines, increasing in number a little at a time until—before you realize—they are everywhere you look. With the fragmentation and isolation of green space, many places are all fringe now, allowing increased access to nests that used to be nestled deeper and dispersed within a wider wooded range. And though the cowbirds are native, they are a threat to these host species, especially those on environmental watch lists, upsetting the balance of biodiversity.
And this we cannot allow.
~
Standing in the driveway, the small strip of concrete that separates my carpet-grass lawn from that of my neighbor’s, I look up to a hawk hanging air above me, hovering the sky. Catching updraft wind and weaving higher, I follow it as it threads its way through a ribboning of raptors. A twirling tornado of birds in the distance. I try to count the bodies, but they billow and blend, forming one force. Building a battalion. Amid the whirling wonder, a question is plucked from the synapses of my brain: What if they were the threat to us? And then I had to watch it. The Birds. I had to see what others had imagined of their attacking. What horror Hitchcock had invoked. Was it just the fear of the foreign, the inhuman, an alien unknown? Or was it the guilt-riddled psyche redesigned as extrinsic retribution?
I did at first find myself agreeing with the skeptics in the film, the unlikeliness of it all. Birds banding together to launch mass attacks. They have the numbers, up to hundreds of billions around the world, but that number has been decreasing all this time—a vanishing of up to 1 in 4 in North America alone since the film was made. And we are the cause. Content to continue their capture in cages, the ravaging of their realms. Their numbers are slowly shrinking, and we are only growing. It’s not that I don’t want this proliferation for people, not that I want us on decline, but does it have to be by taking? Do we only flourish in destruction? Is it always gluttony and greed, this lust that leads to more of us? To the doubling of our numbers, the increase of our size, this contagion claim to the entirety of earth.
~
At a motor-bank I do not frequent but needed to visit to make a one-time business deposit, a sound has me searching left and right for its source. A shrieking. A squalling. A creature call of some kind. But the air and ledges around me are void. This experience is new to me, and I look it up when I get home. I am surprised to find, especially in Deep South Texas where the vast majority of migratory birds stop over if not make a transitory home, where birding has become an economy, it was avian deterrent—predator sounds combined with calls of distress and alarm blasted at inconsistent frequency to prevent the unwanted presence of birds. We don’t want to harm them, a website says. We just don’t want them where we are. It makes me wonder what the calls are saying. What words are at work within the sounds they captured? What are the birds hearing that makes them feel unsafe, that harrows and holds them distant? It’s not enough that we take and reshape the ground below, we also own the atmosphere above. We haunt the wind with waves of warning: don’t come near.
And yet, there is a bit of catch-22 to the situation. The sucking up of buffer space that would keep more of them at bay. When we supplant wood and grasslands with impatient interstates, placebo plazas we create an environment in which they must decide. Fight for diminishing resources in cutaway tracts, adapt suburban and city survival, or dwindle down to extinction. With the canopy shade of backyard habitat we beckon, invite the gathering at our proverbial doorstep, then blame them for the damming. Paint them as pollution. But there is no unpaving of the path, no unencroaching these cramped corridors.
~
They are coming. On feet. On wings. They are coming. Over land. Over water. And air. Driven by dearth and dirge, evading voyeur violence, they come in witness of apteria transposed. Augur of anthropocene era. The flux in slake of sunder.
AUTHOR BIO:
Melissa Nunez lives and creates in the caffeinated spaces between awake and dreaming. She makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where she enjoys observing, exploring, and photographing the local flora and fauna with her three home-schooled children. She is contributor for The Daily Drunk Mag and Yellow Arrow, and staff writer for Alebrijes Review. Twitter: @MelissaKNunez
