Stupid Birds

When my brother Daniel and I were kids, we could talk to birds. Well, not just any birds—we could talk to one specific bird. His name was Scarlet, and he was a robin who lived in our yard. All the robins around our house looked the same, of course, but we could always tell him apart: he was the one who would talk back to us. He was also whichever one was conveniently closest to the part of the yard we were playing in, but that made sense, because we were good conversation. He was just relieved to finally have someone to talk to whose every thought didn’t include eating bugs.

The secret to talking to birds is so simple that most people miss it. I had the revelation, one day, while desperately wishing I could make friends with one: all you had to do, I realized, was chirp in the same number of syllables as the word you were trying to say! It was a moment Archimedes would have been proud of, and I immediately shared my newfound knowledge with my younger brother, who went along with damn near anything I did (including, in one infamous incident, dressing him up as a woman and making him play dead on the couch while I told stories about the dead lady he was pretending to be. This apparently gave him nightmares). After that, we spent hours standing out in the yard staring intently at birds and chirping out messages. The only problem was that we couldn’t ever really tell what they were saying back; it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish syllables within bird noises. We’d kind of fudge it and I’d make something up, but this frustrated me, because I knew it wasn’t accurate, and I’ve always been a little uptight about that sort of thing.

As any reality show knows, when the absurdity factor is too high, you balance it out by adding in more drama. Which is how it came to be that we decided Scarlet had a girlfriend named Rosie. From then on, the possibilities were endless: we could talk to one or both birds, or we could speculate about why only one of them was around. We’d also try to get close enough to touch them, but of course that never happened. This frustrated me too, because it undermined the entire premise of the game, which was that these birds were our friends. If they were our friends, then why didn’t they trust us enough to let us get close to them?

My frustration with birds not allowing me to grab them was nothing new. My mother loves to tell the story of when I was four or five, and had gone out in the yard to try to catch some. I came back in disappointed, and expressed that I couldn’t understand why they kept flying away.

“Honey, they’re scared of you,” my mother told me gently.
That pissed me off. I opened the back door and shouted out into the trees, “STUPID BIRDS! I’M NICE!!”

As all of my friends and any guy I’ve ever dated can tell you, this has actually been a lifelong conflict of mine. To this day, I watch the fat little birds hopping around under my car in a parking lot and get the urge to dive under there after them. I can spend ages standing at our kitchen window watching the birdfeeder. My friends find this amusing and bizarre, and rather than trying to talk sense into me about it, several have taken to joining me. “I want it!” I’ll say, pointing at a nearby bird. “Let’s get it!” they’ll shout, and actually attempt to help me corner it, despite the fact that it’s a total cheater and can fly.

I’m not sure what I would actually do with one if I caught it, though, which is perhaps why I resist other people’s attempts to buy me birds at the pet store. The allure of a wild bird is that it is free to go anywhere at any time. It’s small and quick and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Birds do not need us and do not consult us, and have adapted to live in every part of the world. I suppose I admire that spirit of survival and envy that kind of freedom, and keeping them captive in my house would border on spite. So until the day I actually figure out how to communicate to those stupid birds that I am nice, I’ll have to content myself with watching them chirp and squabble, splash in puddles and carry twigs—wholly beyond my grasp.