I am a bored twenty-something fantasizing about the apocalypse and paddling along the lake’s edge on a visit to my dad’s house on the Oregon coast. There’s that birdsong again, the one I always hear from my bedroom window when I’m trying to sleep in. A low note, a higher one, and then a long, languid trill that sounds like a barbershop quartet on helium.
I am not a bird person; I consider it frivolous. It’s 2006. My college professors talk a lot about peak oil, rapid corporate consolidation and control of the media, calving glaciers. Worst of all, my dad doesn’t believe me about any of this. But as much as I want to, at this moment I can’t focus on these problems. This bird is taunting me. There, in a marshy thicket of reeds, I hear it again. I’m so close. The bird is like a superhero with fingers gripping the edge of his mask, ready to pull. All I have to do is peek in there.
The reeds form a green wall laced with dewy spiderwebs, and instinct tells me to keep my boat out of this mess. But there’s that bird again.
“Conk-la-ree!”
Though I grew up casually bird-watching, as a city kid might get to know cars and traffic, I never paid much attention to make and model. So when I finally lift my paddle to part the reeds, and see this bird with its dinosaur-toes wrapped around one green stalk, impossibly bold, refusing to flutter away, I am shocked when its name rises right to my lips. So shocked, I’m forced to say it aloud to nobody at all.
“Red-winged blackbird.”
The red band on its black wing did give it away.
The knowledge, the power of naming that one persistent bird, as I look back on it now, seemed to stir up some trouble in me. This trouble could also be called a burning curiosity, which several years later led to me owning a very dorky pair of binoculars and pursuing a non-lucrative career in ecology.
Back to the bird. Turns out, the blackbird not only refuses to conform with the little brown songbird dress code, it also eschews the little bird habit of taking the exit for extinction on the mad superhighway that is the 21st-century biosphere. So far, Cornell estimates that 30% of songbirds have been lost since 1970. I don’t know why the blackbird has persisted. But I do have some first-hand experience with its ability to thrive.
Two years ago, I moved to a neighborhood in north Central Point that’s a blackbird mecca from fall to spring. Forming erratic clouds with their numerous bodies, they can scarf down hundreds of dollars of birdseed in a matter of days, tweeting and trilling in a mad chorus.
The first time it happened, I turned to Audubon for reassurance that this was not the apocalypse I’d once dreamed of in feathered form. The website not only had some fun facts to share (there are 22 subspecies/races of red-winged blackbird in North America!) but also good news. As the planet warms, red-winged blackbird populations are expected to continue to stay stable. Temperature models show that more suitable habitat will open up for them across large swaths of what is currently the subarctic zone, as well as in drier places like the central parts of Mexico and the US Southwest.
Today, red-winged blackbirds may be the most numerous bird in all of North America, or so claims Wikipedia. What’s undisputed is that despite humanity’s destructive presence on the planet, the blackbird is still here, and may remain here always, singing from a cobwebby thicket in a marsh, wearing its name on its sleeve, singing into our walls of learned indifference.
Curiosity will not save us from the apocalypse. It won’t even keep us from being the very cause of its unfolding.
But it sure does make it a lot more interesting.
Tuula11 