Splash No. 151 - Birds
Birds
At age 12, I was lucky enough to have an eccentric life science teacher named Mrs. Farr, who managed to move quickly enough through the syllabus to grant us a multi-week unit on birds. Over the course of the unit, we learned to identify dozens of local birds by sound, by sight, by nature, and beyond. I often thought of how absurd it must’ve been to see a room of 7th graders at rapt attention as bird calls filled the room from our teacher’s computer. And although many of us thought the entire experience was wholly bizarre, Mrs. Farr’s enthusiasm overpowered our cliche wonderings of, “when are we ever going to use this?” Soon enough, we’d adopted her mnemonics to remember calls and changed the way we looked at the sky.
All these years later, I’ve been trying to fight my loneliness by looking up again. Noticing these birds expands your vision — you start to look in different places and look with a gaze that you never had before. The label “bird” falls flat and your ignored neighbors start to stand out, through their calls and their short appearances in your day.
My parents’ backyard is filled with trees, which means that we’re lucky enough to host dozens of birds. Even as I’m constrained to the indoors by my pollen allergies, I can still stare into the branches, catching glimpses of the cardinal that nests nearby every year. On my walks to the mailbox, I grin at the American Robins hopping around the grass, living up to their reputations as the harbingers of spring. On good days, I’m accompanied by the neighborhood red-tailed hawk (or Cooper’s hawk, I’m not sure).
I think about how Darwin observed the finches of the Galapagos and was able to figure out how we all came to be the way we are. He looked closer at these creatures than anyone ever had, wondering — why do these finches have beaks like these? Why do those finches have beaks like those? When we look at a manmade object, we can find intent in the details — a curve to match our fingers, a color to catch our attention, a plethora of decisions. When we look at nature in the same way, it’s impossible to deduce why these creatures are the way that they are. We may be able to understand the shape of a beak, but we’ll never know why a cardinal is red, not purple, or the exact reasons that each bird calls the way that it does.
I downloaded an app to identify birds, but thankfully, it often fails to match what I see. I saw a pair of brown birds soaring across the air, their wings sporting symmetrical white splotches. I spent way too long, looking at every medium-sized bird native to Georgia. I think they could be juvenile golden eagles, so maybe I’ll stick with that. It doesn’t matter if i’m right or not, because by seeing them and trying to identify them, I’ll remember them. I’ll remember the feeling of awe as they soared through the air lazily, in vaguely circular motions while staying close to one another. And I will continue to delight in their majesty and find divinity in their appearance. No number of hours at my desk working will reveal the truth that those eminent beasts do simply by moving through the air.
“I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! But the sparrow and I were no longer strangers. It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - Shadow Music of Thailand - really cool genre of music from Thailand in the 1960s inspired by Western music that was being brought over at the time!
ARTICLE - "Online shopping changed, and we barely noticed" by Terry Nguyen - interesting dive into the shifts in online shopping over the last couple of years.
SHOW - Billions - I watch this show with my parents every night and we're 3 seasons in! It's a drama about a hedge fund manager and a district attorney and their adversarial relationship.
With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
Donate to Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta Mutual Aid Networks
Anti-racism resources
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CAW CAW,
Nikhil