Birds
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
It’s as easy as it is rewarding
For a long time I have told people, with an amount of frustration, that I liked bird-watching before it was cool to like bird-watching. This isn’t actually true, as it has always been kind of cool to like bird-watching. Basically, all the cool guys of history have liked it.
Aristotle was super into bird-watching. He was also arrogant (as many of the great thinkers throughout time have been and still are), so he made sweeping false statements about birds. He saw birds disappear in the winter and, even though many early scientists were already onto migration, he told everyone that…
This Is Us
An appreciation of the American goldfinch
Near the end of Freedom, one of Jonathan Franzen’s novels about a family that is awful to each other, Walter Berglund, the paterfamilias and an obvious stand-in for Franzen, gets angry at his neighbors for letting their cat roam the neighborhood and kill songbirds. Walter captures the cat and takes it to a distant no-kill shelter, and Franzen presents the scene with the quiet righteousness of someone who has long harbored a specific revenge fantasy. It is that part of the novel — not the adultery, or war profiteering, or even the character who fishes his own turd out of…
Learning the language of birdsong is easier than you think
Dawn
That magical part of the day when the night is folded up and put away, the sky blooms in pinks and golds and the birds begin their day with song. You may or may not be awake for the dawn chorus of dozens of species of birds, but at some point in your day, certainly, you have the opportunity to hear birds singing. Wouldn’t it be nice to know who is singing some of those songs?
Learning bird songs is rewarding, and not so difficult. Anyone can learn to identify at least a few of the birds that are singing…
I spend a lot of evenings just wandering around looking at things; eyeing shadows slowly rise from story to story in the glint of windows, and across the bricks and cement and fire escapes of apartment buildings: the soft fall of daylight dying on a nightly basis.
Architecture really affects me. The way old, red-brown-veined bricks carry the tarry soot-stained memories of a hundred years; peeling paint and scarred wood; Neo-Byzantine columns; roman-numeral intaglios and seal-head reliefs carved into entryways; deep-set windows, curved bay windows, double-hung barred windows, casement windows, straight sleek tinted windows all in a row; fluted highlights…
