For the Birds

In these days of an extraordinarily early spring that’s followed a mild unwintery winter, the birds have been busy. A not unusual thing to be sure, but I didn’t know what to expect now that our Chicago home has become a city condominium apartment. Would my bird viewing diet be confined to pigeons? Some blandly chirping sparrows?

In the weeks that followed our late January move, as I worked to make of our 21st floor aerie a humankind’s urban nest, I couldn’t help but be drawn to its large floor-to-ceiling windows, to our westerly city views and, from the dining room, to one narrow swathe north over a bit of Lincoln Park growing greener by the day, and beyond that, of Lake Shore Drive and the lake itself. Some days it almost seemed as if I were attempting to imprint views near and far, the way, perhaps, our island ospreys do, taking in whatever markers they need to return to their nests each spring. 

In part, I was looking for the birds. Having met some of my fellow building residents, I also wanted to acquaint myself with whatever winged inhabitants I now shared a neighborhood. It didn’t take long to discover the crows who, perceiving menace, and with raucous alarms and in full-throated, unrelenting chase, alerted me to a peregrine falcon that many afternoons, seemingly oblivious of the clamorous posse in hot pursuit, routinely soars between nearby buildings intent only on nabbing a fat pigeon for supper. 

As spring increasingly took hold, I began to lament the loss of my favorite early harbinger of the new season’s imminent arrival – the male cardinal who perched atop our former yard’s small hawthorn tree, a carmine point around which a dreary end-of-winter gray collapsed. Identified formally as cardinalis cardinalis and more commonly as crested cardinal, our reliable messenger became known to me as Little Buddy – in clear violation of my pledge not to anthropomorphize by way of such names. Though I often caught bright glimpses of the cardinal throughout the winter, Little Buddy became most fully himself in early spring – a bright chap who seemed at first a bit overdressed but after several mornings of unrelenting, heart-bursting melody in which he re-pledged his ardor to his mate and warned off any would-be suitors, appeared instead to have been yoked to all of spring’s renewing color and hauled it into view, even as the sparrows went about their brisk business in dull unchanging brown. I have to presume that Little Buddy still reigns atop that hawthorne this spring, hopefully not unnoticed by our former house’s new owners.

In the city, I’m living again in the neighborhood of my 20s and early 30s, and where, 35 years ago, my husband Bob and I first met. And where, now, far from the island, we continue to seek balance, negotiating our ongoing commitments to work, family and whatever allegiances to our natal city remain. And where, with most of the boxes unpacked and my morning’s writing routines re-established, I have begun walking more, as though to re-introduce myself, to know these once familiar streets in my body, to measure them with my stride. Many afternoons, I push away from my desk and on errands I even sometimes “invent,” I walk the nearby residential streets beneath trees increasingly leafing out.

Recently, carrying home a small sack of groceries and just one block away from our building’s entrance, I was, through familiar sound, suddenly overcome by disbelief – a kind of childish “Lassie Comes Home” moment – in which I became convinced Little Buddy had followed us to the city. And was up in a tree, belting out his usual song. I stopped on the sidewalk, set down my grocery bag and scanned the overhanging branches of the trees that so generously line this neighborhood’s streets, a not insignificant factor in our having chosen it. And, sure enough, up in a large flowering crabapple, a point of familiar red – not Buddy, but, surely, kin. And so similarly full of melodic ardor, an ardent from-the-body pumping that, I wondered, could a cardinal be anything but red? In the days that followed, as temperatures stayed impressively balmy enough to keep our windows cracked open, I’d lay in bed just after dawn, before wind or traffic stirred things up, and faintly catch notes of the cardinal’s ardent calling down the street, and though the imperatives behind his song had nothing to do with me, was tempted into believing a kind of lyrical “welcome to your new neighborhood” message lie within it.  

Some afternoons, I abandon any obligation to feign errands or purpose, and, when feeling a shoreline’s familiar tug, I turn east and walk to the lakefront. Or I head north, up through the park, to the boardwalk encircling an urban wildlife pond. There, along the pond’s muddy banks and marshy pockets, I;m learning that various species of ducks seem to possess a mostly bottoms-up perspective of spring. Here, too, as elsewhere, the reputedly mated-for-life Canada geese seem reliably paired off. But these urban geese, I’m told, are among the Midwestern stay-overs. Non-migrant, they hang out all winter at aereated ponds. Still, when my approach on the path roused one couple from their leisurely stroll amidst the grass, granite steps and benches beyond the pond’s embankments, they erupted into the same loud honking, albeit of an angrier, scolding sort, as that of their wilder counterparts -- honkings more familiar to me at long range, from high overhead Vs arrowing south, in which I try to imagine what if any urges they create passing over a barnyard of domesticated fowl.

Continuing along the pond’s path, I’m often tempted further north, to loop around or cut through Lincoln Park Zoo, a route that takes me past the aviary enclosures. There, last week, I discovered spring also brings forth the mating ardor and nest-building urges of the confined. A vulture, after an elaborate, invigorating bath, presented himself in full-feather display to a seemingly unimpressed female pecking about in the dirt. Seemingly alone in a rocky and, to my eye, largely unsuccessful attempt to replicate a miniature African plain, a male ostrich strutted, turned a wary eye in my direction, then, without hesitation, dropped to the ground, neck stretched out, head on the ground, as though he were back in his native land when predators approached and was attempting to hide in the grass while sitting on a nest, a duty in which male ostriches fully participate.

Suddenly, in spite of or maybe because of the day’s beauty and my freedom to freely roam within it, the zoo began to sadden me. Yes, the Lincoln Park Zoo is a fine one. Yes, the biological imperatives of these birds were intact – to find a mate, build a nest, produce offspring, fill a belly. But what of the connection to a native environment, the instinctual commitment to a place? To what is remembered, ancestral, carried within? As with the island’s ospreys for example, whose faithfulness to a particular nesting site is instinctive, their pull to return to it an unyielding urge?

And whose journeys, come spring, are clearly different from mine. Still, I like to believe we’re kindred spirits. That somehow, perhaps, we experience similar stirrings in the blood, irresistible seasonal urges. What Walt Whitman called the “irresistible urge to depart” or as poet Jim Harrison observed in birds gathering at a season’s turning: “their intentions are in their blood.”

Weeks ago, an island friend told me the Little Crow Island ospreys have returned to their nest and I presume those of Heart Island have, too. And though I'm enjoying the avian and non-avian discoveries within my new neighborhood, my intentions are already in my blood – how, next month, I’ll pack the car and head east. Yes, my journey will be different from the ospreys, as are the imperatives. But perhaps we recognize some of the same markers along the way – Caterpillar Hill, the bridge crossing the Reach, the serpentine causeway. Soon, their high-pitched kew, kew, kew will announce a new, different season, as imprinted within me as an impresario cardinal’s melody.