Birdbrain

“Tell me all you know about starlings.” It was a writing prompt like the ones Natalie Goldberg gives to students, only Goldberg had actually said “Tell me all you know about mashed potatoes.”

Mashed potatoes cannot compete with starlings. My story will try to illustrate how that is true. Please bear with me.

***

The woman knows her story must sound odd at first, maybe even give the impression that she has some issues with, say, her mental stability. However, that is not the case. All the parts and participants do fall into place, like the parable of mustard seed, from Matthew 13:

The Parable of the Sower

13 On the same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea. 2 And great multitudes were gathered together to Him, so that He got into a boat and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore.

3 Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. 5 Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. 6 But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. 7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. 8 But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

The little girl had heard the parable in Sunday School and so she knew that Jesus was referring to how the Kingdom of God starts with a small seed. It grows and grows, just gets immense. It was a black mustard seed, somebody had said, but the girl did not know this and if she had, she would have questioned how anybody could even know that. She did know that mustard plants had pretty yellow blossoms and some have very large, furry leaves with dark leaves. She had never eaten black mustard, though, and thus in her experience mustard was some shade of yellow.

She wasn’t thinking about mustard, anyway, back then. She was more interested in the birds, because she had discovered the starlings.

The woman recalls both the parable and the starlings, but she is thinking now that there is an important meaning in them. The starlings, that is. The moral of her story is slightly different from the parable. She knows that it is a tragedy to waste precious spaces, times of day, and animal sounds. Many things we encounter every day are cast off or ignored. We do nothing with them and they pass through us like air or water. They melt or are stepped on. They are gone forever. 

The starlings were different. Whether or not they produced many more birds, like mustard seeds produce many plants in a field, is not the relevant part. The birds were the seeds and filled her brain. The woman wonders if the girl would have spent so much time with them if she had known what they would do to her, to her mind, to her memory.

The girl, whose name was Lynn, knew about the broken piece of barn siding. The siding had been painted yellow long before she was born, just as the barn had been erected long ago. She never questioned those sorts of things, but she did notice the triangular piece that had somehow broken off. She went over to it and when she was a few feet away, she heard it. The chirping of birds. 

Because the broken board was high up, Lynn went to the side of the house that faced the driveway and began to drag a wooden fruit crate toward the back yard. It wasn’t so sturdy any more, so she was cautious as she raised her slender body up onto it and leaned toward the yellow wall. The smell was the first thing she noticed. It wasn’t a nice smell. It smelled like a nest, and nests, well, they smell like birds and their bodily functions. She got down and went to play, but left the crate beside the barn. She hoped it would hold her up the next time she scrambled onto its flimsy slats.

Cawing was clearly coming from the barn, and Lynn peeked in again. There was a big beak scolding her. She dropped back to the ground, tumbled actually, but the grass was soft. A couple of days later, she returned and discovered the eggs. The woman thinks the eggs were blue, because there was an empty one that had hatched on the grass and it was blue. At the time, the girl had thought it was a robin’s egg (they were the special ones), but the woman knows starlings can lay blue eggs as well. Maybe not the same blue, but blue all the same.

Lynn’s mother called from the kitchen window warning her that there was a nest of starlings there. She wouldn’t harm them, but Lynn could tell she didn’t like them. It was probably because of the smell or because they were, admittedly, noisy. They cawed, when a lot of birds sing. Maybe Lynn’s mother would have liked them more if they’d had pretty voices, songs with real musical notes.

Babies of all animal species are noisy, thought Lynn, once the eggs had hatched, but these nestlings are a gift to me. She was small herself, and couldn’t reach the open place to peer in without hoisting herself up on the crate, but she still felt like the guardian of that home for the birds that others barely noticed and most didn’t like. She had an important task, that was clear.

Lynn knew why she had to protect the birds and their young: their name. The minute her mother gave her that word, gave her the birds’ name, she held tight to it:

Star-ling

Star

Ling

Starlight

She held tight and tugged, day after day. The name of the birds justified her loyalty: STARling. The birds had stars in them. The scruffy nest, the cramped space, were irrelevant. The slight unpleasant odor was also irrelevant. The birds were starlings and they had begun to shine brightly in her mind. The woman knows this now. Both the woman and the girl retrace their steps.

The broken piece of yellow siding was about a foot and a half from one corner of the barn. That corner was aligned with a series of stones on one side of the rock garden. Those stones were big and even. They could have been cement instead of stone, but the little girl didn’t ask herself that question and the woman is too far away now to return to look. Lined with iris, hyacinths, grape hyacinths, daffodils, a portulaca and another flower or two, this side of the rock garden moved downhill a little from the corner of the barn. It was probably about six feet long, but Lynn’s memory might not have been accurate.

What the little girl did was perhaps normal for a child. She loved the flowers, desperately, because she wanted them to last forever. She had to go all the time to be with them. She talked with them, cupped many in her hands, caressed outer petals and watched, sometimes with the good fortune of seeing a ladybug inside a blossom. If you were standing by the corner of the barn looking down that line of stones, to right of them was the triangle of rock garden that curved out in front.

Hens and chicks, pansies, petunias, sweet alyssum, ageratum, probably more flowers - they grew there every year. Most were annuals, so they had to be replaced every year, but some, like the hens and chicks - birds by name only - were forever plants. The woman has hens and chicks now, in fact, in her own garden. She doesn’t know when the rock garden by the yellow barn stopped being replenished every spring and doesn’t want to know.

Some of the plants in the rock garden were the same as Lynn’s mother put in the family’s cemetery urns on Memorial Day, but the overlapping couldn’t be helped. They were all pretty, nonetheless, no matter where they were.

The woman reads one day that there is a thing called a murmuration of starlings.

Little Lynn listened carefully. Cawing. Not pretty, but she knew she was an invader in the birds’ dominion. She tried to explain to them that she was not their enemy. She would even protect them from her mother if it were necessary, although she knew her mother was a very kind woman.

Now the woman knows how starlings can mimic as many as fifteen to twenty songs, and that sometimes they imitate other animals, not simply birds. Lynn had only heard one raucous cry coming from the nest, nothing fancy, nothing very melodious.

A murmuration. It is an impressive sight, resembling waves of liquid air undulating above and around the people who are fortunate enough to encounter one. The birds come together but don’t clash, they don’t bump into one another or knock any of their companions out of the sky. Even if the murmuration’s movement about the sky appears to have some help from physics or aerodynamics, the woman believes they are a perfect model for society. They model how labor and mutual protection in large groups can be fair, how guidance can make for success and survival. 

Star(ling). That first syllable, with its focus on light, never faded, never fades. The little birdies were crying out from the tiny nest. They were bathed in darkness, protected, although the sunlight was shining in on a slant. The little girl wasn’t thinking about the four compass points, but she knew how it reached inside the broken board, just like she knew her face reached inside and promised the little ones they were fine, would be fine. She only knew where the sun was in the sky, over her left shoulder.

Fireflies always lit the rock garden with golden sparks and the bright yellow celandine under the back porch in the summer played its part too. Are there any left? The woman wonders and wishes she knew. She also wishes she knew if the black walnut tree that used to grow so insolently close to the back porch is still there or if it has been sold for thousands of dollars to make furniture. She recalls the phone call out of the blue from a man offering two thousand dollars for the tree. She also recalls slamming the phone down, wondering how the man knew her number and how he knew about the tree. The tree that belonged to the yellow house that matched the yellow barn exactly and had belonged to Lynn. It was Lynn’s because she spent hours playing beneath it, picking up the green-skinned walnuts, trapping fireflies, writing secret stories on maple leaves with the juice from the celandine stalks.

Starlings. To her right was the barn itself with its big door, then two lilacs. The scent was better than the one that came from the nest of baby birds. 

Starlings. Such a pretty name for what seemed to be a homely bird. Lynn did not know that the starling actually has iridescent feathers. Look closely!

Starlings, the woman now knows, come in many types, colors, sizes. Their origin might have been Micronesia, wherever that is. Purposefully introduced into North America around 1890, these were immigrant birds. Immigrants have signified many different things over the span of many generations. Lynn knew very little history when she discovered her birds, but she had heard that some of her family had been immigrants and knew her father had been proud of them.

The secret starling nest had been part of a configuration of lives that swooped and swirled around a back yard that had nothing special about it - except for the rock garden, the celandine that could paint skin orange when cut, the fireflies, the walnut tree. Back yard - with hyacinths, peonies full of ants, hollyhocks with cup-shaped blossoms that could be coaxed into posy ladies, a stray rhubarb plant that was big enough to make a pair of pies from its stalks. 

The woman doesn’t want to think too much about the back yard that is bigger than a universe because it no longer exists. She prefers thinking about the word that describes the starlings and their murmurations. Apparently people in other parts of the world are fascinated by this event and make a habit of watching for them. There are even guided tours for the curious people, adults, who fall under the starlings’ spell.

The Audubon Guide provides four songs or calls for starlings. The woman hasn’t heard them, but Lynn has, and she remembers hearing each one exactly as it sounds on the web page. This makes the woman sad. She wonders if her memory is fading. If memories are becoming transparent instead of remaining warm, flickering in the first hours of dusk like the little lightning bugs. She feels intense pain and thinks it must be this disease that has come to claim her. The illness has no name yet, but it is nestled inside a warm, dark space like baby birds inside a barn slat. It may take years to reveal its identity and exact location. For now, the woman must discover more about the back yard birds or she will go mad, she will go stark, raving mad. Starling mad, even.

These are intelligent birds. They might not have spoken a language Lynn understood, but she listened anyway. She remembers anyway. The woman now knows that the species can imitate sounds like a car makes when its alarm goes off. That is no easy sound to imitate! They can also identify human speech - even the speech of specific humans - and might be able to provide information on human language. Lynn’s starlings surely must have recognized her voice, her ‘western New York’, and the babies could have passed their memories of her on to their offspring. That leads to the possibility that if she or the woman were to go back to the barn, the rock garden, the back porch and the barn, there could be a tenth- or hundredth-generation set of starlings who would know and remember her. Except the barn is gone, burned to the ground in a hellish fire started by boys smoking weed behind the barn door where Lynn had never gone. The black walnut tree might have been sold for furniture after all. The rock garden has probably just been buried under the dust of time.

Lynn did go on to do other things besides watching over the raucous nestlings. She moved away and came back less frequently than she would have liked. When she did, she never checked on the condition of the rock garden. She thought she’d forgotten about the starlings.

Some of the seeds, like the ones in the parable, found fertile ground the produced abundant plants. The seeds that fell on stone or among thorns had produced little or nothing, but there were enough memories and world to go around.

Lynn would go to college, in love with words, the color yellow, and the touch of mustard leaves,, celandine petals, feathers. 

The woman thinks about her mother again. Her mother, who was kind to even those she didn’t care for. The woman knows that all she has learned, she has learned from a bird called starling.