Winter birds and other epiphanies
No. 145
On New Year’s Day I saw my first house finches of the season. It was cold and a little gusty, the kind of weather that gets the Texas songbirds slightly frantic as they flitter around looking for available nooks in the machined shelter we provide. The first one I saw had found the space under the sun shield of the old Airstream trailer where I work. It was perched on the armature that elevates the curved plastic cover at a 45-degree angle from the fuselage, and the finch didn’t notice me admiring it through the window from the inside, right by the little shrine I keep to lost loved ones. As one who tends to get more excited about raptors and big herons, it was a reminder of the potency of more modest wonders.
The first time I ever saw house finches was in the period when I lived in a downtown Austin apartment in the late oughts, life upended at the onset of middle age by unanticipated developments at home and work. The building had been completed just as the Financial Crisis settled in, so rents were reasonable, and I opted for a second floor unit with a big walled-in balcony over the roof of a ski shop and a view of two parking garages, a surface parking lot, and a run-down park that hosted a circle of ancient oaks in the shadows of an abandoned office building. When we moved in over winter break, my son and I filled the balcony with live plants and bird feeders. After a few grey weeks of visitations from the more common concrete-tolerant species—grackles, pigeons, and doves—the washed-out watercolor red highlights of the house finches were a marvel. When we looked them up in the book, I was disappointed by the barnyard ordinariness conveyed by the common name, wishing for something more exotic.
I should have read more deeply at the time, as it turns out the story of the house finch is a little more interesting. Until the middle of the 20th century, the species was mostly sedentary, confined to the region west of the Rockies. In the years before World War Two, they started showing up in East Coast pet stores, marketed as “Hollywood finches” and talked up for their beautiful song. In 1940 an incensed bird lover reported one such group of birds for sale in Brooklyn to the Audubon Society. They began an investigation—complete, in some kind of bird nerd variation on Sam Spade, with “undercover Audubon operatives”—and determined that around 100,000 representatives of the species we now know as Haemorhous mexicanus had been shipped to the East Coast. Federal game wardens were dispatched, and one hounded wholesaler purportedly released its flock on Long Island not far from Jones Beach.
Slowly at first, and then very rapidly, the finches adapted, and their population exploded. By 1981 their range had expanded from the Northeast into Virginia. And, amazingly, they learned to migrate south for the winter. By the early 90s, they could be found from Minnesota to Oklahoma, and even in Texas east of the Panhandle, with some populations settling down here year-round. We all have to find our way to new homes sometimes, and a safe way to get there.
The appearance of the finches this year reminded me of the time, ten years ago and change, that the white pelicans came through. It was right after Agustina, Hugo and I finished building our weird new home in this run-down empty lot we found at the edge of town, between a 1980s industrial park and the forested floodplain of the urban river, where it winds its way free from the last dam impeding its path to the Gulf. One winter morning in 2013, as January drifted into February, walking up to the house, I glimpsed motion just above the treeline. White objects cascading in the air, almost like snow. Big, fleshy snow, shimmers of crisp white planes turning in the light, slowly descending, as if a low-flying aircraft had dumped a hundred pillowcases to float down. I watched as long as I could, long enough to realize they were white pelicans, coming in to land.
In the mornings that followed, we went out looking for them. It wasn’t hard. They settled in for the season that winter, taking advantage of the astonishingly clean and abundantly populated waters of this ephemerally wild and natural stream that had somehow been allowed to exist at the edge of the urban core. They would move back and forth between the dam and the bridge, always together as a flock. When we first came up out of the tall brush on the banks, they flew off, letting us fully experience how big they are—one of the biggest birds in North America, with a nine-foot wingspan and the ability to fly at surprisingly high altitudes. And how atemporal, the way they express some evolutionary echo of the flying reptiles that once roamed these skies. To have such a flock alight for the season within eyeshot of downtown skyscrapers seemed slightly miraculous.
They quickly got acclimated to our appearances when we would step out of the woods, letting us watch as they loitered in the deeper parts of the channel, sharing the river with the pintails and mallards who come every winter and the herons and cormorants who live here year-round. I kept expecting to see one dive from the sky, but that’s not how white pelicans roll. They are not solitary hunters like their brown cousins, but social feeders, finding food cooperatively in shallow lakes and other freshwater pools. They have even been observed collaborating to channel schools of fish into natural corrals.
Before spring arrived, they moved on. That way one day you notice the animals are no longer there. We saw a few the following winter, and haven’t seen them since. Their passing through that year was likely one of those migratory anomalies we were lucky to witness. While you can sometimes find white pelicans on the warm Texas coast, they are uncommon inland, even as the ornithological authorities counterintuitively advise that they are mainly an upland bird, with their primary breeding grounds in the lakes that dot the glacially terraformed plains of the Dakotas, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. But I still can’t help wondering whether their rarity to our experience is a function of the way we have erased much of their habitat. Leopold seems to express a similar feeling in A Sand County Almanac, observing a Canadian flock:
“Let a squadron of southbound pelicans but feel a lift of prairie breeze over Clandeboye and they sense at once that here is a landing in the geological past, a refuge from that most relentless of aggressors, the future. With queer antediluvian grunts they set wing, descending in majestic spirals to the welcoming wastes of a bygone age.”
As true as that image he conjures may be, Leopold is lying there, or at least obfuscating the truth. The aggressor is not the future. It is the march of human dominion across the globe, reshaping every last corner to serve our needs. Each generation of people seemingly less able to see the other life around us than the last, even as we become more conscious of the rapid diminution of such life, diverting our eyes from the ecological carnage and into the screens that keep us feeding the machine.
That winter we first saw house finches on our balcony, Hugo and I made a New Year’s trip to Costa Rica. We spent most of the trip in kayaks, but on one stretch we ferried to a new location via riverboat. And as we pulled out from the port of departure, rumbling up some wide estuary, our ship interrupted a massive flock of roseate spoonbills. We watched it from the bow, as all those hot pink wings and bizarre beaks took to the sky, a flock so big it took several long minutes to move out. An ephemeral glimpse of the diverse abundance the world is capable of, if we just leave room for it. And a sobering reminder, in its rarity, of how much we have erased through agriculture and urbanization. When I see scenes like that in nature documentaries now, I always wonder how old the footage is, and who’s making sure it’s real.
I still see great birds around us every day, even in the heart of the city. Driving in traffic I often see the white specters of a few egrets or the long wings of a pair of caracara, flying low over the cars stopped at the light. Sometimes in winter I’ll look up to see a flock of migratory terns, like the ones I saw high above the Amazon distribution facility during a lockdown ramble. Such sights are reassuring, but they also spark a sense of anticipatory loss, as you wonder if they will soon be as gone as the pelicans, or the passenger pigeons that famously darkened the American skies not so long ago. I think of stories that capture that feeling, like Charlotte McConaghy’s gorgeous 2020 novel Migrations, about a woman who embarks on a trip to follow the remaining terns on what may be their last trip to Antarctica:
Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong.
As powerfully as such stories resonate with the feeling of immanent truth, I tend to think the longer-term future is more like the opposite. The near-term may come up to the brink of the lifeless dystopias of our popular apocalypses, but nature seems quite capable of correcting that kind of imbalance, and its easy to imagine a post-Anthropocene world of remixed biodiversity and diminished human impact. The question will be whether we take agency in that correction, through our personal and community actions, or wait for a bill we know we won’t be able to pay.
Making more room for other species isn’t that hard. The house finches show it, in their ability to share our habitat. And in that brilliant adaptation whereby the more food they take from our feeders, the brighter their colors show. They may not have the romance of spoonbills or pelicans, but taking more notice of the everyday wonders of common backyard life like theirs is what opens our path into the world that could be.
Further Reading
For a deeper report on the mid-twentieth century caper of the Hollywood finches, check out this 1953 article from The Auk.
For a cogent real-world description of what it’s like to observe bird life disappearing around you, Jonathan Franzen goes reporter-at-large in the latest issue of The New Yorker, walking the streets of Los Angeles with weekend cat-neuterers as he investigates the urban ecology of free-roaming felines.
For a catalog of theophanies on this weekend when a few different variants are observed, including the one hidden in our local Tres Reyes treats, start here, and consider their connection to human experiences of natural wonder.
For some popular visions of depopulated futures, Criterion Channel has a January playlist of Postapocalyptic Sci-fi, heavy on the B-movies.
Thanks to Andrew Liptak at Transfer Orbit, probably the best newsletter on the science fiction and fantasy field, for including my forthcoming narrative nonfiction book, The Secret History of Empty Lots, on his list of most anticipated books of 2024 (and for the kind words about this newsletter). The book is with the copy editor now, and we should have a cover and other details to share soon.
Over at the blog of feminist SF imprint Aqueduct Press, my contribution to their annual roundup of the year in reading was posted last week, most of it recounting some of the older texts I explored while researching my own new one.
With the year of looming deadlines behind me, I aim to get this newsletter back to a more regular with this newsletter this year. Next weekend I will be in the field, but plan to have a piece on three very different urban rivers for you in two weeks, on January 21.
For some reason the Old Farmer’s Almanac Weather Calendar by my desk notes, between Epiphany, Orthodox Christmas, MLK Day, and the full wolf moon, that tomorrow is Elvis Presley’s birthday. Which gives me the perfect excuse to share with you this Swiss Bretstuhl two-board chair my woodworker son Hugo Nakashima-Brown just made, featuring an homage to Howard Finster’s painting of “Elvis at 3.”
Credit for the lovely house finch photo above to Katy Flenker, who has metal plate posters for sale here.
Have a safe week.
A fabulous investigation, again. House finches!
Perhaps your pelicans decided White Rock Lake here in Dallas is more to their liking? They winter over here, and herd themselves back and forth from the little inlet called "Sunset Bay" down to the spillway and back. I was astonished when I first noticed them several years ago. http://tinyurl.com/3x32yk33