AS THE SUN DRIVES GOLD nails through the shadows, a dull red dawn, the color of deer and rust, soars up the sky. A hundred palm trees look like tufted pens in inkwells. A flock of slack-jawed pelicans glides overhead, perfectly aligned as synchronized swimmers. Brisk winds drive clouds overhead like time-lapse photography, and I feel the ancient thrill of impending sunlight.
Female boat-tailed grackles squeak like crib toys as they fly among the palms. Sitting in the poinciana trees, the males seem to be going down their checklist: check, check, check, check. One pair perches atop a curved frond of a palm tree, the female buzz-warbling while fluttering her unopened wings. Her mate ignores her, preens himself without joining in, despite her insistent invitation. Not in the mood? Passive-aggressive? We name, we interpret. But feelings? The ignored mate’s frustration and distress are clear even to a human by its increasingly strident and snippy call.
Soon all the grackles are madly clamoring, some in a squeaky whinnying that sounds like the twisting of wet rope, as they fly fast and full of purpose carrying scraps of dry palm leaves to their roof-tile nests. A foot-long curlicue of leaf falls beside me on the chaise. Some nest-holder chose it as good building material. Matted fibers folded together while drying give it a tensile strength ideal for building hut or nest and a surprising softness. I place it on the railing in the sun where the bird who dropped it may chance upon it and feel whatever the grackle version is of pleased. Then I slowly comb my hair with open fingers, coaxing out any knots, and tuck the loosened hairs under the leaf for the grackle to use as insulation. I hear some people also put out lint from a clothes dryer to become nesting fluff. But most often we become part of avian nurseries without realizing how intricately we’re woven into their world.
Flying fast from opposite directions, two grackles meet in midair, do a quick loop-the-loop around each other to synchronize wingbeats, and fly off in the same direction. Other birds work hard to stay aloft in the heavy morning air. A lone grackle twirls to the ground like an open penknife in a controlled spin. He makes it seem so soft, so casual, that terrifying spin that pilots pray they will correct well before the ground. I practiced a spin once (with an instructor) over the revolving fields of historic Virginia, and still remember the scrambled sky, sobering fright, and counterintuitive moves. Birds know instinctively how to fan their wide blunt tail feathers and glide on the collapsing wind. Or maybe only those survive who do know. Does a spin make a bird nauseous, as it does a human in a plane? Do birds excel at bird-in-flight recognition—by wing shape, flight rhythms—the whole “fizz” of a bird aloft? Probably so. Basic plane spotting. Part of their schooling as birds will be how to gauge the force of wind, learning by experience that some blows are unfordable, and others can be circled around or tacked into. The airmanship of birds involves lots of trial and error and what we might call reasoning or analysis. How that fills the bird brain with revisions and prompts I don’t know, but their brains learn, adapt, and rewire as they grow. Such is the clout of having even the smallest brain.
A female grackle cleans her feathers, which must feel good; I doubt she understands the purpose of preening, that she can’t fly safely if her plumage is grubby. She pays special attention to the tail’s steering feathers and the wings’ long stiff flight feathers. Each sweaty, parasite-laden day, some of the hooked-together barbs pull apart, and she must rezip them so that she doesn’t lose lift. Everything also needs to be oiled, especially the flight feathers. Lots of aircraft maintance goes into being a grackle. Meanwhile, her monosyllabic mate sits nearby, caulking the seams of each minute: caulk, caulk, caulk. The pair calls and coos, then switches to short melodies and smoochy sounds. Having found their song, they begin a hoedown of flights, with jumps, cackles, clicks, pennywhistles, tsk-tsks, glottal stops, creaky wood, kookaburra crescendos, hyena laughs, trills, croaks, peeps, and quacks.
Among the hearty calls of adult birds, and the church bell ringing on the half hour, comes the frail high-pitched peep of nestlings tucked beneath the terracotta tiles overhead, pleading their bellies. Dozens of parent birds to-and-fro, greeted by the squeals of their hatchlings. Combining a buzzer, caw, and rattle, a female boat-tailed grackle pauses only a second on the ledge before setting out again for gobstoppers. She will need to find a bucketful by nightfall, and like a lioness, she will hunt single-mindedly to feed her young. Her mate rests on a nearby curb, making quick high-pitched whistles, as if he’s summoning a taxi. In the bell tower, another female flies off with diapers (fecal sacs) cleared out from the nest, as a male lands with a long palm leaf in his mouth.
A sudden movement on the floor beside my chair catches my eye just as a baby grackle pogo-hops past. It looks up at me, then hides beneath the chair and begins chirping shrilly, using its slack yellow clown-mouth that, in time, will mature into a crisp strong beak. A parent calls back over and over. It’s not hard to translate—something like Help! I’m here, where are you?! and Over here! When I stand up to scout its whereabouts, it has vanished, but I can still hear parent and chick calling, and trace the chick’s call to a balcony about twenty feet away. Did it hop or fly there? Or both? It looks well-fledged and uninjured, so it must have glided clumsily down from the nest in at least a recovered fall. Running around, standing and shaking, calling plaintively, it seems frightened. Soon it will risk fluttering, winging. Chicks do. But a cityscape, however tropical, is not like a yard with lots of branches to hide in. Will a parent swoop down to feed it? No squirrels or raccoons clamber up here and attack it, no chipmunks or cats stalk it. But there are still marauding owls, jays, sparrows, ospreys, and hawks. I hear another chick’s notes and track that one to the green feathered canopy of a palm. It sounds just as urgent, and it’s staying close to home. The clamor of hungry baby birds and their frantic parents is never-ending.
Yes, I think, looking up at all the nests on the ledges above, it will be raining baby birds for a while. Even the curly-tailed geckos seem impressed, and let me tell you it takes a lot to impress a curly-tailed gecko. Some chicks will live, others crash and die. Best get used to it. In time the parents show up with quick confident turns and hard yellow beaks, landing together on the railing near the fallen chick. One at a time, they fly to it and fly back to the railing, showing it what to do. I have seen this monkey see, monkey do before, and always enjoy watching parents teaching their nestlings flight rules, including how to stall safely into a nest.
The next morning, as the fog of darkness lifts from the balcony, a pool of greater darkness catches my eye: a dead baby bird, fallen from a nest fifty feet up in the bell tower. Fully fledged, the chick has long legs, brownish-black feathers, and a bright yellow target of a mouth, slack and still. Ants have created wagon trails of scent leading to and from the dead chick. I hear the urgent hunger peeps of its siblings and I imagine its parents can do the simple math of one less mouth to feed. What do they feel when, searching for food, they see the dead chick lying lifeless, swarmed over by a thrill of ants? The living and the dead—these are hard distinctions for any raucous, vibrant being to master.
Another chick flops brokenly on the patio floor, heart visibly pounding as it keeps trying to right itself. Mother, looking thin and twitchy, hops along a railing close by and chirps to it in short contact calls of I’m here, I’m here, come on, come on. Now and then she drives off menacing sparrows. Even when, after several hours, the chick finally stops moving for good, the mother keeps calling a short wringing of wet fabric screech over and over.
It’s hard to tell if the chick was pushed out of the nest by an older sibling (“An heir and a spare” being nature’s motto), or was trying to fly before it was ready. To me, it looks like it has just enough wing feathers to glide, but what do I know of bird muscle or the feel of slick, smooth, air-hugging feathers, as opposed to the warm weak chaos of soft down? As a human several species away, brimming with mirror neurons that spur empathy, I only know: Its avid eye has seen so little.
And so life cycles on, with each generation born into a different universe, a sovereign intersection of time and space, history, mores, air quality, fads, dialect. Just as our skin cells slough off and are replaced every two weeks, our planet is regularly rebirded and repeopled, and the world those youngsters grow up into and influence is a unique combination of chance and circumstance that’s largely unpredictable and inscrutable. Their parents can’t fathom most of it, let alone prepare them for it. We all meet on our separate timelines like sliding panes of glass that crash at times. It’s amazing we get on as well as we do. But empathy makes it possible, and love makes it worthwhile.