Week 2Winter Week 2
This game is an inspiration to place yourself in natural circumstances that will yield a heavenly bird, blessing your year, your perspective, your imagination, your spirit. New year, first bird.
—Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds
According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on the first day of the new year sets the tone for your next twelve months. One year, the first bird I saw was a downy woodpecker, or possibly a hairy woodpecker—the two species look virtually identical, particularly to a person who spies her first bird of the new year before she has had her first coffee of the new year. Because I couldn’t sort it out in the instant before the woodpecker got spooked and flew away, my theme bird that year was neither species of woodpecker. Instead it was a robin, the second bird I saw that morning. As the robin stood on the edge of the birdbath, watching me as I watched it, I found myself wondering if birds play a New Year’s game called “First Human.”
I love robins. I love the way they stand in the yard and cock their heads when it rains, turning an invisible ear toward the ground and listening for the sound of a worm moving toward the surface of the saturated soil. I love the way they flock up in winter, with the locals and their new offspring welcoming the migrators to a season-long family reunion. The way they call to one another in a kind of descending chortle as night begins to fall. The robins’ song is the music of twilight.
But this year my first bird is a sharp-eyed crow, and I am thrilled. One of my favorite childhood stories is Aesop’s tale of a thirsty crow who finds a pitcher with a bit of water in the bottom. The clever bird cannot reach the water at first but then begins to drop pebbles into the pitcher, one by one by one, and soon the water rises within reach. I am beguiled by the promise of a year watched over by this bold, problem-solving bird—the playful prankster, the curious collector, the tender parent, humankind’s steadfast companion. Even if the terrible time comes when all the other songbirds are gone, lost to the fiery world, crows will remain among us, living on what we leave behind.
“What’s the first bird you saw this morning?” I asked my father-in-law at our New Year’s lunch last year. We were eating greens and black-eyed peas for good luck.
“I don’t believe I’ve seen a bird today,” he said.
Tucked up on the fourth floor of an apartment building at a time of year when it’s too cold to stand on the balcony, of course he hadn’t seen a bird. But the day wasn’t over yet, and I told him to keep an eye out. “Look for a crow,” I said. “Who wouldn’t want to start the new year watched over by a crow? They’re smart and brave and loyal . . .”
“They squawk a lot, too,” he said.
He was laughing at me.
I am content for a bird to be only a bird, a representative of nothing. But on New Year’s Day, still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and lack of coffee, I googled my first bird’s symbolic associations. I was surprised to discover that “What do crows symbolize?” auto-populates the search field just behind “What do crows eat?”
Many cultures have associated crows with death. Their uniformly black coloring, their harsh cries, their taste for roadkill—all may have contributed to that most famous of collective names among birds, a murder of crows. Crows have been observed conducting “funerals” for fallen flock mates, and this somber ritual may account for the gloomy associations, too.
But other cultures have associated the birds with intelligence and adaptability, even transformation, and these are the connections I’ll rely on as the year unfolds. I have entered my sixties now, a time of change—to my body, to my family, to the way I think about my future—and I cling to the crow’s promise of metamorphosis. What more could anyone ask from a new year than the promise—or just the hope—of renewal?