It’s almost Valentine’s Day, sales apex for pralines, season of intact and broken hearts, when, all at once, I’m seized by an extravagance of anger.
The anger happens in a landscape that promises nothingness. A two-lane road empty of vehicles, to either side a farmer’s field bumpy with the stubble of last summer’s harvest. A haze of snow, and to the east, the bay, an inlet of Lake Ontario, hard frozen, near indistinguishable from the land. A blue sky with no interference from cloud. A brusque wind. It happens on a road that rhymes with en garde, a warning to assume a defensive stance in readiness for attack.
*****
Already, my husband and I have passed a cheese dairy that’s closed, a hamlet with a sparsity of houses, when he gestures toward the edge of the road. “Look!” Seven birds, gentle in every aspect—collegial, small and inoffensive, dainty in their eating habits. Snow buntings, the rice pudding of birds, their winter white smeared with the black of treacle, dusted with the brown of cinnamon.
Seven birds on the verge.
Although snow buntings are deemed to be “common” birds of open ground, they’re not easily pursued. Like inclement weather, their winter patterns defy prediction as they dart from one feeding spot to another, not unusually every ten minutes. Winter nomads, they leave scant record of themselves behind. They are presumed to be the northernmost passerine birds in the world.
*****
My husband and I are observing the buntings through the windscreen, our engine stopped, the car tucked discreetly by the roadside. We thrust ourselves deeper into our jackets, press into the heated seats, steady our breathing, and prepare to absolve ourselves from time. For breakfast that morning, we’d had apple toast with butter and coffee grown in the shade, cultivated by workers on a living wage. The insults of the past year—the pandemic, the obstacles undermining work and travel, the loss of a beloved pet—are made lighter by the satisfaction of the birds.
The 4 x 4 truck, like the enveloping landscape, is white, but the noise of its engine, if it had a colour, would be red. We glimpse it momentarily in our rear-view mirror before training our eyes forward. The verge is empty. Overhead, suddenly airborne, the snow buntings have shattered into two clusters of three. My heart’s beating too rapidly—faster, if possible, than the wingbeats of the startled birds. “There were seven,” I say. “Where’s the other bird?”
With their squat legs, snow buntings are said to look as though they’re feeding on their bellies. They were invented before the combustion engine. They’re not made to run fast.
I can’t claim to understand whether losing a member of a flock is, for the surviving birds, akin to losing a primary feather or an upper mandible, a breeding mate or a brood companion, a fledgling or an egg, but the cries of the snow buntings overhead, though silenced by my closed windows, the scattering and regrouping in flight, as though vying to restore a missing part, need no interpretation. Snow buntings are not uncommonly called snowflakes, but their purpose isn’t to fall to the ground.
*****
The force of the collision has launched the snow bunting several feet up the road and to the opposite side. From a distance, the stilled black and white heap might have been mistaken for a toppled skunk or an ermine, even a clump of dirty snow. I need no field guide to recognise it as “the other bird.” “The flight of the individual bird is somewhat undulating, but hardly swift”, wrote the naturalist T. S. Roberts in 1932. Before me, the bunting’s feathers are trembling in the wind, as though the bird might still raise its head and lift off in flight.
My husband inches the car forward, where, from the driver’s seat, he has a superior view.
“Is it dead?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Bastard!”
Anger is thought by some to be a secondary emotion, the bolder face of fear or sadness, including sadness provoked by loss. University Health Services Berkeley cites as one key recommendation for anger management “knowing when to let go.” Also recommended is “not personalising situations and adopting a problem-solving stance instead.”
*****
My husband and I are advancing once again along the upper extremity of the loop road, straight, the way empty of other vehicles. We ourselves are empty of words as we pass the barnyard where a single white horse, several donkeys, and a smattering of ewes consider us with puzzlement, as though we’re a question in need of an answer.
“Are you sure the bunting was dead?” I ask again only as we near the settlement where we’re staying.
“Yes.” My husband hesitates. “I think so.”
*****
More than a decade ago, I selected a period image of a snow bunting to illustrate a book I wrote about first encounters with unfamiliar animals. In her portrayal of the bunting, Elizabeth Simcoe, an Englishwoman, wife of the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, arguably was practising a kind of love signified by attention and a willingness to engage. She painted her subject in Quebec, on December 15, 1791, with Christmas preparations underway, and titled it “A Snow Bird.”
My husband had to point out to me that the snow bunting in Elizabeth’s wash on paper was dead. “Just look at it,” he said. The head of Elizabeth’s bird mingles insipid brown streaked almost imperceptibly with black. The feet are gnarled like the bare branches of an ancient apple tree in winter. Her snowbird has no eyes. It is in all probability lying on its side and may be a specimen, although for background, Elizabeth, an accomplished amateur artist, has chosen an abstraction of winter—nuances of blue for sky or water, nuances of white for ice or snow.
That I elected a decade ago to reproduce this specific wash on paper could be construed as a premonition, an anticipation, a foreshadowing of another death, a déjà vu or, merely, a random correlation.
*****
There’s a picture of a goose on the façade of the cottage where we’re staying, rendered in diamonds and squares, and occasionally, fleetingly, surfacing from the broken ice in the pond at the rear, a live river otter.
“Did you see the cottage on TV?” Jake, the owner, wants to know, having joined us in our front hall.
We shake our heads. “We just liked the look of it.”
“Awesome,” says Jake. All three of us are speaking through our surgical masks. Jake plays the viola da gamba and distils gin, and is a skydiver.
My accomplishments for the morning amount to little more than toasting apple bread and eavesdropping on a flock, properly called a drift, of snow birds.
“I think you’ll find plenty to keep you busy here,” Jake assures us. He excuses himself to go check on his gin mash. If it hasn’t fermented enough, when tested with iodine, it will turn blue.
*****
On the afternoon of the day I witnessed the death of the snowbird, I’m disposed once again to search for animals.
House finch
Red-bellied woodpecker
Blue jay
American tree sparrow
A snatch of song, a cap of rust, a stripe of white, a streak of red. I’m making mental notes of the birds as I catch sight of them clinging to splintered trees or worrying the bark for insects. I am determined to have a “good” day.
White-breasted nuthatch
Dark-eyed junco
Suddenly, revealing themselves in a thicket,
Swamp sparrows,
plump and long-legged.
*****
Once again at the cottage, my husband slips into his grey felt mules and vanishes upstairs with his iPad. Sitting on a wooden bench at a synthetic proxy for a wooden table and overlooking a backyard with a side view of a Quaker cemetery, I key in my sightings for the day. Where there ought to have been snow buntings, a winter landscape instead fills my laptop monitor, an expanse of white, absent of words. The economic importance of snow buntings for humans is invariably assessed to be “negative.” If I were to add snow buntings to today’s list of birds, the calculation would result in a loss.
The seventh snow bunting presumably wasn’t versed in how seven is considered to be a lucky, even a mystical, number. Shakespeare delineated the seven ages of man, a week has seven days, the ancient Egyptians recognised seven paths to heaven. And yet, Christianity warns against the seven deadly sins, including anger. Anger, when construed as wrath, may even burgeon into vengeance or punishment.
One, on its face a lesser number, may be considered to encompass the whole vast universe and, in Pythagorean theory, is said to be neither male nor female. The ill-fated bunting, while seventh in life, was in the mathematics of death reduced to or—depending on your point of view—elevated to one.
*****
Once before, in yet another iteration of one, I witnessed a single bird in its final moments of life. The song sparrow had been prised from a mist net, then released from a paisley cloth bag fastened with a peg before being stuffed into a cardboard tube like an empty toilet paper roll. “Weight, 37 g,” the bird bander called out to the scribe beside him while several of us, mere onlookers committed to silence, stood apart. As the bander brought his face close to the sparrow lying supine in his hand, dispersing his breath over the belly feathers, the bird convulsed and went limp. The bander pushed his glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose as he peered at the specimen. “And—it’s dead,” he said unconcernedly. “Probably a heart attack. Fat reserves were low.” To the scribe, he instructed, “Box it up. We’ll send it to the lab.”
The sixth of the seven deadly sins is wrath, or anger. Anger may arise in response to a problem for which there is no solution. Its companion, heavenly virtue, is said to be patience.
*****
The first time I wrote down the name of a bird—a black redstart—was in Riga, Latvia, several months after the death of my mother and when I was newly an adult orphan. I didn’t recognise the inscribing as an impulse to a life list that over the years I’d tend and grow. Becoming an adult orphan triggered anger and imposed patience. With or without my consent, I’d remain an adult orphan for the rest of my life.
Most birds are thought to be unable to recognise their parents more than a year after hatching and presumably fare none the worse for it, with communal birds occasionally making for an exception. Elizabeth Simcoe was herself an orphan, a status conferred on her early on, from childhood.
Throughout her years in Upper Canada, Elizabeth found sustenance in lifeless birds. “I went to the Ft. to see Capt Darlings stuffed birds,” she wrote while in Niagara, “—the most beautiful of them he called a Meadow Lark the size of a black bird the colors the richest yellow shaded to Orange intermixed with black—the Recollect a light brown with a tuft on its head & the tips of the wings scarlet like Sealing Wax upon them—a blackbird with scarlet on the wings they abound here in swamps.” The birds had been shot for Captain Darling’s pleasure.
For Christmas 1794, Elizabeth Simcoe sent to her daughters in the West Country a box of small corpses—songbirds—many of them of bright hue.
*****
While in the cottage reheating roast cauliflower with pickled cabbage and Zhoug from a Styrofoam container, I am at the same time on the road that rhymes with en garde, beside the impassive snowbird—if the bird is still there. Turkey vultures, considered inappropriate to the season in these parts, are prevalent nonetheless. Coyotes in winter eat carrion. For either scavenger, the remains of the snow bunting would count as a small and barely sustaining meal, little more than an amuse-bouche. I’ve not quite succeeded in my “good” day. To my husband, who’s assumed responsibility for the cauliflower, I say, “Make sure it’s hot enough” before shifting my gaze to the darkening yard beyond the sliding doors.
*****
It’s almost Valentine’s Day, the occasion my maternal grandmother chose as her birthday, because, as the afterthought in a family of too many children, she was never informed of the actual date of her birth. My husband doesn’t buy me roses on Valentine’s Day, or ever. Instead, he occasionally hands me a fallen feather. Although we’ve never analysed the gesture, I understand the feathers point not to me but away, towards his and my mutual appreciation of small lives made increasingly precarious by the human.
A posy of feathers, like a bouquet of roses, is apt to fade. My most recent acquisition, a single wing feather from a yellow-shafted flicker, is asymmetric, with a shorter, less flexible leading edge. The shaft is both weightless and strong, and the colour of general warning signs along roadsides, a brown-tinged yellow signalling dangerous or unusual conditions up ahead. A dip. A turn. A curve. A narrowing.
*****
“There are no known adverse effects of Plectrophenax nivalis—the snow bunting—on humans,” claims the website animaldiversity.org. This statement, imagined as a reassurance, fails to hold up if reversed. The adverse effects of humans on Plectrophenax nivalis are myriad and relentless. Although snow buntings are said to be “common,” in the past half-century their population may have declined by 38%. The drop can’t be attributed to their natural predators—Arctic foxes, snowy owls, weasels, falcons—but rather to chemicals, habitat erosion, and climate change. To us. As the most northerly recorded passerine species in the world, snowbirds risk losing as much as 69% of their range should global temperatures warm by 3%. They are also occasionally understood to suffer collisions.
*****
In 1929, the year of the Great Stock Market Crash, the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush expressed a frustration: “I have seen an apple tree almost covered by a great flock of these birds … but I have never seen a Snow Bunting in the woods.” Almost a century later, I too find myself susceptible to a problem induced by a bird that weighs no more than two fountain pens or two AA batteries. A bird that calls into the wind. Being confronted with the death of a snow bunting makes me, and other like-minded people, angry, understood necessarily as an adverse effect of the snow bunting on humans. Remembering the death of the snow bunting also makes me melancholy, an emotion sometimes thought to arise from art as much as from life and to involve an element of reflection.
I therefore dissent from Elizabeth Simcoe. Where she discovered beauty and exuberance in lifeless birds, I recoil from them while bemoaning their loss. I don’t, like Elizabeth, inhabit a land of plenty, the implorations of songbirds and roaring of frogs so loud as to be exasperating. For Elizabeth, centuries ago, plenitude encouraged complacency, the sentiment that one bird less barely mattered. “Now the Wild Pigeons are coming of which there is such numbers,” she wrote, “there is a pond before this House where hundreds of them drink at any time.” In Elizabeth’s world, the hurtleberries are always ripe. The wild pigeon, the passenger pigeon of which she wrote, is now extinct.
The precise spot of the snowbird’s collision, where in my memory admiration and grief intermingle, is a place I might choose to revisit or more likely abstain from forever.
*****
As dusk closes in on almost-Valentine’s Day, I invoke images of my day. In the fields, clumps of lavender sleeping under the snow. The patience of the horse with soiled legs and its companion donkeys, how, like a flock, they agreed on an orientation. In the shrubs edging the fields, the close tangle of branches like barbed wire. Under the iced-over creek, the flow of water, life-sustaining.
“Come have some cake,” says a voice. My husband’s.
The cake is pink and white, Champagne and raspberry, the berries leaching their red juices into the whiteness of the layers. Each slice in the dinner for two is accompanied by a biscuit shaped like a butterfly, a kind of biscuit traditionally known as a langue de chat or cat’s tongue, and so brittle that one of the butterflies arrived with its wing already broken.
“Fabulous!” I say after the first mouthfuls.
“It is good,” my husband agrees. He’s always been more partial to the Baba au Rhum.
Outside, the winter night is silent. There must be foxes, coyotes, a great-horned owl spreading its wings over the fields in search of prey, at nighttime casting no shadow. There’s no intimation of snowbirds.
For just a moment, I imagine the fallen snowbird to be on an extended migration, safely beyond my own field of view, a thought carrying with it the plausibility of return.
*****
To chivvy along the disturbing episode of earlier in the day, I access once again my life list. In times of scarcity, each individual ought to be made more precious. Yet to list the species names of birds as I do is to commemorate the generality, the individual bird itself lost in the column of typewritten words. Also, it must be acknowledged, the birds on my life list are mostly long gone—moved on or passed away. The life referred to isn’t theirs but mine.
The life impacted by the death of the snowbird is also mine, and not least the lives of the surviving members of the drift. One moment the bird was pecking vivaciously along the roadside, buoyed by seeds of grass, weeds and sedge, the next it suffered a collision with an obstinacy of rubber and steel alongside which the bird’s feathers and hollow bones could never achieve parity.
Among the precepts of anger management recommended by UHS Berkeley are:
Standing up for oneself in a firm, but respectful way,
Setting appropriate limits and boundaries,
Confronting when appropriate and safe.
Avoiding when appropriate.
*****
I approach the end of this day having resolved to pay attention, although so often paying attention isn’t conducive to sleep. Snowbirds themselves are said to be very light sleepers.
I’m not aware of anyone having documented a companionship with a snow bunting, nor can I claim to have befriended the bird I witnessed in its final moments of life. I’m not competent to write its obituary, which would entail a summation of the bird’s existence, beginning with its hatching on the Arctic tundra, snuggled in a nest of rootlets, fur, and moss wedged into rock, then first flight, first migration and, with the advent of winter, a first dive into a snowdrift.
In a 1930s letter to the American ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent, Hildegarde C. Allen of New Hampshire wrote of snowbirds, “They so love to swim in the light snow, particularly if it is both snowing and blowing and about zero. They seem almost like chickens dusting.” Contrary to Hildegarde, I know nothing of the dead snowbird’s joys and satisfactions. I’m left only to wonder whether, from conception, it might have been assigned its destiny as the seventh bird, seven being the maximum number of eggs laid.
Yet inexplicably, just as the driver’s life collided with the snow bunting’s, so my own life intersected with that single bird’s, and I find myself joined to it in writing not an obituary but an elegy. Without wings and hollow bones, I’ve no choice but to cut and paste sensation and emotion, extracting the familiar from my own life and species, then warily attributing it to another. One truth I recognise: all of us bundled together in this life carry within the same black and white, the poles of death and life, expressed in the snowbird’s plumage.
