Friday Five: Ornithology Edition
Bird Science, Physics, Self-Pity, the Rich Inner Life of Chickens, and Free Food
1955. In an issue of “Art in America” the painter Barnett Newman was credited with the clever analogy “…aesthetics is for the artist like Ornithology is for the birds…”
1987. The theoretical physicist Steven Weingburg riffed on the idea with “the philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
2019. Author and professor Tim Mauldin replied, “ornithology would indeed be a great use to birds — if they could ask the ornithologists for advice, and if they could understand it.”
2015. The posthumous short story collection The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector has this passing observation: “The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality…The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call ‘chicken.’”
1929. D.H. Lawrence published his short poem “Self-Pity”:
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Would knowing the study of birds be helpful to birds? Would having a concept of an inner monologue help the backyard chickens pecking currently pecking at my studio door live a better life? It seems to me like taking a perfectly good wild thing and giving it anxiety would be animal cruelty, considering what most of us do with the burden of all this knowledge about ourselves.
What I do know is that the Cornell Lab Merlin Bird ID app is one of the most enjoyable things on my phone. I sit on the rocks in my yard in the morning, let it record the din, and bit by bit learn to identify my noisiest, most-welcomed neighbors.
Yesterday at 9:33am I heard American Goldfinches, Carolina Wrens, House Finches, Northern Cardinals, Song Sparrows, Blue Jays, and Northern Flickers (my birding friend Ali texted back “What a treat!”). Not of one of those birds was sorry for itself. Not worried. Not anxious. Not even a little. They’re just… birds. Every bird you see and hear, the platonic ideal of birdness.
I wrote this poem last year, during a particularly frustrating business season. May it be a balm on your weary soul. Go find some birds to consider this weekend.
Birdbrain
Anxiety is the worst use
of my creativity
and yet
I am perched at my desk
fretting
about where the next
paycheck will come from
and some dumb Cardinal
is bouncing around the feeder
outside my window
probably thinking to himself
“Fuck, yeah! Free food!”
just like
every
other
day.
Loved the poem at the end. Helpful reminder for this weary life.