By Susan Telander
Dear Grandchild,
You are not born, but I have been writing to you for years. You see, I was ready to be your grandmother before you were ready to be you. And I thought about a grandmother’s job, to grab stories from her generation, and fling them two generations ahead into small, open ears. So, dear grandchild, I began to write to you. Today, as my half-ruined hands hover over my keyboard, you are not born, but you are busy, heavy in your mother’s belly, pushing against bladder and lungs, winding the threads of your tiny soul through the fibers of her heart.
I planned to write you the whole alphabet, stories of things I love, but I got lost in the letter B—because B, dear grandchild, as you will soon learn, is for bird.
I hope you will grow up to love birds. If you do fall in love with them, you will want to care for them. Birds need nesting sites, food and water. That might mean trees and grasslands and marshes. Some birds need to migrate and not crash into high-rises or be swept away by hurricanes. Notice birds, and they will sing to you. Ordinary robins will perform arias for you among crabapple blossoms. White-throated sparrows will whistle to you. And maybe you’ll see the flash of an indigo bunting or scarlet tanager through maple leaves.
I, your grandmother-to-be, am a lover of birds, though I’ve not always been faithful. At times, I turned away from feathered creatures toward my own life, banishing feeders to lie on a shelf in the garage, occasionally inspected by mice and rejected for their hollow hearts. But during COVID lockdown in our Minneapolis suburb, our feeders multiplied, blossomed from poles with multiple iron hooks until there were sunflower hearts for cardinals, thistle seeds for gold finches, dangling chunks of suet for woodpeckers, and peanuts—shelled for nuthatches, unshelled for jays.
For months that turned into a year and a half, I struggled to teach from home. My classroom was squished into my computer, and from the upstairs window where I sat, I watched birds at our feeders. If I wasn’t upstairs, I was downstairs in the kitchen or on the three-season porch, both excellent vantage points to spy on our birds. Our feeders were regularly emptied by nuthatches and cardinals, as well as two varieties of finch and four varieties of woodpecker. Wild turkeys cleaned up what they dropped.
Bluejays also squawked from the tree canopy in our backyard. If we put out peanuts, they came immediately, like a pet. On Sunday mornings, it was pancakes, peanuts, and plans. We made pancakes, put out whole peanuts and sat down to watch jays pick up nut after nut, considering each and discarding it until they found the one they wanted. They entertained me while I worked on lesson plans for the week.
Size alone would allow the jays to dominate the finches, cardinals, and nuthatches at the feeders, even if they hadn’t been more aggressive. Their angular shape, with a pointed crest and sharp black beak, was echoed in the blue, black, and white etchings on their wings and tails. Black eyeliner and a black necklace added to the drama. They were the feeder divas. But bluejay blue was muted, greyed to blend with the greyish white of their breasts. And the deeper blue bits were contained within stained glass, outlined in black, interspersed with grey and white panes. Which is not to say that our bluejays weren’t beautiful. They were spectacular. But also noisy, common, blue birds that I saw all the time.
Bluejays are with us all year in Minnesota. When you visit, dear grandchild, you can watch them drop bits of peanut into the snow for the grey squirrels to grab. They are rare bits of color when winters are thick clouds, shovel-heavy drifts and bone-breaking ice. When months are robins gone away, gold finches gone dull, and sun disappeared. By the time winter has dwindled to mold-blackened shreds of snow hiding in the shadows, we wait for something, anything, to tell us winter is ending. Something like a bluebird.
On that suburban spring day, I knew I was seeing an eastern bluebird even though I’d never seen one before and haven’t since. And I knew spring had come, because bluebirds mean wide cloudless skies, sunburn on winter-pale skin, and insects whining in ears. They bring bleeding hearts, dandelions, the scent of first mowing, and shade from new leaves.
The bluebird on the branch hanging over the sidewalk in front of the duplex across from the apartments, could have been camouflaged inside any house decorated in the 1980’s. It could have disappeared into the yards and square yards of blue and mauve—heavy curtains, boxy valences, pink floral wallpaper, plush blue carpet—that I ripped out of my house when I bought it in the 90’s. But the bird pulled off the color scheme better than my walls and windows. On the bird, those colors were stunning. Mauve breast, bright blue everywhere else.
I had my hands full at the moment that I saw it. My young dog Carmen, built of muscle and sinew, was pulling hard on her leash. And your uncle had called. I always took his calls because there was a time when hearing his voice was as rare as seeing a bluebird. So I was holding a leash and a phone.
This bluebird was a glimpse of the wild. A shock to my suburban system. My heart pounded, my breath stopped. My brain opened to the idea that the world was not only computer screens and cement and lawns and leaf blowers. It was also feathers and flight, color and song, hollow bones and tiny claws. Excitement gave way to joy. I willed the bird to stay so that I could settle my soul and have time to trust my eyes. But that is not the nature of birds.
This bluebird vanished in a moment. There was no time to take a photo or open my Merlin app to confirm my sighting. I had to commit the bird to memory, spending those few seconds just looking at something I may never see again. As if to help, it flew down to sit on the sidewalk directly in front of me. See? See? I am here. And by some miracle, I was able to leash-wrestle Carmen, who finds all birds equally exciting, into just enough stillness for me to believe my eyes.
If my eastern bluebird had been female, her colors would have been subdued, and she, though stunning, might not have caught my eye. My sidewalk companion must have been a male because he was the blue of plastic toys and blue raspberry candy, as if he were manufactured to represent the essence of blueness.
When I was reading about bluebirds later, I learned that the bird I saw wasn’t blue at all. The color I saw wasn’t even a color as I think of it, a pigment in the feather itself. All blue birds have what is called structural color. Their feathers are structured to refract blue light to my eyes, so that it is in my brain where blue appears. We must collude, these birds and I, in the making of that glorious blue.
But who sees that blue? Other birds? Only humans? Or, as I sometimes suspect, is it only me who sees like I do? And if blue is in the watcher and not the feather, what is true? Can I say I saw this blue? Is my experience valid? You see, dear grandchild, my brain is a toddler, like you will be soon, twirling, arms out, in a playground of questions.
Mountain bluebirds were waiting for me later in the Black Hills. These show-offs didn’t bother with mauve. It was blue from beak to tail. Surreal, feather-refraction blue. They allowed me to watch them, hovering like hummingbirds over a grassy field. For a vacation, we’d rented a camper near that grass and a river and a rocky cliff, which could have worn powerful men’s faces, but didn’t. It was ranch land, horses separated from bluebirds by fencing and fence posts, each post cradling a birdhouse.
The hovering was mesmerizing, like ocean waves meeting ancient lava, or the flames of a smoky campfire keeping mosquitoes away. Things that calm my twirling mind. I brought them close with my binoculars, staring as they darted into the grass for an insect, then floated again. I was in birdtopia. Bluebirdland.
Other birds appeared in the soft blue sky, of course. Some crows—a murder, it’s called when crows gather—harassed an eagle along the cliff. Ours ours ours. Don’t even think about staying here.
Purple and green streaks flashed in front of me. The Merlin app identified them as violet-green swallows, which seemed very exotic, as I had only seen barn swallows in Minnesota. Barn swallows like to build nests under bridges, and boaters passing through a channel, can watch them flitting overhead in greyish clouds, their muddy nests tarred to the bridge’s belly. But instead of a mess plastered to planks, these swallows preferred to nest in hollowed out trees. Or in this case, the bluebird houses. I found myself more tender toward the bluebirds than the swallows, as if my comprehension of their blueness was happening somewhere deeper in my body than my visual cortex. If it were either/or, I would choose blue over violet.
A single highway cut through this area. We had arrived on it and could see and hear it from our rented camper. This asphalt had led us away from our suburban lives into a world of bikers and bars and Biden-hating. It was a noisy world, this South Dakota Oz. Speed and sound. Sound and speed. Both equally important. Speed and sound and Sturgis had touched somewhere deep in these bikers like bluebird blue had touched me, and they wanted more. I wanted more blue.
I stood at the edge of the grassy field, clutching my binoculars. To my left was the river, bubbling under the cliff, and to my right, bikers spewing down the highway. In between, mountain bluebirds hovered, violet-green swallows encroached, an eagle fled from crows, and I watched. Because, dear grandchild, you will never see a bluebird from a noisy, speeding motorcycle.
And you will only see the Azores bullfinch if you are very very quiet. Your uncle, grandfather and I tried not to crunch the gravel beneath our feet as we huddled together behind our birding guide on the island of São Miguel. “We don’t say bird watching,” he explained. Too passive. Not descriptive of tiptoeing through the cloud forest on São Miguel, binoculars in hand. That was my first blunder of the day. The second was to use the term seagull. “Gulls don’t need to be at the sea,” he explained. “Experienced birders roll their eyes when they hear that.” I didn’t argue except in my head. Of course I knew that birding involved studying them and walking around to find them. And that gulls could be found all over Minnesota, which couldn’t be farther from the ocean. But I smiled and took the correction because he was going to show us the Azores bullfinch.
The Azores are a group of islands belonging to Portugal, but are perched far into the Atlantic, a volcanic gift to migrating birds. These islands are gentle with birds, avoiding harsh winters entirely. When Minnesota clouds are birthing only frozen crystals, the cloud forests on São Miguel are generous with rain and soggy fog, as if spring there never ends.
Our birding guide explained that North American birds who pass through these islands are referred to as Yanks. But we were searching for no migrant. Our bullfinch lives only on São Miguel. The birds used to thrive there, feeding on endemic plants, but fruit growers accused them of eating their crops, and a target was put on their little heads. The result was something similar to what happened to the bison on the American plains. Lots of death, not a lot of survival.
Could they be saved? Not in captivity, it turned out. And not eating at feeders. They needed the plants endemic to their environment to survive. Unfortunately, aggressive invasive plants like kahili ginger had already bullied their way onto every slope, non-native hydrangeas lined the highways, and Azorean holly, laurel, and blueberries were disappearing. Clearly our bullfinch needed habitat restoration. A nature preserve was created in the Serra da Tronqueira mountain range, near their preferred peak, Pico da Vara.
Audubon, The Smithsonian, everyone calls it a success. The bullfinch population has stabilized. They are living happily on their mountain, reproducing, unaware that it is only human goodwill that allows them to eat, that they survive on our love. Already, our guide told us, political sentiment had turned against them. Land that had been set aside to study which plants were most beneficial sat overrun with invasives after an election reversal.
But here, where we were huddled in our raincoats, he pointed out an endemic shrub. Holly, with red berries and rounded leaves, not the sharp ones of English Christmases. He explained that there were no native mammals to eat them, so the plant evolved smooth edged leaves. They had no need of protection. But the bullfinches did.
Yet we saw mammals everywhere on the island. Where bullfinches once flew, cows had seeped in to fill the spaces. They grazed next to off ramps, stood chewing on bits of flatness, scattered themselves on impossible slopes. They clumped on two-lane highways, confused by cars.
Tiptoeing down the gravel road in our raincoats, we heard the bullfinches before we saw them. That’s why we were being quiet. Our guide gave a soft, drooping whistle which echoed from the forest. We found them in our binoculars, high on a dead branch, silhouetted against the sodden clouds. Success. But we weren’t finished. We piled back into his van, drove a short distance through spurts of rain and brutal wind, and repeated our huddled search.
The guide led us a short distance before putting up a hand to halt us. We’d been instructed not to point or express loud amazement, as these human reactions only scare the birds. We needed to let them know we were no threat, though of course, we were. The bullfinch was sitting in a shrub—I don’t know what kind—about ten yards away. No distance at all through binoculars. The bird allowed us to look, admire, memorize, wonder at, celebrate in silence. I fell in love in silence. I was a parent inhaling each detail of my newborn, knowing that I would care for this creature for as long as long is long.
The Azores bullfinch, too, had blue feathers. Or they became blue in my brain. The bird’s breast was creamy, its back darker, and it wore a black cap like the chickadees in my backyard. But the flight feathers on the tips of its wings and tail were a deep bluejay blue. I stood in the wet wind on the muddy gravel warmed by this bird whose existence felt more important than mine. My species, like the cows, was busy filling in vacated spaces, chewing up our surroundings.
Next on our birding agenda was a picnic, and we got in the van to find a sheltered area to eat our sandwiches. Not five minutes from our bullfinch, the logging began. Huge stumps sat like acne scars on the mountainsides, the only evidence of former forest. There would be no nesting here, no birdtopia. Friendly loggers waved at us from trucks hauling tree carcasses. As we drove, my heart pounded, my breath stopped. My brain opened to the idea that the world is not only bullfinches whistling in the rain. It is also their absence.
When you, dear grandchild, are old enough to stand quiet in the spring rain, I want you to have bluebirds and bullfinches to love. I hope we allow them to be lovely so that you can encounter wildness, twirl in your questions, and learn to care. And you, my beautiful bird, will need space, too, a habitat where you can be safe and thrive even if loggers are nearby. Whether you are up on a dead branch, hovering over grasses, or on a suburban sidewalk, I will bring you close with my binoculars. I will look, admire, memorize, wonder at and celebrate you. I will fall in love in silence each time.
Your grandmother-to-be
Susan Telander lives in Minnesota. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, working with Rajiv Mohabir and Lucy Ives as well as Lit Fest in Denver, working with Emily Rapp Black. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity Magazine and The Briar Cliff Review.