A Beginner's Guide to (dead) Birding

It is 5:30 am and I am holding a dead ovenbird in my hand. I stand on a sidewalk that has just been washed by the workers who come out before the sun, clearing business facades of the trash and shit and death that accumulates there at night. No quicker way to quell the desire for a breakfast sandwich and coffee than a bloated rat and the wafting stench of dried urine. 

Ovenbirds are just a tad smaller than the brown house sparrows that you probably see all the time in parking lots, furiously fluttering about the remnants of someone's discarded lunch. They have a bold white striped chest, olive-brown back, and an orange crown flanked by two dark brown stripes. Their name comes from the shape of their nest: built of mud and sticks and grasses, it looks just like a miniature wood-fire pizza oven. 

This ovenbird was found just minutes before by a street washer who placed it gently on a railing where she would be safe for collection. Her beak drips with blood. 

She is one of billions of birds that will fly overhead by starlight this fall, migrating south from their northern summer homes. On the outer, untidy edges of science a kind of magic happens: tiny feathered creatures weighing less than a handful of quarters fly hundreds of miles each night across a giant magnet called earth in a symphony directed by the stars, racing sweeping cold fronts to reach kinder climates. And when, thousands of miles away, the soil begins to thaw and teem with squirming, legged things and trees start spitting out their tongues of green, they fly back to their place of birth. If it's still there, they'll often return to the very same tree where they first stretched and cracked out of some warm, dark membrane into the frighteningly wide and bright day. 

The limp ovenbird in my hand is still warm. At the end of her eight hour, non-stop flight she crashed into a shiny pane of glass. What's left of the life in her pours out into my palm. 

When stuck in a cage, migrating species shudder, rapidly beat their wings, and move quickly between perches when birds of their species are migrating. Researchers call it zugunruhe–migratory restlessness, a wired anxiety to fly, to leave. 

Now the coiled-up, frenetic energy that it takes to get her through the night has nowhere to go but out. I put her in a ziplock bag and keep walking. 

Around one billion birds die each year in building collisions like this. Some think this scale of death signals the beginning of the slow process of extinction. Many of the deaths are preventable: turning off lights inside buildings at night, applying anti-collision tape to windows, and using bird-safe glass all lower the risk of disorienting migratory birds. 

But the cost of these changes is an inconvenience, especially in cities built of glass. Imagine thin whitish stripes every two inches across your penthouse view. Do you know how much people pay for a pretty view?

I walk the same route every Friday morning. Sometimes, if we're lucky, there aren't any birds; sometimes they are injured but still alive. Those birds are taken to a rehabilitation center in the city. There are so many birds we don't find, and birds we find for whom it's too late to help. Carcasses gnawed on by the cracking jaws of a squirrel. Flattened piles of feather and flesh, married to the pavement by a bike wheel. 

It is drizzling and cold. My yellow raincoat is soaked through. I pass by a man slumped over in a chair under an awning, an umbrella at his feet next to a dirty styrofoam 7-11 cup. His hand dangles and his black coat is damp and worn. I wonder if he's dead too. I wonder how to tell, and how mad he would be if I tapped on his shoulder and woke him from his sleep. The people I'm supposed to call to ask for help would make him leave if he was alive, probably charge him with loitering. I keep walking and the ovenbird stiffens and grows cold in the plastic, its dead black eyes fixed on nowhere, gently swinging with my step. 

In the news whole cities drowned. Thousands of pagers exploded in grocery stores and homes, blowing up hands, eyes, faces. Men were strapped to gurneys and shook as they choked on poisonous gas and people called it justice. Limbs of children lie strewn among the rubble of their homes. 

It is suggested among moral philosophers that we cannot be responsible for what is outside of our control. I can't prevent that bird from striking this glass building that I have no personal ties to, so there flies the burden of responsibility. A flirtatious, flattering little theory. “Well,” we ask ourselves, “what can I do about [insert your favorite thing to ignore here]?” We gesture up the ladder of perpetrators. We shrug and shake our heads, say “it's such a pity,” or “someone should really do something.” 

And still every morning we pay to have our streets scrubbed clean; we hate the smell of piss before our blueberry muffin and even more to be asked by a stranger with bad breath if we have any cash. We'd do anything to keep the dank, dirty stench of death away from our neat, pristine, unhappy lives. Turn off the news. Call them terrorists, there's no reasoning with terrorists. Say there's nothing we can do, or we don't know what to do. 

In the city at dawn there is death everywhere: the Ovenbird, a poison-swollen rat, rotting teeth in a sleeping stranger's mouth, a Common Yellowthroat with a crushed skull. It means nothing that I am powerless against the overwhelming weight of it all, for here it is before me anyways: a stranger either dead or in a cold, wet, miserable slumber; a tiny warbler lying limp in a puddle on the concrete. And most often I keep walking. Sometimes I hold my breath to avoid the stench. 

“I am guilty for all and before all.” 

And the beautiful, messy, ever-rustling world doesn't give a damn. It heaves and sighs and leaks and shakes, an ever-churning amalgam of death and life and resurrection. A Black and White Warbler leaps up the rough branch of a great oak tree. Maggots writhe and twist in the flesh of a rotting feathered thing. A man stands with wrinkled cardboard on the thin white line between two lanes of traffic, begging for change, flirting with a quick end. A Spotted Sandpiper with windmill legs whizzes to dodge crashing waves on the beach. Terns fly to great heights and haphazardly dive towards their unexpecting prey. It's an ethical horror show with infinitely many beautiful and horrendous scenes, and you're in it. 

I don't know how to play my part well, and maybe I can't. But I do know I have to keep trying to do it anyway. To get close enough to breathe it all in. To mourn all the birds that never make it home, and politely argue with building managers about buying bird-tape and turning out lights at night. And to try to convince you to join me.* 

dead birding tips & tricks: 

- Check out birdcast.info to see when migration through your area will be particularly high. You can sign up for alerts. Be especially careful to turn lights off or shut your curtains on these nights. 

- Go out in the morning when migratory birds are landing and most likely to crash. Look around glass buildings, windows, doorways wherever you happen to be dead birding.

- If you approach a bird on the ground and it doesn't fly out of reach, it's likely stunned or injured. You can gently place a piece of fabric (e.g. a t-shirt) over the bird, and put it into a brown paper bag. Clip it shut, and try not to jostle it around (would you like to be jostled if you just got the world's worst concussion?) Jot some notes on where you found it, take pictures if possible. Take the bird to a wildlife rehabilitation center in your area.

- If you find a bird killed by a window strike, you can take a picture and report the details to a local Lights Out chapter, or google if there's an Audubon Society in your area and ask them if they know where to report the information. (If you work with a local chapter that collects dead birds for research, you can put the bird in a ziplock and stick it in your freezer til you can take it elsewhere. Just don't tell your roommate). 

- Don't be nasty: wash your hands after handling. 

*Maybe dead birds aren't your thing. Weird, but okay. What is your thing? Go find it. And then go do something about it.