Winter finally hit us. The skies are cloudy, dense with fog and moisture. The air is wet and almost warm, and snow sticks to the ground, melts, sticks, then turns to rain again.
I walk in the cold with my nose running and eyes watering. I walk because I can’t stand looking at a screen for another minute. I can’t handle the assault of canned music in headphones or the tinny, compressed voices of talking heads on Zoom.
The dog walks alongside me, skipping through the snow. She tracks her own paw prints as we take another lap around the park.
What strange creature walked here before me? She thinks. What dainty paws! A sniff, a scuffle, a clawing dig through the damp and--There’s grass underneath that white stuff! A couple bites; a cow chewing cud in teddy bear form.
A flock of robins is holding a get-together in a small tree by the hospital halfway through our route. They chirp and scuffle, two or even three to a branch. Their tiny heads twist in ways that seem too jittery to be organic. Mechanized, alert.
I’ve never seen so many robins in one place. Aren’t they solitary creatures? I think of them as lonely worm-hunters. As diggers of creepy crawlies from the wet grass in sharply angled post-dawn light.
One robin used to build a nest behind the speaker on my parent’s porch every spring. She’d startle whenever I shut the French doors off the living room, swooping just over my head. She’d leave her chirping little ones asking for more food and stare at me with venom in her tiny, sentient eyes, saying, too close, too close.
But I’ve never seen so many in one place. It was the annual robin convention, I swear. They looked at each other, heads twitching side to side. There’s life behind those gleaming eyes.
The dog took no notice. Squirrels or die!
We return home, and I wonder at the mass of birds in that small tree. A quick search--in fall and winter, robins migrate in flocks, it turns out. And in summer they guard their territory fiercely. Which explains the animosity held for me by the sweet mum in the nest by my parent’s back door.
Another avian anecdote: I worked in a lab with chickadees one summer after college. I raised birds from hatchlings to gangly teenagers then fluffy adults, all by hand. I played momma bird for a couple months, arriving at dawn or taking the dusk shift, shuffling wax worms and pine nuts into the nest with forceps. Dropping goodies into open mouths and grabbing poop when a little feathered tush appeared in the air.
You’ve never thought about that, have you? Ma and papa bird (should they parent in pairs) nab little poop packets from those raised butts, dropping them outside the nest. Diaper changes happen even in hollow trees.
The university where I worked sat at the intersection of two chickadee territories. To the north, black-capped chickadees; to the south, the Carolina chickadees. And for a strip along the border, you sometimes find hybrids with a parent from each side. We took a hatchling birds from black-capped chickadee nests, from Carolina chickadee nests, and a few that we thought might have one black-capped parent and one Carolina parent. And we tested their DNA just to be sure, and raised them up in the lab, and gave them a memory test.
We were in search of a driver of speciation--the distinction that splits one species off into two or more. Speciation, the core tenant of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Whatever helps improve fitness--or decreases reproductive fitness--will be incorporated, or the species die out. Only those who change will survive.
So we taught the birds how to pull cotton puffs from pockets arranged on a wooden board hung from the side of the cage. In these pockets we’d secret wax worms, until the birds learned that pockets with puffs mean primo eats. Then we upped the ante, placing a big board with lots of pockets and puffs in the much larger aviary, with just one wax worm in a spot we randomly chose and carefully recorded.
We let the birds loose one at a time, starting a stopwatch and recording how many tries it took for them to find the worm.
It turns out the full-bore black-capped and Carolina chickadees had great memories. After a few attempts they could go and find the worm in the first pocket or two that they tried. But the hybrids were much worse off. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but they were about as successful as random chance would dictate.
Now extrapolate: you can imagine if the hybrid birds can’t find snacks in a controlled environment like the aviary, then they definitely would find it hard to return to a food cache over the winter. It’s part of the reason we probably see a distinction between the two types of chickadees. The hybrid birds struggle to remember, and in so doing, have lower fitness levels--they don’t remember where they stash food, and fail to survive long enough to reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation.
Ah, old Chuck Darwin would have enjoyed that study, I think.
All of that to say: when I look at a convention of robins, I’m skeptical that they aren’t exchanging secrets. There’s life behind those cold eyes, and memory, too. There’s a way of overwintering that requires returning and foraging, preparing for time ahead, a consideration of the future in minds that (as far as I know) reside entirely in the present. And there’s a time when they’re meant to travel together and let go of their territorial ways.
Is it possible to take a feather out of the bird’s cap? To prepare for the future without losing myself there? To hide snacks for later without agonizing over what later might look like?
Because, at the moment, I find my mind lodged in future-tense, wondering what I’ll be doing this time next month once we make it to our new home 1,000 miles away. And I pack boxes, lost to the present, thinking of ways to make life for my future self easier, losing touch with the me that is here, now.
God willing, I’ll find a way to be like the chickadee: secreting snacks without a thought, flitting from branch to branch, finding the good things spread out before me without question. And, like the robin, traveling with the comfort of a flock, seamlessly, to our new spring home.
Lovely, DJ. I want to read your writing every single day.
And no, I had never considered the poop packets.... Diaper changes do happen everywhere!
Beautiful piece, DJ ✨ felt like I was there on the walk and in the lab with you. And re: the end, I must say, the fact that you’re aware your mind is so taken by the future makes me think you’ve already taken some impressive first steps toward coming back to the present 🙏