The Life of Birds

The Life of Birds

By Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright

In the study and classification of birds there seems to have developed some confusion about the Baltimore Oriole. At least, it seems that way to Ben. Recently, while conducting his field trips, he has begun to feel awkward in his presentation of the Oriole. Although he knows what he is talking about, something is not right. He has been feeling that either he is not saying what he knows or that some relevant news, which would change everything and whose coming he is vaguely aware of, has not yet reached him.

Ben is an amateur ornithologist and feels most comfortable with scientific method—or, at least, his version of it.  He is willing to provide a reasonable allowance for other forms of considering the world’s phenomena, but his tolerance of these alternatives is easily exhausted by even the mildest whiff of metaphysical speculation. Indeed, a lack of logical principle and scientific reasoning usually provokes in him a burst of indignant pedantry for which he is famous, avoided, and, of late, somewhat sorry.

Ben developed his interest in birds as the director of a small New England wildlife sanctuary set in the center of a small New England town. The 100-acre sanctuary was the bequest of one of the town’s founding fathers who, having transformed three thousand acres of forest into a small commuter village, acquired a change of mind during his final days. Convinced that his de-forestation had deprived the community of its entire oxygen supply, he departed this life gasping for air with his lungs in perfect working order.

The sanctuary is comprised mostly of hardscrabble rock, pin oaks, shadbark hickory, and patches of “poverty” grass. Emerging like a tumescent fungus from the domestic grid of well-arranged lawns, its modest acreage hosts only a scanty coterie of birds, squirrels, and a few expatriate wilderness creatures such as The Northern Raccoon, whose evolved nature is to hunker down within the ring of garbage cans surrounding this largely lifeless woodland.  The Audubon Society declined sponsorship.

There is no real staff at the sanctuary other than Ben, and his primary function there is to run the gift shop which sits by the road at the sanctuary’s entrance. This task is not unimportant since most visitors are usually casually lost motorists whose need to get anywhere is not urgent and whose attention is easily diverted to the shop’s abundant ceramic wildlife.

Occasionally, however, Ben is called upon to lead field trips for small groups of bird watchers.

He enjoys doing this; it affords him the opportunity to exercise his position as a man of the natural sciences.  On these narrated walks through the sanctuary, Ben will typically provide a detailed lecture on the birds they might be expected to see and, after their walk, a brief discussion on why they had not seen them. But no one seems to leave disappointed, least of all Ben. His analytical rendering of birdlife never seems to require…well, actual birdlife. Good science is like that, he says.

Nevertheless, recently, it was in these woods that, while speaking of the Baltimore Oriole, Ben first noticed a feeling of odd anticipation –  something imminent and unsettling – as if the sanctuary itself was poised to fold inside out, swapping the center for periphery and forcing the small town to suddenly hew its fragile civilization from inside nature’s hard heart.

It began like this.

“You will know the Oriole as a brilliant orange or yellow bird with black and white markings displayed on the wings and head,” he said, “Its voice is the sweetest of North American birds…a wonderful thing to hear but, unfortunately, a difficult voice to trace, lilting as it does from within the dense upper canopy of the bird’s nesting tree. The Oriole, unlike its close relative The American Crow, prefers its distance and its alluring song is but a false promise.”

Its alluring song is but a false promise…?!

Ben had surprised himself. He had offered this lyrical description to the group as if he were laying the bird itself into their palms. It was unlike him. He grew silent, worried that continuing with any further ornitho-logical analysis might cause the bird to fly out of their cupped hands in some oddly altered and unexplainable state.

And then it happened.

One of the birdwatchers, with innocent charm and lethal misconception, remarked on his familiarity with the “Baltimore” Oriole. “Oh yes, the Baaawl…timore Oriole; that is a lovely bird and, you know, there is a baseball team named for that bird – just like the St. Louis Cardinals and that Canadian team, what is it? – The Toronto Blue Jays. Yes, of course, except those aren’t real birds. Right, Ben? There’s no St. Looois…Cardinal; it’s just a plain Red Cardinal, isn’t that right?”

Ben experienced a mild loss of balance. At first, he thought he might have been holding his breath too long – something he had found himself doing more and more while looking through his binoculars.  But, he also knew that this birdwatcher had stumbled into an important matter in need of sorting out.

Centering himself again, Ben responded with a nod and a good-natured ain’t-life-grand-and-that-little-observation-proves-it chuckle that he was only partially convinced would prevent a recurring loss of foothold. He began speaking while trying to figure out just what it was that he wanted to say.

“Actually, there is no such thing as the “Baltimore” Oriole as we know it,” he said.

How did we ever get this news?

“Until recently, the eastern version of this bird, the so-called…Baltimore Oriole…

Why Baltimore?

“…was thought to be a different species from the western version, the so-called Bullock’s Oriole…

Who is Bullock?! Did he give us this news? Why?

“…However,  despite the differences in their appearances, it was found that they interbreed freely in the Great Plains of Central USA and most birds are hybrids known as The Northern Oriole…

Hybrids…? Do you mean mongrels?

“…Icterus galbula.”

Bingo! Mongrel!

The band of birdwatchers nodded approvingly, but Ben ignored them. There was much more he was not telling them about this family of birds, about the reclusive Black-headed Oriole furtively skirting the Mexican Border or the insectivorous Hooded Oriole ignoring the duty of the genus to re-seed through their excretions. For the moment….in fact for many moments since he had given things any thought, these birds, like the pretender Lichtenstein’s Oriole, seemed beside the point. The point was the fictional “Baltimore” Oriole, the bird with the quotes around its name in every textbook and field guide in North America. And, the point was beyond his science; it was beyond the affirming gravity of his data. Like a small feather floating in the air, the bird’s true identity had suddenly eluded Ben’s grasp.

Feeling himself to be deep in some primordial forest, he continued on…obscuring things.

“Actually, I was born in Baltimore…and, I must say, I was an Oriole fan myself. I mean a fan of the baseball team. It was a real disappointment to learn that the bird, ha hah…was not as real as everyone thought.” Ben looked up at the sky; he did not want to meet the gaze of the birdwatchers.

Actually…it changed the world as you knew it! This fictitious bird held a solid position within popular understanding of birdlife. It was nestled right in there with the Robins and Sparrows, a little prettier perhaps but as reliable as the rest. Even when the clever interloper’s fiction was uncovered it was too late. No one wanted to let it go. Calling the bird a “Northern” Oriole was like calling a Red-winged Blackbird a Blackbird with red wings. It was like recruiting an entirely new team. It was changing the very chemistry of the thing. The Baltimore Oriole was specific. It meant something! The “Northern” Oriole isn’t even acceptable as an expansion team. North is no place… it’s just a general area, an arbitrary celestial direction.

Ben continued, “I seem to recall finding out about this while reading Life Magazine. You probably don’t remember the original Life Magazine; it had a very good science section….ha hah.”

Another child’s underpinnings knocked apart by an innocent intrusion into the magazine rack. Where is that weird chuckle coming from?

“Anyway,” Ben said, wibbling further off point, “You’re better off rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals; then, at least, you know what you’re rooting for…a baseball team and not a bird.”

By now, the group had begun to move on, their heads both nodding and swiveling in the manner that heads do when their owners are expressing understanding and disinterest at the same time. They were not really interested in baseball teams. They were interested in real birds and their heads swiveled like radar dishes hoping to intercept a flight path, any flight path.

Ben lagged behind. Still grinning with half his face, he cocked his head sideways and punched his fist into his palm. Things were becoming clearer. As a grown rational man of science, Ben had occasionally experienced a mild and not unpleasant synaptic disruption due to the overlapping of the Baltimore Oriole as both ornithoid-being and baseball cap symbol; however, the circuit was now fully blown. Rotating about himself, he realized that in some peculiar way, he had always believed the bird to have been named after the baseball team and not the other way around…or, at least, they had shared the name for the same reason.

He remembered 1954. He was only five years old when The St. Louis Browns baseball team was bought by a group of baseball men from Washington, D.C. There was already a team in Washington, so the Browns were installed 30 miles away in downtown Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium and re-named the Baltimore Orioles. Vice-President Richard Nixon threw out the first ball and the peculiar Oriole fan was born.

It is said that Oriole fans are unique to baseball, a happy blend of southern propriety and northern presumption, the only fans that appear both deeply apologetic and apoplectic when booing their opponents. But like the city itself, Baltimoreans also seem to have unto themselves an air of contented dislocation. They are, in fact, neither northerners nor southerners, known best by their easternness and centeredness, as in…the “mid-Atlantic states.”

Ben spent much of 1954 at Memorial Stadium in the care of an irreverent row-house widow named Thelma Bishop. “Bishie”, as she was known, was Ben’s babysitter; the Stadium was her daycare center. An avid Oriole fan and holder of loud opinions on the national pastime, Bishie believed that baseball provided a fine synthesis of all that was good in the world, and all that could go bad if someone, namely herself, was not paying careful attention. She considered herself a master statistician and strategist, quick to tell Ben what the pitcher should throw next, where a fielder should align himself, on which side of the runner the batter should drive the ball, and so on. She conveyed these directives to Ben with her head turned down to him but her eyes on the field as if it was understood that he was to pass this information directly on to the eagerly awaiting Oriole dugout. Indeed, Ben’s earliest memory of these days was his embarrassment for the player who had somehow missed the relayed signals.

The days with “The Orioles” came to an abrupt close when Ben’s family moved out of state, leaving the team to prosper as the winningest team in baseball for the next thirty years. It also so happened that these thirty years were the only ones remaining in Bishie’s life. She had appreciated baseball, but she had loved that baseball team –  there was a difference; this was her lesson and Ben’s inheritance. Although he could never quite explain why, Ben had come to feel the same. Deeply.

He had not thought much about Bishie after joining the sanctuary but now, here in this scrub forest, she had alighted on his shoulder, an overdue memory admonishing him with a wink and an elbow in the ribs. She had been the namer of things for the young boy – an Ann Sullivan to Ben’s Helen Keller, placing the object in one hand while spelling the word that named it in the other. The difference was that Bishie had given him two things with the same name and he had gone forward into the world, slightly askew, smiling goofily, like a kid showing off his new shoes on the wrong feet.

As a boy, he had simply and with the utmost understanding assumed the bird and the baseball team to have been named for the same reason (somewhat like… ah ha, over there is an unusual bird with qualities a, b, and c. I shall name it “X”. And look, over there… a fine young bunch of baseball players. They too have qualities a, b, and c and although these are baseball qualities and not bird qualities, it doesn’t really matter since I admire them both in the same sort of way. As such, I shall also name this team of fine young baseball players: “X”). It was fine for them both to be named “X” because “X” was what was important and which had meaning. Not an accepted meaning nor, in most circles, even an acceptable meaning; however, it was meaning enough for a child to take a few timid steps forward into the world and that was precisely what Ben did. Later, as a young man turning to science, he had begun to stumble.

Ignoring a vague discomfort, the young man of science established a new sense of order with this shape-shifting name (of course, the bird, Icterus galbula, has nothing whatsoever to do with the baseball team; that would be as preposterous as believing the San Francisco Giants to be a yahooing, tobacco-chewing, rump-slapping band of Gullivers jogging ashore to play baseball for the Bay Area Lilliputians, ha ha ha) and, having dispensed with that problem, continued about his business. Then, one day, the bird’s name itself was canceled by some ornithological stock room clerks rearranging scientific inventory and, when this taxonomic change occurred, he had done a peculiar thing: he had pretended not to notice.

And now, drifting farther and farther behind the birdwatchers, connected to them like a forgotten balloon bobbing reluctantly at the end of a long string, Ben did take notice.  He realized that at the moment the fiction quotes embraced that bird’s name, its very life had been sucked out it and along with it had gone a big piece of Ben’s childhood. The boy, father to the man, had been orphaned.

Ben stopped and welcomed Bishie; she had come back to babysit.

They were out of the forest now and the birdwatchers were standing expectantly before the gift shop. Fumbling in his pockets, Ben realized that he had lost his key somewhere along the trail. Only slightly disappointed, the birdwatchers mumbled their thanks and returned to their cars, happy enough to be rid of the dotty pre-occupied fellow and the few disappointing crows still flying overhead.

Ben dutifully watched them leave and then, still gripping tightly to his binoculars, turned back into the sanctuary and began to retrace his steps, barely resisting the urge to run.

Author’s Endnote: For much of the 20th century, popular culture had always used the designation “Baltimore” for the Oriole,  but the scientific community used “Northern.” Genetic tests have restored the bird to its proper place both in the world and in popular imagination.

This was the seventh most-read piece of 2022.

Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright is a novelist, architect, Emeritus Professor at The New School, and rabid Oriole fan. As It Is On Earth, his first novel, received a 2013 PEN/Hemingway Honorable Mention for Literary Excellence. His latest novel, The Door-Man, is being published February 1, 2022 (Fomite Press). His uncle is/was three-time National Book Award winner, Peter Matthiessen, who never quite understood his nephew’s love for baseball…Go O’s. www.peterwheelwright.com

Michaela Paulson is an art conservator currently researching the optimal methods for the care and preservation of feathers and feathered cultural heritage materials at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She’s a novice birdwatcher, learning under the wing(s) of the ornithologists at the museum. 

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