Graeme Gibson: The Bedside Book of Birds

1.

When an anonymous artist incised an owl in the cave at Chauvet, there were probably fewer people on earth than there are in the Greater Toronto area today. Every human being lived in a rich and productive eco-system. Life was relatively easy, and would remain so for another 20,000 years -- until population growth and the evolution of farming introduced the unfortunate notion of hard work.

I’ve twice had the good fortune to visit an Arnhemland safari camp at Mount Borradaile, a ninety minute flight eas t along the coast from Darwin in northern Australia. There the rock outcrops rising from a monsoon plain are intricately honey-combed with caves and grottos that contain an extraordinary collection of Aboriginal rock paintings. Some images date back more than 50,000 years.

The caves are surprisingly fresh and dry in the tropical heat and heavy seasonal rains, which helps explain why people lived there for so long. There’s also the “bush tucker,” or wild food, which is varied and plentiful: Rock Ferns, Passion Fruit, and Native Gooseberries are tasty and nutritious; fish such as Barramundi still teem in pools below the rapids; and as the dry season approaches, wading birds cluster together by shrinking waterholes. A knowledgeable person wouldn’t have much trouble finding food or shelter in such a place. As a result, especially for someone accustomed to our relatively unforgiving northern forests, there’s a sense of Eden -- a Garden of Eden -- and perhaps it really was like that -- at least until the Europeans arrived.

Current research indicates that men in successful hunting-gathering societies spend about a week each month in search of game, and that women’s work takes between one and three hours a day. The rest is leisure time, as we now call it. There’s good reason to believe that ritual and ceremony, and probably language, occupied much of that time. The remarkable paintings at Chauvet, Lascaux, or Mount Borradaile, support this notion. Whatever else prompted such art, it seems probable that a ritualistic attempt to influence the hunt was involved.

An artistic people with time on their hands must have wondered about the meaning of things. Death, for instance: what was it that had departed the body and left it merely a corpse? And dreams -- where did they come from?” Was someone or something trying to instruct or warn us? And what, if anything, was out there, beyond the ring of firelight in which the people sat beneath a vast clear sky at night?

Birds had been around for over one hundred and fifty million years by the time humans appeared on the scene. We came to self-awareness surrounded by them, and as there were few of us, birds would not yet have learned to fear us: as Charles Darwin and others discovered, they could have been knocked off their nests with a stick. Doubtless birds and their eggs were our first fast food.

And birds would have been present in great numbers. As recently as 1813, John James Audubon rode all day under a sky filled with migrating pigeons. He reckoned that a billion birds had flown past him by nightfall. In 1866, another legendary flight arrived in southern Ontario: over a mile wide, with an estimated two birds per square yard, it took fourteen hours to pass overhead. Subsequent estimates suggest there were more than three billion birds in that assembly.

Perhaps because they were common enough to be commonplace and were relatively easy to kill, birds are rare in paleolithic cave art, but they are vibrant players later, in myths and stories from all cultures. Finland’s great national epic, the Kalevala, features a “beauteous duck” and her eggs, which become the earth and sky. In the north, loons and various other diving birds are credited with bringing mud up from the primordial sea so that dry land could be fashioned. Among the Yoruba, a hen with five claws spreads a handful of earth until the seas are parted. Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, was depicted with wings; Horus of Egypt had the head of a falcon.

When St Matthew’s Gospel described “the Spirit of God descending like a dove” and alighting on Jesus at his baptism, it was partaking of a tradition that reaches back into pre-historic times. So for that matter were the Mayans when they venerated Quetzalcoatl, their all-powerful plumed serpent. It is noteworthy that by the time of the Greeks the gods had been assigned two attributes possessed by birds, but not originally by men: flight and song. The more godlike you were, the more birdlike you were as well.

Man is the only singing primate; a fact that may cast some light on the ancient connection.

2.

The Norse god Odin, the All-father, had two ravens, one named Thought (Huginn) and the other Memory (Muninn). Each day they flew about the world, and on returning told the god what they had seen. Much of Odin’s power is attributed to his “raven knowledge,” as second sight is called in parts of Scotland. Perhaps it is this kind of belief that survives in the folk saying, “A little bird told me.”There are good reasons why Raven became an iconic figure. These birds cannot open large carcases, especially frozen ones; they must therefore follow hunting carnivores, such as wolves, bears, and humans, who will do the hard work for them. For millenia early humans hunted in family groups, just as wolves do. Field researchers in New England told Bernd Heinrich? that hunting wolves are almost always accompanied by a raven or two. Ravens must have associated with human hunters in the same way. Indeed they often still do, during moose and deer hunting seasons.

Ravens, or “wolf birds” as they are sometimes called, not only follow hunting carnivores; there’s good reason to believe they actually collaborate, by leading them to prey. Ravens are clearly intelligent birds; as they are capable of spotting quarry from far above their earth-bound partners, it’s likely that, over the long years, they figured out a way of bringing predator and prey together. Heinrich describes older Inuit hunters who insist that Raven has been an active partner in their hunts.

Ravens aren’t the only birds capable of choosing to relate to humans. Parrots are also high on the list. Early in the autumn of 1964 I bought a parrot in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was a handsome creature, very healthy and full of life. I named him Harold Wilson. He scarcely said anything at all, but he barked like two dogs at once, made roaring noises like a vacuum cleaner, and spoke my sons’ names. He was bright and affectionate, and soon became an amusing and responsive member of the family.

However, back in Toronto a year later I became increasingly uneasy about Harold’s situation. As winter cold and darkness set in I saw that the bird was miserable: diminishing daylight must have been bad enough, but I also sensed that he was lonely.

By spring I’d arranged to give him to the Toronto Zoo, a modest operation back then. The director led us to the aviary himself, where a congenial cage had been prepared. Waiting inside was a female parrot named Olive.

Watched by my sons and a gathering crowd, I entered the cage, with Harold on my wrist,. When I placed him on the main perch, Olive shuffled away. I said my good-byes and turned to leave. Then Harold did something that astonished me. For the very first time, and in exactly the voice my kids might have used, he called out “Daddy!” When I turned to look at him he was leaning towards me expectantly. “Daddy,” he repeated.

I don’t remember what I said to him. Something about him being happier there, that he’d soon make friends. The kind of things you say to kids when you abandon them at camp. But outside the aviary I could still hear him calling “Daddy! Daddy!” as we walked away. I was shattered to discover that Harold knew my name, and that he did so because he’d identified himself with my children. I now believe he’d known it all along, but was using it – for the first time – out of desperation.

Both Konrad Lorenz and Berndt Heinrich (author of Ravens in Winter and The mind of the Raven) mention instances of birds calling out the private names of intimates when threatened by serious danger. I am no longer surprised by such information. We think of our captive birds as our pets, but perhaps we are their’s as well.

3.

In folk and fairy tales from all over the world, the attitude and behaviour of birds and other animals often contains a lesson, or a warning. Many of us grew up with Aesop’s Fables, with Orwell’s Animal Farm, with Chicken Little, with the rhymes in Old Mother Goose and with the Little Red Hen. Popular examples of folkloric birds are everywhere: Woody Woodpecker with his maniacal laugh, Scrooge McDuck, Christopher Robin’s Wise Old Owl, Big Bird of Sesame Street, and Harry Potter’s messenger owl Hedwig.

Animals acting out versions of human strength or folly have always compelled and entertained us. Enigmatic animal spirits preceded our anthropomorphic gods: earlier generations lived in close and often dangerous proximity to wild animals, and were keenly vulnerable to the vagaries of the hunt. It isn’t surprising that they created stories about these creatures, and in doing so strove to identify with them and thus control them in some small way.

In DIET OF SOULS, which is John Houston’s documentary on traditional Inuit hunting, there’s a compelling exploration of how animism lingers on in the North. If you believe, as the Inuit have traditionally done, that the animals you must kill also have souls, and that their spirits are sometimes stronger than your own, then spiritual life is dangerous, and inescapably tragic.

We are a very long way from that world now. They say the majority of city children have never seen a live sheep or cow. Nevertheless our continuing tradition of animal stories carries with it a secularized echo of magic, of shamanism -- of the time when spirits moved between human and animal bodies; and when people believed (as some still do) that all living things have souls, and that we must learn from them.

For much of the seventies I lived and worked on a small farm north of Toronto. There I witnessed a real-life fable, a cautionary tale with distinct human implications. Among the collection of animals on the farm was a desperately earnest rooster, who herded, protected, and serviced about two dozen hens. The poor devil took his responsibilities so seriously that when I was feeding the hens or collecting their eggs I had to protect my legs by fending the rooster off with a tennis racquet. Moreover I don’t think I ever broke open an egg that hadn’t been fertilized.

Should a strange dog bark or the shadow of a crow sail over the barnyard the rooster would explode into action, chasing his startled harem into the barn, all the while screaming havoc. Needless to say he was not a happy creature. If he had he worked in the city he would have been recognized as a classic Type A personality.

One fateful day in spring, several threatening events occurred simultaneously. The sheep barged into the rooster’s flock, separating it into two groups of hens. The rooster was trying to round them up when I appeared in a doorway with a shovel over my shoulder. Then I walked between the bird and his charges. It was all too much for the rooster. He uttered a series of frightful screams and then pitched over on his side. He was dead.

Before redeeming the unfortunate creature as coq au vin I showed the body to our veterinarian, to rule out some ghastly avian sickness. Contemplating the rooster’s swollen, blood-filled head and neck, the vet said: “This bird died of rage.” It certainly looked that way. I’d seen such faces glaring out from cars during rush hour, and recognized the symptoms.

What was the lesson? Nothing the bird intended to teach me. In folk tales and parables, the bird is our ventriloquist’s dummy: the voice we hear is our own.