![]() ![]() On the corner of 149th I spotted another bird, the American redstart. We turned the corner and made our way up Broadway toward the Chipped Cup for overpriced Belgian hot chocolate. I pointed out the extraordinary owls, stopping to take a picture with the camera of my phone. Her mom told her the name and it all clicked into place- black bird, red wings-as she learned the game of language and how we match it to the world around us. For Meera, it was the red-winged blackbird, there at the feeder, when she was small. ![]() For Windhorse, it was the Baltimore orioles flitting about in the high branches of poplars at his grandfather’s house up north on the lake. For Kerri, it was a whooper swan above Inch Island, Donegal, the year the peace process began. For Aimee, it was the peacocks in her grandmother’s backyard in southern India. The owls watched me quizzically with their heads cocked, their long skinny legs perched on the colored bands of a psychedelic rainbow that seemed to lead off that gray street into another, more magical realm.Īmong people who watch birds, it’s often the case that a first bird love, the so-called “spark bird,” draws them forever down the bright and rambling path of birding. It wasn’t snowing, and it wasn’t going to snow. ![]() It was midway through the Trump years: January, but not cold like Januaries when I was little, not cold enough to see your breath. The park is a concession to the community for the massive wastewater sewage plant hidden beneath it. ![]() I spotted them after ice-skating with one of my kids at the rink in the shadow of towering smokestacks at Riverbank State Park. IF I CAN BE CALLED A BIRD-WATCHER, my spark was a pair of burrowing owls, painted on the narrow storefront gate of a shuttered real estate business on 145th Street in Harlem that brokers single-room occupancy housing for two hundred dollars a week. Find this story and more in Orion’s latest anthology, Spark Birds. ![]()
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