birds

Absorbing Silence.

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I had some dalliances with the outside world, some with interesting people, but mostly not. The community I live in is remarkably ignorant and petty. Someone dropped an egg on the stairs and the janitors had not gotten to it, so that was a point of discussion. A security guard had laid on a couch was another, which became a matter of pettiness as well – the guard was unwell, it ended up. The ‘rain flies’ of Trinidad became a topic or so I thought – it ended up that the recent deluge of rain flies (termites) was accompanied by actual flying ants – alates – that befuddled the denizens of this strange community.

Recently, in a group chat, someone posted a video of an extraction fan in a bathroom and said they thought they had animals in their ceiling. Upon listening, it was clear that there birds involved, and being a curious person I had long found that the extraction fans connected to open air rooms where the split AC units vented their heat to the world. Like most chats, I was late to it and a day’s worth of speculation had already gone into it with only one person out of maybe 10 involved actually getting it right: birds. I don’t know how people couldn’t identify it, and the original poster retorted to me that she didn’t have time to watch the discovery channel.

I live on a planet where being able to identify the sound of birds was being shamed. Discovery Channel? Most of this can be found by simply walking outside and observing. Listening. Watching. Noticing. Finding the right questions, and thanks to the advent of a communications network filled with information, finding the right answers to questions. It used to be much more laborious with encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System alone. How can you not know the sounds of a bird in Trinidad and Tobago? What sort of life has one lead for not knowing the sound of birds to be defensible?

I sat drinking beer with a friend a few evenings ago, and said as much. He, too, has a curious mind, and like me, his advice is often ignored by people not as far away from brandishing pitchforks and torches over small and petty things while larger issues loom. We commiserated, laughed, and went about our lives after a few beers, but it bothers us both not that people don’t know as much as people don’t seem to want to know. What if I told you the person with animals in the ceiling was a musician? How does a musician not know the sound of birds?

Are we so removed from our world, staring at the flat screens in our caves that we shout complaints at these same screens about things we should know? How is not knowing the sounds of birds defensible? What sort of life does one have where one doesn’t hear the birds around on a daily basis? What sort of silence is in that cave?

Is it a cave, or a tomb with wifi?

Is it that the red dots of life have replaced the sounds of the outside world?

Like every morning, I sat with my first cup of coffee listening to the birds – the orange winged parrots and their revelry of cacophony, while every now and then the sounds of various tanagers and the croaking of the orependola rings through. The ever present Great Kiskedee chimes in now and then to a natural symphony of sunrise every morning. Not all would know the different instruments involved or name them, but certainly we should be able to hear them and know that they are birds. Rodents are not known for their voices. Birds are. One doesn’t need to be a naturalist to appreciate the songs of the morning.

It seems we absorb more and more silence around these flat screens that we expect that as nature when it is not, but I know it is not silence. I hear the fans of my computers, the whine of electrical devices all too well, and in time I tune it out but it also takes a toll on me where I need to hear the other lack of silence. That there are people who are different does not surprise me, and still I wonder after over half a century why people don’t know more about their world when the information is so readily available.

My knowledge of birds came from observation and answering questions that came to mind. My knowledge of insects was the same way, with trying to understand which insects were beneficial or not to households and plants pushed me on minor quests to get more knowledge, and I do not claim great knowledge of these things, yet the ignorance of others about these things has become as palpable as the shroud of silence they seemingly snuggle in. What sort of life is there without curiosity and only complaint?

We are the noisy ones on the planet, mostly, and we are deaf to our own noise. We are deaf to the sounds around us, it seems, and we are blind to the world around us as well if it is something inconvenient.

It seems despite my best efforts, I am surrounded by the deaf and blind, who lash out at the smallest inconveniences, and who will complain as if it’s their problem while acting as if it isn’t.

We do not live in silence. We live increasingly in ignorance, it seems. The troubles half a world away, where people die because other people choose to kill them, are likely filled with people who appreciate the songs of birds as a welcome interruption to the sounds of the weapons of their enemies.

What luxury we live in to not know the sound of birds. What depravity.

AI should replace some of these people, for that is all they have become – large language models with no questions and hallucinated answers.

Knowing What Something Is.

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Thraupis Episcopus, Blue-gray tanager, also called the Blue Jean in Trinidad and Tobago.

Recovering yesterday from the silicon insult, there was a quote that I kept coming back to as I awoke now and then.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard P. Feynman, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

We use labels to communicate things to other people, and it’s all based on some common perception. The bird pictured is blue-grey, so some very smart person called it a blue-grey tanager, where tanager is a type of bird that has common characteristics to other birds we call tanagers. Then someone who was taught too much Latin in school decided it looked a lot like the ‘Bishop of Thraupi’ (the literal translation). I have no idea why it’s called a blue-jean in Trinidad and Tobago, but it is what it is.

As most creatures, they’re interesting in their own way. I spent a lot of time watching birds in Trinidad and Tobago, taking pictures of them as a challenge, most of which ended up on Flickr and most of which weren’t that great. In doing that, I learned about how the birds interacted with others, what they ate, and when I talk about a blue-grey tanager all of that is behind the label. I know what the bird is based on what it does, how it behaves, etc.

It’s not just a label.

In the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’, a similar point was made in one of the more epic tirades done by the late, great Robin Williams:

…You’re an orphan right? You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?

“Good Will Hunting” (1997), Sean speaking to Will.

The obvious way to go with this would be about identity politics and some of the silliness that ensues with it because clearly labels don’t mean as much as who the people we’re talking about actually are, but that’s not where I’m going with it – though in a way, I am.

When we look at generative AI, and how it can be trained on the way we have communicated in the past, be it art, writing, etc, all it’s really doing is using the labels as puppets. It doesn’t understand what it has spit out in response to a prompt.

I’ve met people like that. In fact, in my younger days, I was more like that than even now I care to admit – reading about things I didn’t understand, and having my world view defined by the views of others. Actual experience varies, and that’s the point of all of it. That diversity of experience is what enriches our society, or should. It’s additive.

It’s impossible for us to be able to share all of our experiences with others, but we can share more if we go beyond the labels. That one picture above of the blue-grey tanager did not just happen. It required me to understand the bird to get close enough with only 3x magnification on one of the original digital cameras to get the detail I did, it took trimming the plumb tree just right to allow the branches to be close enough from the top of the stairs, and it required a lot of patience in developing trust with the birds – that I wasn’t going to eat them.

The very experiences that make us human are the things we need to fall back on to be human these days, not the rote memorization and regurgitation of labels that generative artificial intelligences are much better at than we are.

We need to understand these things.

The Bird Feeder.

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My father, about about 5 years before he died, began feeding birds. He did this for the pleasure of hearing them sing, I suppose. In a way I suppose it was one of his ways of controlling his environment. He also found it amusing that passing birds would make a mess on passing cars.

They never really did.

He liked to think one day they would. In some ways he wasn’t all that nice, but his distaste for people using their horn around the corner was so tangible that you could see a bird feeder floating above the road.

After he died, I continued the practice a bit, but rather than hang it over the road, I brought it to a more natural setting at that old house on San Fernando Hill. I tried it near the avocado tree, and it still wasn’t too good there. Birds like places where they feel safe.

Don’t we all?

And so the feeder ended up at the back of the house, in view of the kitchen sink. As a bachelor, this was convenient for coffee and food, and as someone who seems to have taken way too many pictures (you’re seeing some of the good ones), it was a blind that the birds were used to.

The history here is that for a while the City of San Fernando would spray malathion all over to deal with mosquito issues. Anecdotally, after they did that in the 1990s, there were less birds in the area as well as less bird pepper trees, named after their planters. Whether directly or indirectly, I believe the spraying caused a decrease in the birds.

When my father started feeding the birds, I filled in when he wasn’t home to do it for very different reasons. They had stopped spraying malathion, and there was still enough wild land on the hill to allow for re-population.

The palm tanagers( thraupis palmarum), in the top picture, were the first to the feeder. They had seemed to survive the best, and so they happily fed. In time, their cacophony brought out other birds to the feeder. The Great Kiskadee was omnipresent, but they are hardy and will eat anything – including Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Within a few days, the blue-grey tanagers (thraupis episcopus) showed up in much fewer numbers. They behaved much like the palm tanagers but in their own little clique. They sounded all alike to me, but they only really fed with their own clique.

The bare eyed thrush (big eyed grieve, tardis nudigenus) came along next. Shy yet bold at the same time, they seemed on the constant lookout for predators but had no issues putting the other birds in place on the feeder. The Great Kiskadees, always looking for opportunity, would back off when they saw a bare eyed thrush nearby. This brought out the tropical mockingbirds (mimus gilvus), too, though there are plenty of pictures of them. If there was a pecking order, I’d put the tropical mockingbirds at top.

Male white lined tanager (tachyphonus rufus), with a Great Kiskadee (Pitangus Sulphuratus) in the background on the feeder.

In time, other birds showed up, like the white-lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus), barred antshrikes, tropical kingbirds, and so on.

It became quite lively. In fact, if I did not restock the feeder by sunrise, palm tanagers would make their way to my room through the open window and act as alarm clocks. None of the other birds did that, but the palm tanagers for some reason had no trouble making a ruckus to get fed. This I considered a problem, not because I minded the palm tanagers, but because it made me aware that we had formed a relationship I didn’t intend.

I wanted to get the bird population back, I enjoyed them, but they shouldn’t depend on me. By this time, the barred antshrikes were nesting in the yard. White lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus) had fresh hatchlings, and I had planted some fruit trees in the yard as well as let the mango tree thrive. There was food there, they could ‘plant’ more plants – I had hoped for bird pepper trees, but none popped up, likely because all the bird pepper trees in the area had died.

Bare eyed thrush (Turdus Nudigenis), locally called the Big eyed grieve.

At the same time, one of the arms of the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago developed a road up the other side of San Fernando Hill, which on it’s face seemed a good idea. It’s a definite landmark, there is a lot of flora and fauna that is worth appreciating.

But instead they just had fetes, where loud music was played throughout the night, and when they decided to light fireworks, the debris landed on the galvanized roof above me and those around me.

The peace and quiet was to be no more on the Hill, as we called it, and it was no longer a nice place to live for the birds. For the other wildlife. And, I might add, for me.

I had been outmatched by drunken revelry and fireworks.

This is why when one of my father’s sisters challenged me for the house and demanded I move out, I didn’t bother fighting about it. Within a week, I handed her the keys and didn’t look back. The house did not have good memories over the years and my attempt to create some had failed.

I drove by the place last week, being in San Fernando for some other reason, and just shook my head as I drove by, looking at the disrepair of the place. My father’s sister had died not long after I had handed her the keys, nobody thought to inform me of her funeral and I probably would not have gone had I known. In the stack of bad memories, she was just another one.

Yet I remembered watching those birds thrive for that period. How very interesting they were with their social standings, their bickerings. Their families grew, and hopefully they migrated away from that horrible place as well. It could have been a good place.

Birds are little alarms.