Towards a New Ornithomancy
In this newsletter: Communing with the big bird brain, the latest on Omicron, and some words of advice.
Part I: Towards a New Ornithomancy
The most amazing thing I ever saw a bird do was defecate through the window of a Jeep Wrangler.
This was a few years ago; probably in the fall of 2016. We were at the beach just driving around, and we saw this huge hawk sitting on a post by the side of the road, five feet off the ground.
We stopped at a respectful distance to gawk. Then this yellow Wrangler drives up, full of people who seemed like they had immediate plans to drink a substantial amount of Red Bull and vodka, and parks like one foot from the post. The Wrangler folks look at the bird for thirty seconds, and then get bored and try to scare it off. They shout. The hawk does not get scared. They lean on the Wrangler’s horn. The hawk swivels on the post, raises its tail feathers, and projectile-defecates through their window.
What I like most about this story is how it hints at an intelligence in the big hawk that goes beyond those base instincts needed for hunting a squirrel and eating it whole; some rational mind just out of human reach.
I’ve always considered myself more of a bird observer, or a bird appreciator, or perhaps a bird noticer, than a bird watcher. I like looking at birds, but I can’t tell a phoebe from a towhee, and I don’t particularly want to. I do like to point out any bird larger than a pigeon and assert that it’s a red-tailed hawk, because people tend to believe me, and I think I’m not always wrong?
As others have gotten into birding during the pandemic, I’ve had more time for my own bird observing. That mostly means looking up at pigeons while I push the stroller up the hill towards the park, and looking up at pigeons while I push the stroller through the park, and looking up at pigeons while I push the stroller home from the park. Also, looking down at pigeons through the window while I sit at the desk in the bedroom, typing words into a computer.
During these months of bird observations, I’ve thought often of the big hawk we saw on the beach that day, and the uncanny intelligence it revealed as it defecated through the Wrangler’s window.
There is, perhaps, no eerier problem in all of natural history than how to even begin to comprehend the phenomena of songbird migration; the fact, for example, that blackpoll warblers, which weigh half as much as a BIC lighter, once a year fly across the open ocean for three days straight without stopping.
The only reasonable explanation for how a bird small enough to be scooped up in a soup ladle can find its way across 1,500 miles of ocean is that the individual blackpoll warbler is not, in fact, an individual at all.
I’m proposing here the existence of a great collective avian mind, of which each pigeon or sparrow or blue jay or grackle or tufted titmouse or blackpoll warbler is a node; an emanation of a single combined bird consciousness. This unified bird mind theory not only solves the problem of songbird migration, and bird migration in general, but also the mystery of the starling murmuration and the turkey death dance. To the bird hive mind, coordinating a murmuration is as trivial as walking, and migrations are guided by a consciousness that has followed the same route hundreds of billions of times.
The unified bird mind theory does not necessarily suppose a queen bird somewhere at its center, though it seems likely one would exist at the axis of the great swarming collective. It could be something mundane, like a mourning dove just sitting on an antennae somewhere, or something obvious, like a centenarian parrot. Or maybe a hidden dodo, concealed by the bird collective somewhere out of human reach; a last lineage of living dodos hidden in some secret cave, on some forgotten island. Impossibly inbred now, unable to feed or take care of themselves; preserved by the bird hive, which would dissolve without them; the bonds broken, and the billions of individual birds left to peck their way alone through a vast, cold, and hostile world. So these last dodos are guarded from rodents and snakes by a flock of frigate birds, and wandering albatrosses bring food for them from across the waters. Emperor penguins do tours of duty as their butlers, swimming up from Antarctica to spend six months preparing their meals, preening them, washing out their caves. And the dodos themselves, sightless and sickly after generations in the darkness, spend their days exploring the infinities of the avian oneness; binding the tropical hornbill to the Steller’s sea eagle of Kamchatka, the house sparrow to the tufted puffin.
Maybe, or maybe not. Either way, even more important than the implications of a shared bird brain for the understanding the behavior of birds, are its implications for human attempts at divination. If we accept the existence of a single unified bird mind; if birds exist not as individual organisms, but rather a species-bridging supraorganism; then augury, or ornithomancy, becomes perhaps the most rational approach to divination.
Compared to the reading of tea leaves, say, which implies the existence of a demon messing around at the bottom of your teapot, augury in a world with a great collective bird brain is eminently logical, and assumes only that the thoughts of this Big Bird can be guessed through the movement of its parts, just as the intentions of a mammalian brain can be glimpsed in the flashes of blood flow seen in the readout of an fMRI. We don’t even need to ascribe psychic powers to this avian hive-mind in order to imagine that accessing its thoughts has predictive power. The panoptical awareness that comes from containing within its oneness tens of billions of flying, walking, swimming nodes distributed all across the planet, coupled with a distributed brain of virtually infinite size, would make the big bird mind effectively omniscient.
The only question is how to read this unified bird brain’s thoughts. This Great Bird is watching us, and has been watching us, and will be watching us. Ancient and modern systems of augury must necessarily have been insufficient, for if they had worked, we would still be using them, and the power of the unitary bird would have shaped the course of history.
I have not arrived at a new system of ornithomancy. In my bird observations over these past two years, however, I have begun to feel my way through the beginnings of a new approach. I might be on the wrong track here, but I thought I would share my early results. Below is a list of observed bird behaviors, plus a proposed preliminary interpretation for each.
A flock of pigeons sweeps in from the west, wheels in two tight circles overhead, then settles on an apartment building roof.
“This guy’s going to roll that stroller through that dog shit, isn’t he? Yep, there he goes. Right through it.”
Two crows chase a red-tailed hawk through the sky, tumbling over each other as the hawk screams its rage.
“Wasn’t he wearing that t-shirt yesterday?”
Three separate pigeon flocks flee a peregrine falcon rocketing down out of the clouds.
“When’s the last time we saw him go anywhere but that park? And always in a rush. He’s hurrying down the hill, why? So he can hurry back up it in an hour? And then back down after that? Did he ever go anywhere else? Was this always his life? Up to the park, back from the park, up to the park again. It’s sad, really.”
High above Fort Tryon Park, three tremendous raptors float on the updrafts that blow up from the river. Their heads are white, their bodies black. Bald eagles. They hover, fixed like stars in the firmament, until the wind blows hard and they are pushed eastward, out of view.
“This guy is still cutting his own hair, isn’t he? He looks like he’s molting.”
As dawn breaks over the city, the silhouette of a lone red-tailed hawk resolves out of the darkness on a distant fire escape.
“He thinks he’s got so much self-control because he took Twitter off his phone, but he’s at that desk with Twitter up on one of those monitors for like eight hours a day. That’s already too much Twitter! You don’t get points for cutting out hour nine!”
Seagulls mass over the park at dusk, spiraling in a growing flock, their cries carrying faintly over the wind.
“Why’s he always looking at us? Get a life!”
This is only a start, but I think I’m on to something here. I’ll report back as I continue to develop my system.
Part II: The Latest on Omicron
A few of items I wrote this week for Barron’s: Moderna’s data on its developmental flu vaccine disappointed. The FDA and CDC expanded the U.S. booster campaign to include 16 and 17-year-olds.
Also, I spoke with the Novartis CEO about what he’s going to do with his company’s $20 billion war chest. And BioNTech’s CEO said on a press call that, against Omicron, his vaccine is a three-dose vaccine, not two doses and a booster.
Part III: Words of Advice
Here’s the 2015 study that confirmed that blackpoll warblers actually do fly three days over the ocean without stopping on their annual southbound migration.
This is Audubon’s 1841 drawing of a blackpoll warbler in a gum tree.
The best bird Twitter account is this one.
Maybe everyone’s seen this, and I’d kind of forgotten about these guys, but I do wonder if this is not the best musical performance on a late night television show in the history of late night television shows?
That’s all I’ve got!