The Birdwomen of Arizona

The Birdman of Alcatraz was a convicted killer who turned his life around by devoting his life behind bars to the care and study of birds. I suspect that if my mother were to compile a list of people she admires Robert Stroud would be on it—probably after St. Francis of Assisi and John James Audubon, but possibly before Mother Teresa and men of lesser accomplishment like, say, Thomas Edison. Frankly, my mother has gone to the birds.


I’d have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. When my grandmother lived with us, her greatest joy in life was feeding the wild birds that flocked to her back door. My mother hated those birds, and with good reason. She bought a bright, shiny new car almost every year; the birds left poop-stains on the paint jobs. She took great pride in her carefully manicured yard; the birds scattered unsightly seed that grew into weeds and attracted bugs and vermin. Despite my mother’s constant complaints about her fine-feathered enemies, her mother slipped me money every Saturday to ride my bike to the store for a 5-lb bag of seed. When Grandma succumbed to lung cancer, I worried that dozens of seed-deprived sparrows would follow their former benefactor in a great migration toward the Light.


When we moved back to Arizona, a cycle repeated itself and my mother moved in with us. She’d sold the house – and virtually everything else she possessed. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that she arrived with her clothing, a chair, a bed, and a table. Oh, and one thing more: we were still assembling her bed when she handed me a 5-lb bag of bird seed and a cheap plastic birdfeeder, clearly left over from the Grandma-administration. She said only, “I hope you have a post for this.” I didn’t, but the local lumberyard sold me one.

Five years have passed and my mother—who has never been one for doing anything halfway—now has seventeen birdfeeders and two birdbaths within view from her picture window. (But she is in town today, so there may be three birdbaths and twenty feeders before I get this posted.) She caters to finches, sparrows, mourning doves, orioles, hummingbirds, and other winged creatures that I’d have to get out her bird book and binoculars to identify. By association (and much to her chagrin) she also feeds two squirrels, one hawk, a roadrunner, countless mice, at least one fat gopher snake . . . and most of the neighborhood cats. This nature preserve she has going is not exactly convenient for anybody besides the cats. One example—from many:


Before my son left for Iraq he draped a Marine Corps-issue dress coat over his chin-up bar. Before I could take it to the cleaners as I’d promised, an industrious oriole built a nest in one pocket and filled said nest with eggs. The picture at left shows the situation as of this morning. So as not to disturb the nursery—and get our eyes pecked out by the mother bird—we can no longer open the door leading to the back porch, nor can we turn on the porch light under any circumstance. This means that the cat has to be let in and out a window and I have to walk a half-mile around the house to feed the chickens and/or retrieve food from the freezer. But one must have priorities and my mother’s "priorities" are nesting.

Yesterday evening I looked out a window to see my mother sitting on the bench we put up when the 25-foot trek from the seed barrels to the feeders became too much for her. A hummingbird hovered over her head, two doves pecked the ground near her feet, an oriole hung upside-down from its nectar feeder nearby, and the St. Francis statue was knee-deep in sparrows. There sat the former bird-hater, looking as much a part of the scene as the bird-loving cement saint. The feathered fauna are so accustomed to her by now that the mechanical click of her oxygen tank no longer startles them, nor does the deep, rattling cough that often comes with her struggle for breath. I thought of how like the famed Birdman she is. In her case, the person she's killed is herself. She is now serving (like her mother before her) the end of a life sentence without possibility of parole. The unpardonable crime? Smoking. If she could take back the terrible choice she would. Because she can’t, she’s made another: to avoid despair and hopelessness by looking beyond her prison. It gives me great comfort see her gazing peacefully up into the sky because I know that beyond the soaring birds is He who marks the life of each sparrow. I think it was He who brought my mother around to her mother’s great love. Or perhaps He merely provided beautiful, hungry birds, and her innate curiosity and boundless charity did the rest.

True confession: I just can’t make myself love birds the way my grandmother did and my mother does. They’re too messy and noisy and prolific and—in the case of hummingbirds—viciously territorial to elicit my affection. Nevertheless, it won’t surprise me if the day comes when I arrive at my daughter’s home with a suitcase in one hand and a beat-up plastic birdfeeder in the other. She won’t have a post, of course . . . but she’ll get one.