DEEP READERS OF THE VISIONARYnovelist Toni Morrison appreciate the significance of birds in her work—they show up everywhere in her illustrious canon. I had the great fortune of experiencing how she treasured them every day. I met Morrison in 2016 when I interviewed her for two days for Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a film about her art and life released last year. A few months later she invited me to visit with her at her home, an enchanted boathouse along the Hudson River where a ghost named Beloved visited and where she wrote and dreamed until her passing in 2019. On the calendar, our friendship was fleeting. Spiritually, the bond endures.
When I visited Morrison, birds somehow winged their way into our conversation, and we’d spend precious moments exchanging stories about our avian adventures. To my joy, I got to be a bird nerd with the celebrated author.
Yet as much as Morrison revered birds, she was not a traditional birder. She kept no lists. She did not go on hikes or trek to faraway places in search of exotic sightings. And she surely did not join birding groups. While she understood the longing to see birds, efforts to plan a trip for one that might or might not show up sounded too complicated for her taste. (When I gave her Birders: The Central Park Effect, a documentary about New York City birders who go to great lengths to catch a rare sighting, she gave me her famous side-eye.)
Instead, she marveled on what was happening outside her doorstep—the river, the trees, and the sublime gifts of the morning hour, which included scores of
