I
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. I spotted them after ice-skating with one of my kids at the rink in the shadow of towering smokestacks at Riverbank State Park. The park is a concession to the community for the massive wastewater sewage plant hidden beneath it. It was midway through the Trump years: January, but not cold like Januaries when I was little, not cold enough to see your breath. It wasn’t snowing, and it wasn’t going to snow. 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.
Among 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. For Aimee, it was the peacocks in her grandmother’s backyard in southern India. For Kerri, it was a whooper swan above Inch Island, Donegal, the year the peace process began. 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 Meera, it was the red-winged blackbird, there at the feeder, when she was small. 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.
I pointed out the extraordinary owls, stopping to take a picture with the camera of my phone.
“Look,” I said.
“I want hot cocoa,” my kid replied.
We turned the corner and made our way up Broadway toward the Chipped Cup for overpriced Belgian hot chocolate. On the corner of 149th I spotted another bird, the American redstart. It was painted on the security gate of Washington Heights Pediatrics—the kind of doctors’ office that struggles to keep the lights on with trifling Medicaid payments and nebulizes asthmatic Black and brown kids, like mine, with albuterol when their lungs constrict too severely for a pump to clear at home. The tuck of color under its wing matched my kid’s unnecessary winter hat. I took another picture. Oh New York!—you gorgeous aviary of madcap design. Across the street, in the corner of my eye, were more: a pair of Calliope hummingbirds painted mid-flight outside the Apollo Pharmacy.
That’s when I understood there was a pattern.
II
After the spark, I started noticing scores of them along my two-mile walk to work at City College. Most of the bird murals in Upper Manhattan are spray-painted on the rolled-down gates of mom and pop shops along the gallery of Broadway, at street level. Others are painted up higher on the sides of six-story apartment buildings. Nesting, perching, roosting in the doorways of delis, pharmacies, and barbershops. Lewis’s woodpecker at the Taqueria; the almighty boat-tailed grackle at the Buena Vista Vision Center; Brewer’s blackbird at the La Estrella dry cleaner, and so on—dozens of bird murals, each one marked in a corner with the name of the ongoing series to which they belong: the Audubon Mural Project.
John James Audubon, the pioneering ornithologist and bird artist once lived in the hood. He’s buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church at 155th Street, midway between my apartment building in Washington Heights and my job in West Harlem, where I teach writing, sometimes using Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a prompt. Audubon Terrace, once part of his estate, is now the site of a complex of cultural buildings. Other uptown locales named after Audubon include a housing project, an avenue, and the (1827–1838), in the guise of public art.
