Actually, two Robins. On the hood of an old Jeep by our garage. I found them aligned head to foot, on their backs, wings folded. They lay as if placed there by someone: side by side, not a feather askew, stone cold dead. There was no sign of trauma, just a little blood at each of their beaks. Two beautiful, pristine birds. Dead for what reason? If poisoned, they would have had to have eaten/drunk from the same source, close by. I could think of nothing they could have gotten into. It seemed unlikely they would have been simultaneously electrocuted from the wires above.
Having been a birder for several years at this point, I emailed an ornithologist I had taken a field class from, and he solved the mystery with his first guess: probably two males, establishing territory in spring (it was April). One would have been chasing the other and they didn’t see the windshield. Both necks broken instantly. Of course with no inquest (technically a necropsy when it’s done on a non-human), I’ll never be sure, but it seems the most likely scenario.
What to do with two dead birds? The ornithologist had also put me in touch with the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The curator told me that it’s illegal to collect or own wild birds even if they died in your yard, and that it’s almost impossible to get the permits to keep them. I asked about donating them as specimens but he said it was better to let nature take them back.
I’ve always been the kind of person who, upon finding a dead creature, says not “Eww!” but “Ooo . . .” I’m the one who gets a stick and pokes at things, who treats an owl pellet like a miniature archeological dig, teasing out tiny jawbones and vertebrae to keep in a little glass box. My husband Alex thinks it’s disgusting. “I don’t know why you need to touch things,” he says, offering me Purell. My parents were supportive of my childhood explorations. When I was in about 6th grade and our cat brought home a dead rabbit, they allowed me to boil it in a pot to get the meat off so I could see the skeleton. Then in a high school anatomy class, I took apart a cat and marveled that the same muscles fanning across each other—pectoralis, trapezius, latissimus dorsi—existed under my own skin. As a capstone to that senior class, the teacher brought a few of us (probably illegally) to witness a human autopsy. Despite the smell and the squelchy noises, I left with a passion for science. In college, however, I couldn’t get through the most basic math class, so became an English major. I’ve often wondered what alternative life I could have had with a bit more persistence.
Taking the opportunity to learn what I can while I have these two Robins, I get out my Sibley’s field guide, which includes topography charts naming the parts of a bird fully dressed, then look online for the interior anatomy of muscular and skeletal systems. I sit down at the back porch table with my specimens. Alex wants nothing to do with this.
Just hours before, these two healthy birds, now so still and composed, were racing through the air, wings and hearts pumping. Just this morning no doubt their exuberant song rang from their throats as they took part in the dawn chorus. They probably still had a worm or two in their stomachs. Maybe one of them had a mate nearby, waiting for his return.
I choose one bird to examine—without gloves—stroking the soft breast, turning it over and stroking the back. The American Robin is a common sight in our yards and neighborhoods, hopping on the grass, cocking their heads to hunt for worms, plucking berries from trees, yet you never get this close, you never get to touch.
It is light: three ounces on the kitchen scale. I extend a wing—what a miracle of design, so perfect. Using the charts, I identify the types of feathers: the largest are the primaries and secondaries and working upwards towards the shoulder, coverts. The underside of the wing is covered in pale brick-colored underwing coverts, with soft axillaries in the armpit. And the tiny feathers that cover the top knife-edge of the wing are marginal coverts, if I read the charts right. The fan of tail feathers (called retrices) is rounded and solid grey, while the undertail coverts contrast them in both shape (pointed) and color (crisp black and white). Why so fancy, I wonder, when they’re hidden under the tail?
I examine the head and see bird ears for the first time. Covered by small feathers called auriculars, the openings look alarmingly like holes in the head. I also notice what look like whiskers—small stiff black feathers at the base of the bill. These “rictal bristles,” which many birds have, serve a sensory function similar to mammals’ whiskers. They may also, according to field guide author David Allen Sibley, serve to protect the eyes from struggling prey. The bill is nearly closed, and stiff, but I pry it open just enough to see the little pointed tongue. The eyelids close from the bottom up over the black eyes, and the tiny “orbital feathers” encircling them are white.
The vertical black and white striping on the throat reminds me of when I first observed a Robin’s “whisper song.” While walking along a path with trees on both sides, I heard a very faint, melodious song—so faint it seemed to come from high up or far away, but there were no tall trees nearby. I noticed a Robin at eye level about 12 feet away, sitting on a branch. But he wasn’t singing. He was sitting perfectly still with his beak closed, minding his own business. I wanted to be sure; the voice sounded like a Robin’s cheery song, made up of many musical phrases. Would the song stop if he started moving around? He hopped to another branch to eat some berries. The song stopped. I waited to see if it would resume once he settled back down, and it did. He was so close I could see every feather on his chest—red, rounded, fringed—and the stripes on his throat. Were their barely perceptible movements just his breathing or did they synch up with the tiny notes? They did! It was like the Robin version of humming, so quiet. He was clearly an adult, so I didn’t think it was a juvenile “practice” song, and it was October, not time for mating or nesting. With no other Robin around, communication couldn’t be the purpose. Perhaps he was just humming to himself for the fun of it. (Although we can never know how Robins define fun, neither can we prove they don’t have any.)
When I looked into the phenomenon online, I found this charming observation from J.J. Schafer, of his having heard these songs in 1915.[1]
“On September 22 a Robin was heard scolding at short intervals in the front yard. At the same time I also heard what I thought was a small bird singing very softly. After trying for some time to see the supposed small bird, I became aware that it was the Robin singing a whisper song and scolding alternately. The Robin’s repertoire was the same as sung during the spring and summer months, but the singing was so faint that it was scarcely audible at a distance of ten yards.”
Part of the field class I had taken involved bird banding, and holding the Robin, I remember that when recording data, one of the measures of health was the amount of fat that could be seen through the near-translucent skin under the breast and belly feathers. The more yellow, the more fat. I part the small downy feathers down to the skin, which shows red (the pectoralis muscle) over the sternum and ribs. Their breastbone is not like ours which is simply where the ribs fuse, but more like chest armor with a prominent ridge down the middle, the “keel,” to anchor the large pectoralis, which is responsible for the downstroke of the wings. Lower down on the belly, some yellow shows through, and darkish areas I take to be organs.
Wondering if I would see parasites or decomposers, I check the body for insects. There is no sign of anything moving, even down to the bare skin.
Also, it smells clean, like rain.
The feet, with three toes in front and one in back, have reptilian-like scales on top, and reptilian-like pads on the bottom, left over from dinosaur ancestry. They articulate perfectly when I draw up the leg, and splay out when I push the leg down. Each tiny curved claw is sharp enough to prick my fingertip. The bone making up the bottom part of the legs seems covered only in skin, no muscle, like two little sticks. That bone, the tarsometatarsus, is really an evolutionary fusion of foot bones, so that what looks like their backwards knee corresponds to what would be our ankle, with their actual knee tucked up higher, under the feathers. I manipulate the knee and hip, feeling the joints moving under the skin, and squeezing to feel the tiny bulge of the “calf.” I also move the wing around, feeling for the shoulder joint. Pressing my fingers against the top of the wing, I find a miniature bicep, and perhaps the forearm muscle. I consider going below the skin but feel like I’d be desecrating the poor bird, cut down in his mating prime.
Grateful to this Robin for letting me handle its body and learn so much from it, I dig out a little spot in the garden near an ant colony and lay it to rest. If the ants disassemble it like they did with the goldfinch who died there last year, maybe I’ll get a tutorial in the avian skeletal system.
I crave this knowledge because I crave birds. If I’m outside, I’m tuned in to bird life with total attention, scanning the trees or sky instead of where I’m going, which has led to walking into branches and twisting my ankle in holes. My ears are pricked for the merest cheep. At anything that’s shaped like a bird, moves like a bird (even shadows), or sounds like a bird, I stop dead, whirl around, snap to attention, catch my breath, press the binoculars harder into my eyes, which only fogs up my glasses and makes me swear. Observing a nuthatch caching a seed behind bark can make my whole day.
My husband has humored me, even taking up bird photography to give himself something to do on our walks, but we’ve evolved into a pretty good team. Alex credits video game playing for his ability to locate movement. I can hear better, but he can see better. Alerted by a little buzzy call, I’ll tell him, “I think there’s a Palm Warbler somewhere in those two trees,” and he’ll find it, giving me the kind of directions familiar to birders. “Take the left trunk, go up to where it splits and there’s a horizontal branch, and it’s about 5 feet in from the tip.” Then I can confirm my ID and observe its behavior.
For those moments, following the warbler from branch to branch, then to the ground only a few yards away, drinking in its rusty cap above a yellow eye stripe, its constant hopping and stooping for bugs, there is nothing but this bird. I am full to bursting.
The ancient Egyptians called birds “winged souls.” Naturalist J. Drew Lanham once said, “I worship every bird I see.” And I get that: They fly. They sing songs that may have inspired humans’ first music. They build nests of all sizes and materials, from huge branches to grasses and spider silk, some lined with their own downy feathers. City birds have even learned to use cigarette butts to help keep parasites off of their nests and chicks. They navigate over oceans and continents—some without stopping—during migration, steering by the stars and their sense of the planet’s magnetic field. They hunt, in the air, on the ground, under water. They hide food for the winter, with chickadees actually expanding their brains in the fall to remember the locations of hundreds of hidden seeds. They play. They give gifts. Some of them hold funerals. Some of them dance for each other. They are, as Henry Beston put it in The Outermost House, another nation—one that I wish I could be part of. And so I watch. But with these two Robins, I also got to touch.
“Never say, ‘just a Robin.’” On a bird walk, the leader had talked about how each bird is important in its own right, and that we shouldn’t dismiss a common bird as if it isn’t worthy of our attention (what a friend calls “bird schmird”). And Robins are perhaps the most common wild bird in North America, estimated at 370 million. But ever since that walk, whenever Alex and I stalk a bird that turns out to be “just a Robin,” we correct each other. And now that I have known a Robin so intimately, I feel a connection with those I see going about their business. Like, I know you, or, I knew your cousin. I know what your little toes feel like, and what’s under your feathers. If one distracts me while I’m searching for the more colorful spring warblers, I may still think, “just a Robin,” but other times I will spend 20 minutes engrossed in watching one pull worms from the ground. Though they are the commonest bird, they can still surprise me too, like when I saw two juveniles—perhaps siblings—competing for the best spot in the birdbath. Rather than plucking at each other’s feathers as I’d seen before, they just snapped their beaks until one gave way and the other commenced its splashing and preening. Birds always have more to teach, and each new thing I learn is like a little gem I add to my collection.
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A couple of years after finding the Robins on the Jeep, I got an opportunity to work a few hours per week at the comparative zoology museum, preparing bird specimens for ornithologists to use in their research. The first day this English major put on my white lab coat and got a bird in my latex-gloved hands, I felt I’d gotten into science through the back door.
The specimens are catalogued and housed in a collection much like a rare books library, with similar temperature and humidity controls. Credentialed researchers can look up species, geographic location, and date range in the database, then take the catalogue numbers into the collection and locate their birds. As in a library, the numbered ranges are marked on the end of rows; each row is made up of large cabinets. Each cabinet contains shallow drawers, and each drawer holds dozens of specimens, usually laid on their backs. A tag tied to the leg gives detailed information on when and where the bird was collected, its sex and age if known, amount of molt, even the contents of its stomach. Besides these “study skins,” the collection also includes bird skeletons, nests, and eggs.
I don’t work in the collection, but rather the lab. Once a week, I don my white coat, and see what the curator has laid out for me to work on. Usually 3-4 birds, each on its own plastic cafeteria tray, along with any tags or notes from the collector, and a cataloging sheet where I fill in the data. My supervisor, Kate, often stays in the lab with me, working on her own specimens, from tiny songbirds or ducks, to birds of prey with wingspans that exceed the length of the metal table. Cynthia, a doctoral candidate, sometimes joins us as well. We all chat as we work, trading bird stories, and they patiently teach me the finer points of bird anatomy.
The sheet cites the cause of death, when known: for smaller birds it’s often a cat kill or window strike; for larger birds it can include being hit by a car; one Osprey was found tangled in fishing line; a hawk had been electrocuted by wires. It wasn’t long before I had a Robin on my tray (cat kill). Having spent years in the freezer, it wasn’t a good candidate for preservation as a whole specimen but was slated to be skeletonized. This meant that my assignment was to reduce the body to muscle and bone, with beetles at a field station further reducing it to a clean skeleton.
Before beginning this task, I take a moment to pay my respects to the bird. Despite having been dead for many years, it is still beautiful, and I feel compelled to honor its physical integrity before taking it apart. Turning it over in my bare hands, I stroke the soft breast, admire the face and bill, the colors and shapes of feathers, stretch out the wings. I wonder how many thousands of miles these little appendages took this bird during migrations. Then, using ruler and calipers, I take wing, tail, bill, and leg bone measurements, while noting any pinfeathers that would indicate molting. Finally, the moment comes to part the feathers along the keel and pick up the scalpel.
I remembered feeling that to cut into the Robin I’d gotten to know so well from my yard would have been a desecration of sorts, and I’m uneasy about what I am doing. I have to force myself to set that aside; I came here to learn, and to contribute to science. Also, I am about to get to know Robins even more intimately.
I make a single incision down the center of the chest, nudge aside the skin to the left, and cut a rectangle of muscle tissue. Small bits get placed with tweezers into a numbered vial headed for the deep freeze for later DNA analysis. As the bird is undressed of its plumage, the beauty of its architecture is revealed. I feel especially bad stripping off the wing feathers, until I discover that the underlying structure—the little muscles, delicate bones, and the ligaments connecting them— has a spare elegance of its own. The mechanics of joints and tiny bands of tendon still function as I stretch out the bare arm.
Today, I learn where the songs come from. Cynthia shows me where, right above the tiny jewel of heart, the trachea branches into two bronchi. At this intersection, a small swelling indicates not a larynx, but a syrinx—the Robin’s voice box. Instead of vocal cords, it has a membrane called a tympanum. This instrument is controlled by three pairs of muscles.
Robins belong to the thrush family, some of the avian world’s most melodic singers; in fact, a thrush can produce two notes at once, harmonizing with itself. In the woods, the effect is fairylike. It’s my favorite sound in existence; if I hear a Hermit Thrush while on a hike, the world stops. And God help the person who speaks as long as the bird is audible. But the Robins I hear are usually closer to home. Especially in the summer, when their song floats through my bedroom window at dawn, or in the blue hour before dawn, echoing down the quiet street. Their daytime greeting of “cheeri-up, cheeri-o” seems softened at that hour, often ending with a trailing trill. Donald Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds, described the final trill of the male Robin’s dawn song as “an ethereal whispered note much like the delicate flourish at the end of a Hermit Thrush song.”
The Robin’s song has a special significance to speakers of the Native American Seneca language. My friend Larry from upstate NY told me that in his people’s tradition, the address for giving thanks, Ganö:nyök, is spoken in such a way that the cadence mimics that of a Robin singing. He explained that this is because the robin is known as an early and late singer—”the first to give thanks in the morning and the last to give thanks at night.” He then graciously recited part of the address, and indeed I heard the Robin.
In Europe, songbirds are caught and served as a delicacy, cooked and eaten whole. A legally banned but still available French dish includes drowning an Ortolan Bunting in brandy before serving.[2] Songbirds are hunted in Italy in numbers that contribute to their extinction, despite it being illegal there as well.[3] Looking at the Robin, I can’t imagine silencing this voice, swallowing this syrinx with all its unsung songs.
Today, I also learn where the eggs come from. In each bird, we look for gonads, and measure them if we find them. Often they are undetectable, but if the bird died during mating season, they are more obvious. I see a little ovary here, only a couple of millimeters across, its granular texture indicating that some ova were beginning to mature. I think of a mother Robin I saw nesting on my daily walk. At the time, I tried to imagine what it was like to be her: I’m sitting here in this nest that I built, in this cup that I shaped with my body, on these eggs that I laid, keeping them warm as the sun warms my back, as I did yesterday and the days before that, and through that cold rainy night, and as I will tomorrow, and the days after that, until I say hello to my babies, and feed them till they fly.
I did not understand how eggs worked until Kate showed me some inside a bird. It was not a Robin, but the Osprey that had died by fishing line. She had five eggs inside her, but they were not yet eggs. In preparation for mating, ova start to mature; first, just the yolks are formed. If fertilized, they move down the oviduct, where glands add the white (albumen), membranes, shell, and color. The ova develop sequentially, so when I took the five that were removed from the abdominal cavity and lined them up on the tray in ascending size, the first to “ripen” was about the size of a SuperBall, the smallest like a marble. Though they were just yolks, they were firm, deep yellow and orange-red, swirled with dark veins. The next generation of this osprey family that never got to be, they reminded me of the fiery planets of a solar system model.
If developed, the genetic code in these eggs would knit together each body with the exact tools needed for its particular place in the world: the talons, the bill, the hollow bones, down to the last perfectly formed feather, each feather designed to fulfill its specific purpose—flight, warmth, waterproofing—and to fit into its assigned placement next to its neighbor.
I’m surprised that the colors of the Robin’s red breast, and the Cardinal’s even redder, remain undimmed by death, retaining the vibrancy of life. I once found, on a bed of pine needles, so small they’d be almost invisible except for their bright yellow, a collection of infinitesimal feathers, smaller than my pinkie fingernail. White at the fuzzy end, yellow at the top, and that’s all there was to them. A couple dozen at least, a few clumps matted together, one wing feather. Their color still arresting the eye, speaking out: “I was here.” In another day, the evidence of this small life would be dispersed, blown in every direction, to become part of the forest’s carpet. What has been knitted will be unknitted. And knitted again.
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Birds have better eyesight than humans, and proportionally much larger eyes. They take up so much space in the skull that they need specialized bones, called ossicles, to add stability. Thus, birds can’t move their eyes as we do; they must move their head, as owls are known for. A Robin cocking its head at the grass isn’t listening for worms but focusing on movement.
It is strange to see two Robin’s eyes disembodied on the tray, so that we can study their anatomy. More than other body parts, eyes seem uncanny on their own. In life, the shiny black eyes would reflect a gleam of light, but now they are dull and faded. Cynthia likens them to blueberries.
A colleague once told me how comforting she found it to look into her own face in the mirror, as if seeing a friend. I cannot look into my own eyes for more than a moment without becoming unnerved, without seeing the eye not as a window to the soul but as a mechanical object like those laid out before me: iris, retina, optic nerve. I become too aware that the “I” behind the eye is dependent on the functioning of a three-pound loaf of neurons and electrical signals, observing a face that is mine but not me. What I do find reassuring is that living eyes seek other eyes; looking at each other forms a baseline connection within and across species. Your cat will look you in the eye, but so will a wild animal, or bird, even fish.
Southern writer Bailey White once described an encounter with an Eagle she interrupted at a road-killed meal. “He turned his head and gave me a long look through the windshield with his level yellow eyes.” It affected her so much that she turned off the car. “I thought about that glare he had given me: What are you doing here? it had said . . . I think it does us all good to get looked at like that now and then by a wild animal.”
Watching a bird fly, I can now visualize its inner workings. This has allowed me to visualize other bodies—my cats, my husband, myself—as collections of systems, machinery, and plumbing, that function until they don’t. Are these bodies animated only by oxygen and nutrients, or by some ineffable, eternal spirit?
In her brief but enduring essay, “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf muses on this animation, the energy that suffuses all life—even the “intricate corridors” of her own brain—as it is embodied by an insect on her windowpane. “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.” As death approaches and the moth’s frantic legs struggle in the air, it’s as if a machine has hit a glitch, but as the moth relaxes and stiffens on the sill, she realizes the struggle is over. “Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”
Death is certainly strange when looking at a Robin on a tray, reduced to its parts: a pile of feathers, another of organs, and a body of muscle and bone. But death also allows me the knowledge that I crave, a kind of entry into bird nation that I wouldn’t otherwise have. I can trace the delicate curve of a Brown Creeper’s bill, prick my finger on the points of a Chimney Swift’s tail, feel the soft webbing between a Murre’s toes. I can see if a warbler was prepared for fall migration by the amount of fat at its neck and above its tail. I can tell what a bird’s last meal was (young Kestrel: grasshoppers, Harlequin duck: tiny clams, Red-Tailed Hawk: mouse, Ground Dove: a crop full of seeds and one small worm), or if it starved. I can also guess at a bird’s age by the percentage of its skull covered by tiny spots, the signs of ossification (struts connecting two layers of bone). All these gems have been added to my collection.
As much as I’ve learned, it is a relief to take off my lab coat and walk outside into the fresh air. At the park, a dozen Robins—collectively called a “rabble”—alight in a tree, eating berries, greeting each other with short “chuk, chuk” calls. One sits with the sun on their breast, fairly glowing red. Below them in the pond, geese paddle, keeping to their own society. On the green, dogs bark, chasing balls and each other while a squirrel peers around a trunk. Joggers run past, conversational pairs saunter. We are all here alive today, our systems functioning: toes grasping onto branches, beaks closing around berries and jaws around caught balls, voices calling, tails wagging, hands holding other hands, eyes finding other eyes.
[1] “The Whisper Songs of Birds,” The Wilson Bulletin, No. 94.
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ortolans-birds-enjoyed-french-delicacy-are-being-eaten-extinction-180972272/
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/emptying-the-skies
