Fall of the Birds Read online

  The robins did arrive several days later. That is, a few did. Not in their usual droves. They rushed on stick legs here and there across the grass, as robins do, pausing stock-still before stabbing the ground with their beaks and yanking forth wriggling worms. But then, several days after that, they disappeared again.

  At the feeder Caitlin and I saw some of our old regulars. The tree sparrows were back, flitting and chipping, throwing seed onto the porch floor with lusty abandon. A tufted titmouse put in an appearance, his dashing pointy crest making him look for all the world like a doo-wop singer who’d gone gray from years on the circuit. But just as suddenly as they’d arrived, they abandoned us, too.

  “Maybe it’s a bad batch of seed in the feeders,” Caitlin suggested.

  Together we drove over to town, where we purchased two fresh bags, one a songbird mix of safflower seed and white millet, the other our usual sunflower hearts, which had always been a favorite in times past. Maybe a little obsessively, we retrieved a couple of old feeders from the gardening shed, cleaned them up, and hung them as well. And even though it was far too early for our ruby-throated hummingbirds, we boiled some sugar water, cooled it, and set out our flying-saucer-shaped feeder for good measure, knowing it would likely draw only ants.

  “Banquet fit for a kingbird,” I quipped, failing to get a chuckle out of Caitlin.

  I was, however, delighted by her response to my birthday present, which I gave her a few days later.

  “Leitz?” she shrieked, “I cannot believe this,” and gave me a warm hug, a heartfelt response that went far beyond my hoped-for Way cool.

  While I hadn’t told her about the bizarre circumstances surrounding my trip over to Warwick—we rarely discussed my work, as I believed insureds deserved their privacy—she had read about it online and put two and two together. Being circumspect herself, she avoided bringing it up until something very similar happened not long after her birthday. This time a farmer outside the hamlet of Stone Ridge made the grisly discovery of a multitude of common grackles arrayed in iridescent purple and bronze heaps across acres of his untilled cropland. Though he wasn’t insured with the company I worked for, I found myself irrationally drawn to drive up there to witness the spectacle. Caitlin begged to come with me, since she was the one who had learned about it on the Internet. Seems she had begun blogging about the freakish behavior of avian life in our part of the country, discussing it with other birders online who’d posted similar anomalies here and there around the world.

  “I’m not sure if there isn’t a health risk involved, Cate,” I tried. “Maybe it’s not the best idea.”

  She shook her head. “Why would it be okay for you to go if there’s a health risk, and not me? Anyway, if something happens to you, what happens to me?”

  “All right,” I answered, having no fair comeback. “I think there’re some painters’ masks with the brushes and old cans in the cellar. You want to run downstairs and grab a couple?”

  “You really think that’s necessary?”

  “I don’t know what is or isn’t necessary. Can’t hurt to have them along.”

  It was an admittedly glorious day. Sparkling sunshine, nice and warm, no humidity, great puffy cumulus clouds riding along way high up. The leaves were budding out, the earth coming back to life after being incarcerated by frost and deprived of succor by winter light for so many months. Though Caitlin offered to indulge me by listening along to The Woodlanders—I was at a place in the narrative where the perfidious Dr. Fitzpiers was about to return with his ill-starred wife to Little Hintock, her home and a place he dearly loathed—I wanted instead to use the rare chance of this father-stepdaughter outing as an opportunity just to be together. Maybe my line of work had made me a bit overly inured to disasters, and it’s possible that I was not being a totally responsible parent in allowing Caitlin to see what was surely going to be a freakish sight, but in all honesty I welcomed her company. In a way, and for no reason I could explain to myself, I sensed she was calmer about what lay ahead than I.

  As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones interested in what had happened near Stone Ridge. Cars were parked for about a hundred yards along the grassy shoulder of the two-lane road, which was flanked on either side by unplanted cornfields. We made our way as close to the front of the line as we could but were soon enough directed by a state trooper to pull over. A boxy white EPA truck with flashing overhead lights passed us as we locked the car and proceeded ahead on the shoulder toward where others were congregated. Seeing that no one else was wearing any kind of breathing protection, we kept our masks in the back pockets of our jeans. From our necks dangled our binoculars, although it wasn’t at first clear whether we’d be allowed close enough to glass anything, because a perimeter had been established by the police.

  Once we did reach the crowd of maybe fifty or so people, the vast litter of dead birds became visible. They peppered the entire side of a gently rising hill atop whose round shoulder was a farmhouse, collection of outbuildings, and a silo. Through the field glasses I could get a decent view of things—at least, what was observable from this vantage. In a word, the sight was horrific. Surreal, actually.

  Caitlin interrupted my spiraling thoughts with a quiet hand on my raised arm.

  “Over there,” she half whispered, holding her binoculars in one hand and pointing with the other.

  I narrowed my field of vision to the area she’d indicated and at first didn’t see what had caught her interest. But then I made them out. An incongruous group of familiar but lifeless red-tailed hawks and what appeared from a distance to be a scattering of ferruginous hawks, distinctive for their dark-streaked white heads and tails a paler rufous than those of the red-tailed variety common to our region.

  “Bald eagles?” Caitlin asked. “I mean, those ones next to the red-tails?”

  Bald eagles made so much more sense than ferruginous hawks. The eagles had made quite a comeback in recent years along the Hudson River. But when I looked again, focusing on the telltale beaks, my original identification was about as confirmed as I could manage without walking up the hill and kneeling beside the feathery remains. The only problem was that ferruginous hawks never venture east of the Mississippi. They’re hawks of the Great Plains, not of New England farmlands. As before, when I thought I had mistaken a western-dwelling grosbeak for an eastern one, I could hardly dismiss what I was seeing right then and there in clear view, with my own eyes, although the scale of this sighting was far beyond any “accidental,” “lost,” or “blown off course” explanation that I’d ever heard of. So far beyond as to be bizarre, troubling. And it begged the question of why hawks of any kind would flock with grackles, much less why both lay dead on this hillside. Made zero sense. I was reminded of the ’70s free-love rock lyric, The eagle flies with the dove, a Peaceable Kingdom image in the old lion-lying-with-the-lamb tradition. But there was nothing peaceable about this.

  “Not sure,” I told her, which wasn’t completely a lie, since I really was not sure what I was witnessing. For a moment I considered trying to persuade one of the police to allow me out onto the field to examine some of the birds, but I realized that my credentials as an insurance adjuster and devoted if amateur ornithologist wouldn’t make a convincing argument. Besides, I wasn’t about to leave Caitlin by herself, sidelined, and was more than ever disinclined to allow her to get any closer to this potentially mephitic kill zone.

  I told her it was time to leave. We’d seen all we needed to see, and then some. Ultimately, our journey hadn’t been about divining the mystery of what was happening, but rather confirming for ourselves that it was happening. Whatever “it” meant.

  In my work, I often find myself both awe-inspired and dumbfounded by how property-loss victims are able to move from shock and grief to resolve and optimism. I have met with families whose homes were burnt to the foundation, where the only thing left was a blackened brick chimney standing over the smoldering ashes like a skinny tombstone, and have watch
ed them go from sobbing disbelief to buoyant can-do confidence that they’ll rebuild a new house better than the one before. I’ve seen people whose heirlooms, jewelry, and collectibles were stolen by burglars who blithely trashed whatever was left behind tell me they thanked God at least nobody got hurt. Once, I quietly marveled at an elderly couple in Westchester who, when the hundred-year-old oak tree in their front yard that had been planted by a beloved great-grandparent was felled by a lightning strike, simply planted another sapling where the old one stood, dedicated it to their forebear’s memory, and went on with their lives. We may be a flawed lot, we humans, but it can’t be said we’re not resilient.

  All of which is to say that Caitlin and I, and those around us, subtly acclimated to whatever was going on with the birds. Or, if not exactly acclimated, we were not quite as viscerally shocked by each new incident. When I spotted a confused black-legged kittiwake in the backyard rather than, say, one of our usual flickers or blue jays, I took note of it, even jotted it down in a journal where I’d started to record some of the odder sightings. When innumerable gulls washed up along a five-mile stretch of Long Island’s Atlantic coastline near Montauk, I was depressed by the footage on television, but jaw-dropping surprise wasn’t how I would characterize my response. Some experts blamed the incident on ocean acidification, others on stress induced by an uptick in the volume of craft in shipping lanes and the oil and garbage left in their wake. Either way, I knew that despite my disquiet, coming unhinged wasn’t going to do a bit of good. Wasn’t going to rewind any clocks, unchime any bells. Nature had gone through upheaval in eras past, and it would find its Darwinian way through this one too. So I’d begun to tell myself, though I scarcely believed my own words.

  When Caitlin’s blog reading turned up mentions of some unexplained domestic bird deaths, she watched over her Peeps with increasing concern. Whereas before any celery stalk would do, now she was careful to feed them only certified organic celery leaves, and she stopped offering them hard-boiled eggs for fear the chickens who laid them might be ill, their eggs contaminated. If well water was fine once, now they drank and bathed in bottled or boiled. She talked about buying an air purifier for their room and I would have let her, except she abruptly changed course one evening toward the end of May, as we were making dinner. Memorial Day was coming and we’d long planned to visit Laurel’s sister, Nicole, and her family in Camden, Maine, though our trip was potentially in jeopardy now because Caitlin no longer trusted anyone to care for her finches.

  “Do you remember a while ago,” she asked as she rinsed some lettuce, “before all this stuff was going on, when they found an emperor penguin in New Zealand or somewhere, stranded and all alone like a gazillion miles from home in Antarctica?”

  Another non sequitur. I did remember, I told her, but couldn’t recall how things turned out.

  “Well, I’ve been noticing that the bird deaths don’t seem to be happening as much the farther north or south you go. That penguin’s the only time I ever heard of a polar bird acting weird.”

  “Hadn’t occurred to me, but maybe you’re right.”

  “Oh, I’m right. I’ve been reading up on it.”

  “And?”

  “And look. Buildings burn down everywhere, right? Earthquakes, floods, and, like, frozen pipes? Bad stuff happens all over the place.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” still waiting to see if and how this was going to take shape and direction.

  “So—” and here she paused for a moment, letting our salad fly in circles on its own in the spinner—“wouldn’t you be able to do your job in Maine, or actually I was thinking even farther north? Prince Edward Island? Or Newfoundland, maybe?”

  Less a non sequitur than an improbability. She’d certainly been researching her geography. “I suppose. But all my connections, my company, not to mention whatever expertise I’ve got, is really grounded right here. I don’t think I’m qualified to analyze policy settlements when an igloo melts because somebody’s seal-blubber stove overheated.”

  “I’m not joking,” she snapped, knocking the lettuce out of the basket into a bowl.

  Our dinner was eaten in silence—Caitlin brooding, me mulling over whether her proposal was even slightly viable and also wondering, absurdly perhaps, what Hardy’s woodlanders would have done if confronted with similar circumstances. Up and move away from the only home they’d ever known?

  I was the one who finally spoke. “Did it occur to you that there may be fewer bird mortalities near the poles simply because there are fewer birds to begin with?”

  She set down her fork and glanced outside. Several pine siskins, absolutely normal for our habitat and season, were greedily snatching seed from one of the feeders.

  “Okay, well, no, I hadn’t.”

  “Look, I think we should go ahead and visit Mom’s sister, go sailing with them on that boat you like so much, have a little fun. Mrs. Tyson down the road has already proven herself to be perfectly able to take care of the Peeps. She’s never failed you once, has she?”

  “No,” Caitlin admitted.

  Funny how sometimes she acted like a woman older than her seventeen years, such as when she calmly spotted those eagles, or whatever they’d been, dead on the Stone Ridge farmer’s catastrophic hillside. And other times, like now, seemed a little girl. Laurel would have known what was going on inside her head. Would have known what to say next, or do. But I felt momentarily bereft, out of my depth. I had shelves of birding guides, not to mention an adult lifetime’s worth of disaster expertise under my belt. Yet nothing to guide me to a richer, wiser, surer understanding of what my stepdaughter—my one and only daughter—was truly feeling.

  Before we left for our trip north, Jim Helms directed me to meet a fellow adjuster to check out a new claim in Manhattan. By this time I had become our region’s unofficial authority on bird incidents, having by then visited some dozen sites up and down the river where claims had been filed, out as far as Connecticut in one direction and Pennsylvania in the other. Thus far, the company had honored nearly all of these claims, which was right and fair. What made life tough, however, was that every time I showed up to inspect the damage, I could sooner fly to the moon than offer a considered opinion as to why some thrushes had crashed en masse into a grocery store’s plate-glass window or why a throng of warblers had drowned in a swimming pool. With every fresh exposure to these bird deaths, I fathomed less.

  To say this was frustrating would be an all-out understatement. That it seemed to be happening in geographic pockets worldwide and that no one from the World Wildlife Fund or World Health Organization or any other health or wildlife group could bring the epidemiology of this nightmare into clear focus didn’t make things any easier. There was no more safety in numbers among us humans, in other words, than there was in the avian world. The more people I discussed this with, the more alone I felt. Indeed, aside from Caitlin, I’d never felt more alone in my life.

  A restaurant insured with us near Washington Square reported that the northwest quarter of the park and adjacent businesses had been temporarily shut down by the health commissioner’s office because scores of pigeons lay dead on sidewalks, streets, pathways, and grass. The mass fatalities had taken place predawn, and preliminary reviews of surveillance-camera footage suggested no specific cause. At first light the birds emerged from their roosts and simply began to stumble in errant circles, fall, and perish. A few tumbled off windowsills where they’d perched, others dropped like overripe feathery fruit from trees. It seemed for all the world like a particularly virulent disease—, a kind of super H5N1 strain,— had set in. But while some autopsies did report elevated white-blood-cell counts in the affected birds, no individual underlying virus or contagion had been agreed upon.

  “A mess,” I agreed, shaking hands with the restaurant owner and my colleague as we looked outside, where the cleanup was slowly getting under way. “So it looks like you might lose a week of business more or less until they’ve finished, and
we can put in for a decontamination team to come through meantime. Sound right?” I asked, turning to my fellow adjuster, Richard Wyndall, a man my junior by a decade or so, which was possibly why Jim had asked that I travel down to the city.

  “Unless there was any damage to the exterior I didn’t notice,” Wyndall said, looking at the owner.

  “No damage besides all these flying rats dead everywhere, stinking up the front entrance. They’re disgusting on a normal day, but this is ridiculous. City should have exterminated them years ago like they’re taking care of the Canada geese problem.”

  Despite myself, I winced at his callousness. Oh, I’d heard city pigeons disparaged before. Not like he coined the term “flying rats.” But most people don’t realize they’re really much like doves—rock doves, the Brits used to call them—in the same family as turtledoves and mourning doves, not to mention the passenger pigeons that were also taken for granted way back when, hunted and harvested into extinction although they’d once filled the skies from horizon to horizon in long, heavenly rivers of migration. He was still speaking, though.

  “—is whether I’m insured against what’s going to be a big drop in customer business until the headlines move on to something else.”

  “I think—”

  “That would not be up to us to determine, I’m afraid,” I said, interrupting Wyndall.

  “Look, when I called this in to my broker, I asked you guys to send someone here who could tell me what’s causing this so I can get us insured for it going forward. Last thing I need is for a bunch of birds to drive me out of business.”

  Wyndall turned toward me, waiting to hear my response. It was strange, I thought, that this issue hadn’t arisen before in so many words. Our company had already paid out millions for coverage of damaged assets. But the idea that this was—like flood, like hurricane, like tornado—an identifiable phenomenon that could negatively affect whole local economies was nothing I’d clearly considered before that moment. Now, the insurance industry articulates risks, essentially suggesting through our rates where people might be better off not living, not building. But to be insured against birds? I was tongue-tied.