Letter From America: The Birds
Ronnie Bray, who is still haunted by Alfred Hitchcock's nightmarish film The Birds, welcomes birds of a different feather who flock into Arizona to enjoy winter sunshine.
When I saw Hitchcock’s moving picture The Birds, I felt exactly as the rotund Englishman intended me to feel – terrified.
His film explored the breakdown of human society by the action of wild birds acting in concert to attack human beings in a reign of horror that elevates the terror level in my mind every time I see a line of dickey birds perched on telegraph wires, because I dread they may be marshalling themselves for a further, even more deadly, attack.
Poor Tippy Hedren was almost pecked to death in her home by former feathered friends fighting feverishly, as they function ferociously, aspiring to displace their foes, our human fellows, sending them frantically fleeing into the fields feeling more than fairly foul in their fervent desire to escape the frightening followers and their stabbing beaks.
Rod Taylor, a strapping chap of more than six feet tall, young, virile, and well muscled, was unable to check the sudden rush of thousands of beating wings, tearing at their flesh with flashing claws and bills.
It was such a time, and the disasters the savage avians initiated left cinemagoers with the feeling that when the picture ended and they walked out into the light, nothing would ever be the same again.
Sales of budgerigars and canaries plummeted like shotgunned ducks. Park pigeons pleaded in vain for bits of stale bread from the hands of chubby children, and domestic parrots were put on short rations, as the improbable became, for a time, the possible, and aviaphobia gripped the Western World, doing to nervous populations what the Red Army, with all its military might massed menacingly in Moscow’s Red Square, had failed to do.
The entire bird population was treated as the children of Israel had been treated by a paranoid pharaoh, and made to pay heavily for their potential for rebellion, although they had shown no predisposition to insurrection. Those were long and watchful days.
Nevertheless, as it does, the world rolled around bringing new days. New films that were disposed rather to make us laugh than cringe, illuminated the lustrous veil and helped our growing forgetfulness. The Birds became old hat, and bird-fear fever subsided as other changes sported on the stage of human history.
In course of time, the Red Army disbanded, its massive munitions pilfered by delinquents from nations emerging from the Soviet bloc’s restraint, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and people lost their fear of birds.
And there the matter of The Birds should have rested, never to be revived. However, this very day I was given a sharp reminder that not all past fears can be safely left to rest. Some of them have a habit of shooting up, as though from the tomb, to revisit the terror that once was ours.
Driving home from the Dog Park this morning, I saw them. Just one or two at first, but then more and more, all headed in the same direction, and I knew that it was happening again. The birds were coming back!
They impinged on my consciousness slowly at first, hardly registering as my mind lazily searched for understanding, but with no sense of urgency, no sense of invasion. Yet, they were the vanguard of what will soon be a vast horde of birds flocking to the Valley of the Sun to roost during the warm winter months in Arizona’s friendly cities, where they boost the economy even as they slow the traffic by adding to its volume.
When autumn dies in cooling climes, the birds head for southern parts, where warm dry weather is de rigueur, and tired, aching bodies bask in the healing heat of the Arizona wilderness.
The names of these birds are not found in ornithological encyclopaedias. There are no ducks, geese, finches, terns, sparrows, wrens, or ungainly grackles in the ranks of these interlopers.
These species include Winnebagos, Lunars, Wheats, Warriors, Tiogas, Tigers, Tetons, Zanzibars, Saharas, Serengetis, and Continentals.
These flightless birds travel by road, and their names are the makes of their exotic transports, many of them costing as much or more than stationary homes.
These vehicles have fully-fitted bathrooms, freezers, plush bedrooms, well-equipped kitchens, and slide-out lounges that double the width of the entertaining area. Everything is palatial. The high quality furnishing and fittings would grace a mansion.
They carry their owners from the unwelcome winters of their homes and deliver them to the Valley and its pleasantly high temperatures, where they will remain before driving back north in the swelling days of spring before the scorch of Southern Arizona shoots the mercury into the hundred and tens, or higher.
These birds spend their summers in the beautiful places of the continent. Places such as my beloved Montana, and Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, even from as far away as the "Land of the maple leaf, home of the beaver."
Collectively, they are called Snowbirds, and they come in droves as soon as frost glazes the windows and wilts the summer blooms in whatever places they call home. Besides adding to the congestion of the motorway systems that race in and around and through our cities, they contribute to the economy, and add colour to Wal-Mart’s car parks with displays of distinctive licence plates unique to their varied states.
We welcome Snowbirds with open arms, and look forward to hearing their tales of high adventure from the spectacular wild places of the north, rich in good people and wild animals, the likes of which are never seen in Arizona’s southland desert.
When spring comes and the thermometers rise above the high sixties and seventies of our winter, creeping into the eighties and beyond, they say long and fulsome farewells, and in the early hours of a warm red dawn turn their headlights northwards, and are gone.
I have drunk of nature’s nectar in the wild places amid the greenery of mountain fastnesses, their remote haunts giving homes to bear, elk, deer, mountain goats, and the like, and where the pace of living is more unhurried than in our teeming Valley, and only the fishful rivers run fast.
And because I have breathed and basked in the beauty and mystery of a place unlike any other in this great land, then perhaps I can be forgiven if I secretly indulge a little wish that I was going back with them.
As I watch them shrink in to the horizon on their way to the northern lands, there is no teardrop in the corner of my eye. It is the spring wind bathing my eye and cheeks with its welcome moisture.
Only the spring wind. The spring wind and nothing more.
Copyright © 2004 Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
