754: Spark Bird

Not long ago, I went out in the woods in Oregon with this bird expert, Noah Stricker, looking at birds. Every day he goes out for at least an hour, often it's a lot more. On trails around his house that he and his parents cleared back when he was a kid. And I'd never been birding. I had no idea how much of bird watching. You're actually just listening for the birds. When we sit out in the morning, we still foggy. Already I can hear some birds calling now, so there's a spot at Tohy.

calling just behind me. That was a California quail waking up. Did you get a little. That was the sound of a Stellers J imitating a red-tailed hawk. Wait, you know the birds well enough you can tell when a bird is imitating another bird badly?

Yeah. It's not a real red-tailed hawk. Stellar's jays are just kind of bullies in general, and they imitate red-tailed hawks. As far as I can tell, just to terrorize other little birds in the forest. Does it work? I don't know, honestly. What's weird about this is, if Noah can tell that it's not a red-tailed hawk, and he's not even a bird, can't other birds tell? If they can, why wouldn't Stellar J keep doing it?

To answer that question, Noah tells me about how a couple years ago he bought this powerful microphone, a parabolic microphone that could capture bird sounds from a great distance. The first bird I ever aimed it at was a stellar jay sitting up on a branch. So we turned on his recorder, put on headphones and waited for it to make some noise.

And I realized it was sitting up there with its beak closed, singing a very quiet whisper song to itself that only itself could have possibly heard because it was so quiet. That just blew my mind. I have never listened to birds the same sense. So I think they do make noises just for their own sake a lot of the time.

Going up birding with Noah is going out with somebody who is insanely knowledgeable about birds. He's written five books about their behavior toward the world seeing 6,000 of the nearly 11,000 existing bird species in just one year in 2015. So he knows a lot. But he's also still completely excited about birds. Can't get enough. He told me this story. He goes to Antarctica for months studying penguins, and sometimes he gives tours to visitors of the penguin colonies.

At first, he says they love it. They go into the colony. They see the baby penguins, which are super cute. And then like day five or so, people get up in the morning and they're like, where are we going to go today? And you say, we're going to a penguin colony. And there's like this look that I've learned to recognize. It's like, I've just been to eight other penguin colonies in the past four days.

How is this one going to be any different? But for me, I have never felt that look in my whole life. I've never got penguin out." He happily goes back to the same colony, with the same woods around his house, every single day. Noah says this endless interest in birds began in sort of typical ways. In fifth grade, he first noticed birds for real when his teacher suctioned copped a bird feeder to the classroom window and he could stare at the birds through the glass just inches away.

He started reading The Field Guide, looking for birds on his own, joined a local birding club. Everybody else in the club, by the way, was in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. He was like 12. The one kid is energetic, birdy, doogie-houser. And a person, no, actually does have kind of a Neopatric Harris vibe. But the thing he says that changed him from that kind of leisure time, birder, into somebody who organized his entire life around it, happened because of turkey vultures.

one particular pack of them when he was 16. And he saw this episode of a TV show called The Life of Birds where David Attenborough goes into a trinity and rainforest. And he has this smelly old piece of steak in his hand. And then he buries the steak under the leaf litter on the forest floor in the rainforest. And then backs off.

and then they cut, and then 45 minutes later, this turkey vulture comes sailing down through the canopy of that forest and flies unerringly right to the spot where the stake is and digs it up, moves the leaves aside, and gets the meat. When I saw that on the life of birds as a high schooler, I just immediately had one thought, which was,

I gotta try this at home. That is like the best bird feeding idea I've ever seen in my life. It seemed incredible to him, that he might be able to lure these birds that you usually see from so far away. Turkey vultures are shy, hard to get near. And he might be able to see them close up. And he thought, if David Attenborough got one bird to show up with some old piece of steak,

Maybe he would improve his odds. If his bait was something bigger. Imagine how many turkey vultures I could attract with like a dead deer. There's so many deer here in rural Oregon on the side of the highways and freeways. I can now go out and find a roadkill, bring a whole carcass home, and see how many turkey vultures we can attract. But it was kind of hard to find a roadkill as it turned out.

It took me like a month to track one down. Another way to put that last sentence if you were in a 16-year-old, very eager to see Turkey vultures up close. It only took a month to find a deer carcass. Noah wrestled the heavy, bloated, gaseous, yellow jacket covered, putrid smelling deer into the trunk of his Volvo sedan.

Got home, put the deer in a wheelbarrow, wheeled it out to this very spot where we're standing in this pasture and dumped it. So it's like right here where we're standing. This is the spot I chose.

At this point in our birdwalk, we are standing with an eye shot at the house that he grew up in, but not too close. The capacitor is overgrown. That goes for his white oaks around its edges. I thought this would be a good spot because you can see it from the sky. It has multiple approach paths from the air. So they will be as attracted as possible to this deer carcass. It was dark. So we went to bed. No idea if this was going to work. It's up the next morning.

And there were turkey vultures everywhere. They were sitting on these trees right here. There were vultures sitting on the roof of our house. Like, 10 of them lined up on our roof. There were vultures circling overhead.

They were probably 30 or 40 turkey vultures hanging around the yard. And when I woke up and realized that this had happened, I was so happy. I rushed out here and I'd set up a little camouflage tarp next to the deer carcass. So the tarp was just kind of in this wet grass. So if I come over here,

I was hunkered down right about here. So if I kind of get down, I was sitting under a tarp with a hole in it and my camera lens sticking out. He was maybe 10 feet from the deer. He waited. And then finally, it was like magic. The first one came down. And once one came down, they all started just piling down. It wasn't like what he imagined. He thought it was going to be chaos.

Like a pack of lions ripping into a zebra. What unfolded was very polite.

They were just delicately walking around it, standing on top of it, and starting to pick at it gingerly. It wasn't like a brute force kind of thing at all. And they were very well behaved, I thought. There was almost like a pecking order involved. They knew which birds were going to eat first, and they adhered to it. So it was very orderly. It was an orderly scene of turkey vultures beating their breakfast.

Where did they start? I thought it was so cool. So the softest parts of the deer, that's where the turkey vultures would start sticking their heads into. They didn't like, I was expecting them to tear a big hole in the side and just go at it. But that's not what happened at all. They actually started by pecking the eyes out. I guess those are the softest part of the deer. So they went for the eyeballs.

And then they went in and very carefully ate the gums out of the deer, like around its teeth. They have to go for the soft parts because they don't have very strong feet or beaks. Instead, a turkey vulture just kind of sticks its head up inside the body. It's headed bald and red with no feathers, which is handy for sticking inside of carcasses and not getting your feathers all messed up.

The turkey vultures next started eating around the wound on the deer's shoulder from where it got hit on the highway. Took turns eating around there till they got a big enough opening to get access to the chest and guts and everything else. Noah would go off in the mornings and do tennis camp and other kid stuff. I think I'm back to his tarp for hours and hours.

I don't know how many hours I spent out here that week, but it was full afternoons, pretty much every day, all week long. So I got to see the whole process. At the beginning, the deer carcass was relatively fresh, and then gradually it was stripped away, and by, you know, day five or day six, they were starting to disassemble the skeleton that was pretty much picked clean.

It was like being drawn into another world that exists in this world that we are very seldom a part of. Being so close to these birds that don't normally allow us to get that close to them was like passing through some kind of force field or something and emerging on their side of the divide and feeling that. Yeah, and their world is not the same as ours.

No, and it has existed for much longer than ours has. I mean, humanity is not that old. Turkey vultures have been around for quite a lot longer than we have.

Man, when you stare into the eyeball of a turkey vulture and it blinks its third eyelid that birds have, that is just unsettling. They are strange, strange animals. They just have this weird, very reptilian vibe.

Before this, of course, he'd seen lots of birds, but it was like checking them off a list. He saw this one and that one that he read about in the field guide. He never just stared at one group of birds for so long and watched how they related to each other or what they did.

Turkey vultures are what I would call my spark bird. For a birder, a spark bird is the one you see usually in some kind of unexpected situation that grabs you in a way that you haven't been grabbed before by birds and turns you on to a wavelength that you haven't been turned on to before in the bird world. Like people will talk about what's your spark bird?

Birders when we get together and go out on field trips. Yeah, or you'll have to say, oh, yeah, what was your spark bird? Oh, that's a cool one. What was your spark bird? And you asked just about any birder out there what their spark bird is and they'll probably have an answer for you. For me, that week watching these vultures being in their world just gripped me. It changed my life.

That week in the pasture by his house has basically turned into his entire life. Thanks to the Sparkbirds. None of us here at our program had ever heard the phrase Sparkbird before we talked to Noah. And we thought, there must be other situations where bird arrives and changes everything. And we weren't looking for stories like that. We found a bunch, a whole flock of them, and all kinds of settings. And that is what we are very pleased to bring you today.

From WBZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us. This American Life today shows a rerun. Act one. Don't chicken out. So one thing about the birds in the show, the Sparkbirds, is that they don't know how consequential they are. Know what I mean?

They're just going about their day picking at worms and seeds unaware of the lives they're transforming. I'm fairly sure that that's true for the bird in this first story, though we were unable to confirm that independently with the bird.

One of the people in the story is Carmen Melito. Back when she was 13, in 1960, growing up on Coney Island in New York, one day, she met this boy on the beach. Even today, when she talks about him, the words she uses are gorgeous, beautiful. He had just the cutest face that I've ever seen, dimples. He just swooned me. He swooned her. That's how they did it back in the 60s. Girls were constantly swooning back then over the Beatles and Elvis and whatnot.

Anyway, she and the guy talk for 10 or 15 minutes. He strolls off. Three years later, she's at a social club in some random neighborhood, far from Coney Island. There's music playing, people dancing, and the boy walks in. Fate. He's wearing leather jacket. It's like back hair as teenagers did back then. Carmen points him out to her friend and she looks over and she goes, Oh my God, he's gorgeous.

Charming goes up to him. The guy buys her a drink. They talk for a long time. He asks her out. She's 16. His name is Bobby. She's excited. But she is too ashamed of the apartment where she goes with her mom to have him pick her up there. It was run down, she said, under the elevated train tracks. So she hasn't picked her up at her sister's place. Her mom is furious about this.

She was, you're not proud of what we have here. I worked my ass off on my life and you're embarrassed. Cameron tries to tell her that she just wanted to make a good first impression. Says, don't worry, she's going to have him come to the house when he picks her up for the second date.

So that day was a Saturday, and I told my mom that he's coming again to pick me up, and she put this little face on. So what do you want me to do, you know, put up the flags? So she said, well, tell me about this boy. What's going on with him?

So I said, well, he's an Italian guy. He lives in Bensonhurst. I said, he happens to be Sicilian. And she stopped. She said, no. And I said, what do you mean no? No, you're not going out with any Sicilian boys. My mom is from Naples. So she had married my dad, who was Sicilian. And he turned out to be a real deadbeat of a man.

He deserted her when she was pregnant to me for the babysitter, actually. Wow. So when she heard that he was Sicilian, she thought that life was repeating itself and the thoughts that came into her mind were like, you know, he's going to desert you. And I said, please, you're jumping the gun here. It's the second day. Don't, you know, I don't care. So I said, Mom, please.

Carmen tells her, just go out and do the shopping while I clean the house. Her mom says, fine. She goes out. Comes back a little while later with a large cardboard box. And in this box is a chicken. The chicken, of course, is the spark bird in this story. The one that's going to change everything for Carmen.

And it's scratching that box all over the place. And I looked at it and I said, what is that? And she goes, it's a chicken. And I said, what are you going to do with it? And she goes, I'm going to kill it and then eat it. And I said,

You never killed a thing in your life. What are you talking about? You can't have this thing here now. He's gonna be here in a minute and you've got it. Life chicken is gonna think we're farmers or something. I just went off and she goes, oh, don't be ridiculous. I'll put the chicken in the bathroom. Now the bathroom was right next to the kitchen. So you close the door and you hear everything, everything in that bathroom.

And so do you figure, like, oh, this is her revenge on me. Like, she thought I was ashamed to bring him to the house. And so here's what she's doing. She's brought a live chicken in. Oh, yeah. I said that. I said, are you getting back at me for something? And what are you doing? What? She goes, oh, don't be ridiculous. She said, just go. Go finish getting dressed. Don't worry. He's in the bathroom. He won't hear a sound. You're precious, Bobby.

Okay, before we go any further, I just want to say the rest of this story is about whether this chicken actually does get killed and eaten for food or not. And I know that there are people out there who find the killing of chickens for food to be offensive and cruel. The people in this story, like so many people, do not feel that way. All right, back to Carmen and her mom.

Well, as we're arguing, we hear footsteps coming in down the hallway. And then there's a knock on the door. So she said, go ahead, open the door. Very calmly. And it was like, so such an assurance about her. Like she had a plan.

It walks Bobby. Well addressed, handsome as always, polite, close Carmen's mom, Mrs. Nicastro. Call me Ida, she says, and I scorched him into the kitchen. She offers him a drink. You know how to drink, aren't you? Bobby was 19, but it's a weird move with the boy who's going to be driving your daughter. Carmen wonders what she's up to.

So he sits down and she gives him a drink of scotch and she asks him questions like, where are you from? What do you do? Now, in the meantime, that chicken is scratching its way out of that box in the bathroom. And he was so kind, never said a word.

He heard it, you could see it on his face because he'd look around like, where's the sound coming from? Oh my God, I just wanted to die. And every time the chicken would, would scratch at the box, I would cough or I would say, you know, we got to go, you know, we got to go and my mom would say, just a minute. She had this way of saying just a minute, just a minute. Hold your horses. Bobby, come on, finish your drink. How about another one?

Okay, just a word right now about Carmen's mom, Ida, and what she's doing here. Ida has been described to me as kind of scrappy and sharp-witted and willful. Somebody who had to figure out how to make her way in the world. And if she wanted to convince you to do something, apparently she was very hard to resist. In the summer, she would pick up extra money as a barker on Coney Island, urging passersby to come in and buy tickets for the wax museum.

She had to wear clothes paying factory jobs all her life on her feet all day, starting when she was 13, when her parents pulled her out of school to go to work and make money for the family. When Carmen's dad looked after her for the babysitter, she lost all her friends, her family turned his back on her, and she had to fend for herself, wearing to survive.

And she was a very sensitive woman. She would wear her heart on her sleeve. Very protective of Carmen, who was the baby of the family. And with this boy in her kitchen. She just saw Sicilian. That's all she saw. Right. And she had a plan. She was like a little crazy as a fox. And then she said, wait, I have to ask Bobby something. Tell me, Bobby, did you ever kill a chicken?

And he looks around and looks at me and he goes, why is there a problem? And she said, no, no problems. She said, I just want to know if you ever killed a chicken. And so he looks at her and says, he lied. He said, sure, yeah, I killed a chicken.

She goes, oh, I knew you did. And she goes, Bobby, listen, do me a favor, honey. I have this chicken in the bathroom. Would you do me a big favor? Can you kill it before you leave? Well, you could have heard a pin drop in that room. It was silent.

And I said, Mom, I said, no, and I'm screaming, I'm carrying on. Now you can't do this. He's all dressed. She goes, don't worry about it. I'll get him an apron. And then she grabs the chicken. She puts the apron on him. She goes in the bathroom and she puts the box with the chicken in on the table. And she says, here.

So he opens the box up and this chicken's running around the box and he closes the flap right away and he goes, I don't know if I can do this. And she goes, you said you could, you don't disappoint me now, Bobby. You know, please, you promised. And he's like looking at me and I'm looking at him and all of a sudden I started to say, will he do this? And he closes the flaps and he said, God, do you have a knife?

Okay, I'm going to spare you the details of how he killed the chicken without getting blood on his white bandlon shirt or anything else, but it was swift and surprisingly deft for somebody who had never killed a chicken in his life.

And I was like in shock. I couldn't move. And my mother was dancing all over the kitchen. You are a jam. I think I'm gonna love you. You come back on Sunday and I'm gonna make you the best chicken and catratory you ever ate in your life. She gives him a towel to wipe his hands. She was like treating him like some,

God of sorts. I mean, she was like in heaven. And she looked at me and she gave me this big wink and a thumbs up sign kind of. Like it's like you have a winner here.

She goes, go ahead, go out now and have a ball. She said, you come back on Sunday? And he said, I think so. Yeah, I guess. And we left and did not say a word to each other.

You and he didn't say a word to each other about it. Not a word. A word was not spoken. We sat in the car, and I just stared out, he stared out, and we started to laugh. And that was the end of the conversation. Never again was it mentioned.

What happened was we continued to go out and see each other, and 56 years later, we're still married. This is the man of my dreams. We're still married after 56 years. Carmen says, asking him to kill the chicken? It was a test.

Any other guy would have said, you're crazy lady. I'm not going to kill this chicken. She believed that that would have been his response, but he, he just, I guess, was in love with me and just said, I got to do it for her, you know? Oh, that's what the test proved. It proved his feelings about you.

Yeah, oh yeah, oh totally. He killed something for me. She knew that if he wasn't the guy for me, he would have never done this.

You know, I never really looked at it that way. I looked at it like my manhood was being questioned. This, of course, is the man in question. Bobby. The Bobby was the nickname. Has he got older? He switched to using his given name. Sebastian. You know, like, did I have the stones to kill a chicken? Mm-hmm.

I was 19. And when you're 19, you're insecure. And she sort of like threw a test, which I thought maybe was some primitive ritual that came from the village that, you know, they were from Naples, you know, from Sorrento. Maybe that's how they did it in Sorrento. Oh, my God. They devised a test for them. He's the God primitive. Don't say primitive. Yeah. I don't want to get letters from people who are in Sorrento.

Anyway, I didn't want to be embarrassed in front of God. I didn't want Carmen to think of me as not being manly enough to do something like that. But at that point, I don't think I did it out of love. I mean, it's funny because I think they both took it. At least your mom took it as a sign of like, oh, you really like her. And it's funny to think that she got it wrong.

Well, I did like her. I mean, I was crazy about her, but I didn't say I'm going to do this for Carmen. It was just her second date after all. Would you have done that for any girl's mom? You know, I can't think of any other girl's mom would ever ask me. She was very wily and a good person. I mean, I loved her. I loved the dearly.

When Carmen was 16 and her mom pulled off this plan, she was horrified. But now, you know, she's two decades older than her mom was that day in 1963 when this happened. And she has kids and grandkids of her own. And she sees her mom's actions that day very differently.

I adore her for doing that. I could cry wanting that night back. The bravery of her to do something like that. I can't imagine

her doing anything else, actually. She wasn't a talker. She wouldn't have sat down with him and said, listen, you know, I want you to respect my job. She wasn't going to say anything like that. She was going to give him a test. And in that test, even though she was wrong about whether Sebastian had killed that bird out of love for Carmen, if you look at her mom's bigger conclusion, that he was going to be a reliable man for Carmen. They were going to stick around and be there for Carmen.

Half century later, it's probably safe to say, if you got that part right.

Coming up, the rarest bird species in the world, so rare that only one family in Massachusetts has ever spotted them. But until right now, even knows about them, that's in a minute. Chicago Bubble Gradio, when our program continues.

It's a American life from our glass. Today's show, Sparkbird. We have stories of Sparkbirds who are the birds who get it all started for somebody, the birds that make you see things differently. Today's show is a rerun. And if you're just tuning in, we began our program today with Noah Stricker, who's the author of The Thing With Feathers and other books on bird behavior, somebody whose Sparkbird was the turkey vulture. And one of our producers, Chloe Weiner, and I spent hours tromping around the woods with him in Creswell, Oregon.

which was ours of actually doing the thing that today's show is about, gardening to see things differently through birds. And I just want to play you a little more of this because so much of what Noah told us along the way was new to me and Chloe. Like for instance, Noah was telling us how late one night he was home and he heard this bird sound he'd never heard before. I don't even know. I was like,

And I came running out here with my flashlight because it was dark because I had no idea what it was and tracked it down. And it was a fledgling screech owl sitting on a branch. And it's just like it hadn't learned yet how to make the proper screech owl noise. Yeah, birds babble just like human babies do. Scientists will call it sub song and have these other technical terms for it. But it's just birds learning how to sound like birds. Birds babble like human babies do.

I didn't know. I honestly never think about the fact that he lived in the middle of a whole world of birds. I don't notice them. I don't hear them singing. But of course Noah cannot stop himself from hearing them and instantly recognizing that that's a Pacific Grand, that's a chestnut-backed chickadee or whatever.

And he doesn't just hear the bird sounds when he's walking around outside. Becoming a birder ruins Hollywood movies for you forever because whatever bird sounds are in the background in the soundtrack, whether they're just natural or whether they've dubbed them in even, they're never the birds that would be in the place that the movie is set at the season that it's set in. And it drives me nuts. I mean, how hard would it be to put the proper bird sounds in there?

Like what's the movie that this happened to you in? Well, just yesterday I saw the movie Spencer, the new lady dye movie.

They had red-winged blackbirds in the background. This is supposed to be one of like Europe in the UK somewhere. Red-winged blackbirds don't live in Europe. That's a whole continent away from where they would actually live. They had stellar jays in the background and all kinds of North American species. So obviously this movie was filmed by North Americans who were dubbing in North American birds into a completely wrong background.

Just the lengths to which they go to get all the historical details and period pieces accurate, the shape of the headlight that no one is ever going to know, honestly, when you watch the movie. And yet, the bird sounds are all over the map. And there are so many birders out there like me who know what they're listening to. That's not unusual. This, I guess, would be the downside of having a bird open your eyes to something about the world that most people don't notice.

It wouldn't be hard to fix this, no, it says. There are archives with most bird sounds. Movie sound editors, Noah would love to hook you up, John Mulaney says. But of course the problem is, the world doesn't care about birders. Hollywood knows that they'll continue to show up at their factually inaccurate movies and stream their error-ridden television shows, because where else are they gonna go when they need to watch something that's indoors and not wild, alive, and feathered?

Act two, a scrub is a bird that can't get no love from me. So we now turn to a spark bird that started a political fight, a fight that has lasted for a very long time concerning one state's official state bird. Be a matter of when me tells the tale.

The thing about an official state bird is that it just really doesn't matter. I say that with no intended disrespect to birders across the nation, some of my best friends are birders. But think about it. What was the last time you sat down and truly considered the scissor-tailed flycatcher, who is the avian embodiment of the state of Oklahoma?

Exactly. It's absurd. A state bird has nothing to do with the state's GDP, for example. It doesn't tell us how happy the children are. It makes no one's life materially better or worse. And yet, in Florida, the debate about which flying animal deserves the title of official state bird has been ongoing for more than two decades. The state bird means nothing. But somehow, in Florida, it's come to me in a hell of a lot.

Florida was actually one of the first states to designate a state bird back in 1927. It was probably a simple choice. The Northern mockingbird is a good bird as birds go. It likes to sing, it has an incredible talent for mimicry, and with its gray coloring, it's cute.

Here's the thing, though. The northern mockingbird is the official bird of another four states besides Florida. It's actually the third most popular state bird, behind the northern cardinal and the western meadow luck. After 72 years, some people had had enough of this spread-thin state bird. Enter the spark bird of this story. The Scrubjay.

The Florida Scrubjay is the only bird on the planet that is found only in Florida. It's a sturdy looking bird with a dull blue head and wings. It's unclear exactly why the late Republican rep Howard Futch was such a champion for the Scrubjay. But in 1999, he co-sponsored a bill for it to become the state bird.

Maybe it was the fact that Futch represented Brevard County, which used to have the highest number of scrub jays in the state. But I think he just liked the bird. As he put it, it's got good family values. It's kind, and it's a bird that likes people.

Scrubges do something called cooperative breeding, which means that each nest has an adult pair, but it also has helpers, usually the older siblings of the newest Jay Babies who help feed the young and defend territory. Very different, in Futch's opinion, from the mockingbird. The mockingbird, a lot of people love that sucker, he said. But it's pretty mean.

There's nothing human beings cannot make about themselves, even birds. And the fight over the Florida State Bird very quickly became loaded with familiar political tropes. On the side of the status quo, the side of the incumbent mockingbird was one of Florida's most famous seniors, Marion Hammer. Hammer is a longtime lobbyist with the National Rifle Association and the architect of Florida's Stand Your Ground Law, and she is no fan of the Florida Scrubjay.

In her committee testimony, Hammer dismissed the bird as a thieving scrounger in the strongest possible terms. They eat the eggs of other birds, she said. That's robbery and murder. And in response to the scrubjay's alleged friendliness exemplified by the way it eats out of humans' hands, she had a rebuttal. Begging for food isn't sweet. It's lazy, and it's a welfare mentality.

The response from the other side was just as harsh. Democrat Rep Mark Pafford called the mockingbird an obnoxious, plagiarizing and promiscuous bully.

State Rep Futch and the Scrubjay had the Audubon Society on their side, and they also had a chunk of Florida citizens, school children. Thousands of them signed a petition in support of the Scrubjay. Hammer had a hunch about who was behind these passionate school children,

She suggested they had been influenced by environmentalists trying to secure extra protections for the scrubjay. It's adults hiding behind impressionable children, she said. If they get it on the endangered list, you can kiss your property rights goodbye.

This had begun as an argument about something that means nothing, but now it had become an argument about the biggest things. It would have been neater if the camps were strictly a Republican versus Democrat, but bird choice and party affiliation didn't always align. The choice of state bird became a proxy referendum about what traits Floridians should find admirable.

Depending on which side you were on, the mockingbird was either a stand-in for rugged, talented individualism, or it was a raucous bully. And the scrubjay, seen through one lens as nurturing family values and sweet enough to pal around with humans, somehow also became the poster child for a reliance on big government and its handouts.

I'm very familiar with irrational and hyperbolic debates about regional fauna. In my own home country, the UK, we are not above turning benign animal behaviour into weird politicking. There has long been a PR battle waged between the indigenous and endangered Red Squirrel, by some accounts a noble and scrappy creature. And the Grey Squirrel, a larger, invasive American interloper who has ideas well above its station.

It has brought forth every type of nativist narrative you can imagine. In a debate in the House of Lords in 2006, ladies all tune of Abernathy likened the Red Squirrel to quiet, well-behaved people who do not make a nuisance or an exhibition of themselves or commit crimes, and so do not get themselves into the papers in the vulgar way grey squirrels do.

When I was at university, I swear I read tabloid stories that basically compared grey squirrels to American GIs during and after World War II, overfed, oversext and over here. Since 2008, Prince Charles has been the patron of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust. In 2017, the prince backed a government plan to sterilize grey squirrels, using Nutella as bait.

That's a step beyond what Floridians are doing. They've yet to weaponise any spreads or condiments in their fight to choose a state bird. A state bird whose anointment will make no one's life worse, or better. Being out of Woon-Me, she fears no birds and respects only one, the crow.

At three, we need to talk about birdly. Okay, I just wanna say a word about what I find interesting about this next story. I think every couple, there are the things that you share and talk about with each other, and then other things you don't share so much, but each couple has to kind of invent or discover the territory of stuff that they have in common and where they meet up, and the more stuff in that territory, probably the better, because the more chances you have to connect and feel close and all that. The couple in this story

They had their stuff. They were, you know, even raising kids together, which is obviously a huge thing like that. But as the kids got older, the couple invented this whole other original common ground for themselves. Also, there's birds. Sean Cole explains. Before I get into what the story's about, I just want to say that the couple in question, Peter and his wife, Matty, are normal people.

It must be Maddie. Hi, great to meet you. How are you? Thank you. Their house in Northampton, Massachusetts is so normal, it's beige. Four bedrooms upstairs, one for each kid. Peter and Maddie crammed themselves into the attic for a long time. They're a blended family. Peter came to the marriage with two sons. Maddie has a son and a daughter. All of them are grown, doing well. Now it's just the parents at home. Maddie works as a lawyer, recently won a big case through the Innocence Project.

So I do trial work and I do appellate work. So I actually... Peter is a professional musician. It's toward Europe playing Bach arrangements on a special guitar he designed.

I've been an artist all my life. I think I'm really grateful for that. For more than 10 years now, a sizable number of their conversations with each other concern a family of imaginary birds with whom they live. Six birds, who do not exist, and yet each have names and distinct personalities, successes and failures. Most of them have corresponding stuffed animals associated with them.

Peter and Matty might spend more time talking about these birds than about anything in reality. The birds' lives resemble those of grade school children. They attend Bird Academy, ride there on the bird bus, and they're kind of little menaces, always accidentally spilling things on themselves and throwing parties at the house when Peter and Matty are away. Yet they somehow also meddled in the Olympics and recorded a Grammy award-winning record. Here's Matty.

It's odd. I mean, I know it's odd. Upon reflection, because it's like this Byzantine storyline now, it's every day and it's like woven all through the day and

For example, if I was doing something at work, like a difficult meeting with a client, a jail or something, then afterwards, when I would call Peter to say, I'm on my way home or whatever, then he would say, how were the birds? Like, how did they do? And then I would say, terrible, usually. Usually the birds do terribly. So the birds had a tantrum in the car with my colleague.

The birds were rude to the investigator. Like that's sort of how it arises a lot is asking how the birds managed what we were managing sort of. Like when Peter went up to Maine to visit his son Chester, who just fixed up an old boat that he was sailing and living on, which Peter's really proud of him for having accomplished.

And of course, when I'm on the phone with Maddie calling her from up there, it's like, well, the birds didn't really like the boat. The boat is really small. They thought it was going to be like the boat on succession, on the TV show succession, the nice yacht. Which, by the way, is not how Peter felt about the boat.

The views and opinions of the birds do not necessarily reflect those of Peter and Maddie. Sometimes they do, but it's not that simple. It's more like they're this messy Greek chorus that always has to be accounted for and factored into almost every experience. It's like a very elaborate running joke. They like seeing what each other's going to come up with next. Poke fun at each other via the birds.

push and pull and go, no, the birds don't do that. The birds do this. What are you talking about? The birds hate skating. And it's like, wait, what about birds on ice? The birds have an annual event called Bird Fest, which is always canceled at the last minute. At the last minute, it will turn out they didn't really have a permit. They hadn't really spoken to Beyonce's manager.

The throwing out ideas and coming to a consensus is a lot of how they built the bird world. For instance, so the birds are really into milkshakes. Their birdmobiles are outfitted with special shake machines. But they file a lawsuit against Shake Shack after one of them got his head feathers caught in a ceiling fan. Which is really a shame because the birds love Shake Shack. But they're not banned from Shake Shack. They're not banned, but it must have soured them on the whole Shake Shack experience.

I don't think so, honey. They got a ton of money and they still can get shakes there. Okay. Yeah. It's important to say too, this is the first time Peter and Matty have ever talked about the birds in front of anyone. Other than their kids and Peter's therapist once or twice in passing, they've never mentioned the birds to a single soul until now. It's just too out there, they told me, and too hard to explain.

which means this is also the first time they've had to answer any questions about the birds. They've never examined any of this, even in private. So when I ask them something like, why they do it or what they get out of it, they really had to puzzle together those answers in real time as I sat with them. I'm not trying to like, yeah, I'm not trying to sell it. You know what I'm saying? I'm just reporting it that it's happening here.

And the whole thing with the birds, it isn't just frivolous. It's actually been helpful in the family in some ways. And hurtful too, which I'll get to. But just to say how it began. So the birds first entered their lives about a dozen years ago when Maddie's daughter, Peter's stepdaughter, Eva, bought Maddie a little stuffed toy monster. Technically, it was something called an ugly doll. But to Maddie, it looked like a bird. Eva was only about 12 years old at the time.

And I do think it was the first thing that she had ever bought for me. So it was a very sweet gift. And I just loved it so much. And then I gave it this silly name, Birdley.

So Birdley was the spark bird, the bird that sparked the capital B birds. Maddie started bringing Birdley everywhere. Birdley rode in the car with her, she took him on vacation. Peter would idly toss him to the other side of the bed and Maddie would be like, hey, careful. And this hadn't dawned on Maddie until we talked about it, but this was around the same time that her custody arrangement with her ex-husband was changing. Used to be the kids would never be away from her for more than three days at a time, but then they switched to one week on, one week off.

And in the beginning, the week that I did not have them felt like an eternity. I couldn't, you know, it was a challenge. I think it was fair, and I think it was the right thing to do, but that was a period that I was missing my children.

So I think that may have been why I got super attached even to the bird that she gave me. And very quickly, Birdley grew a personality of his own. Adventurous, irresponsible, Machiavellian. He'd take out credit cards in Peter and Matty's names, uh, neglect to file his taxes for five years. But Matty would dote on him nonetheless. At first, I found Birdley really annoying. She just got so

exaggerated about how like precious he was and how, and I would just be like, okay, all right, you know, like please. And then somewhere I crossed some line and moved over into, well, he didn't do a thing to help do the dishes or something, you know, like participating in it.

You know, and then she'd be like, what? He had to work on his presentation for school tomorrow. And it's like, the psychologist and marriage expert, John Gottman, talks about how couples are always sending each other these little requests for attention. Subtle. Like, wow, would you look at that sunset? Sometimes the other partner just shrugs. But in some couples, the more contented ones, the partner responds enthusiastically. Like, oh, wow, yeah, it's beautiful. I think the birds are a request like that.

Sometimes the birds will even swoop in and help them communicate something that's difficult to express. Like this one time, he's fine now, but Peter was deathly ill. He had a bacterial infection in his spine. And they were driving back from a doctor's appointment where they'd gotten some bad news. The mood in the car was dire. And after saying nothing for a long time, Peter goes, oh, we have to stop at the mall. The birds want to go to the mall.

I mean, what else are you going to say, right? I remember it as the best way for me to say something like, don't worry about me. I mean, you can't tell her not to worry, but you can talk about the birds. What about the birds? They want to go to the mall.

And then here's the way in which the birds have not been so great for the family. Again, they're four kids, and they each had somewhat different responses to bird world. The oldest, Torsten, thought it was kind of funny, and he left for college anyway, not long after it started. Hank was indifferent, except that it is some kind of code that his parents used to communicate. Chester, the very youngest of the four, thought it was annoying and not funny.

And then there was Eva, who again gave Maddie, her mother, the doll in the first place, and who was the most aggrieved. Oh, I was definitely jealous. This is Eva. She's 25 now. I was jealous of Birdley. I don't know if I felt forgotten, but I was definitely jealous. Now, as the youngest of Maddie's two kids, Eva was used to being the baby, doted on, showered with affection, and suddenly she had to bear witness to this overwhelming, overweaning geyser of praise and attention her mom gave Birdley and the other birds.

The theme that bothers me the most is like, if you say something about your life and then the birds have their own thing about their life. So it would be like, if you got an A, the birds either got an A plus plus or they got an F minus, but mom is still somehow like more interested in their F minus than she is in your A, which I'm sure wasn't true, but that's just how it felt at the time. So like that's really when the intense

dislike of Berkeley began to build and build and build and build until sometimes it exploded.

I don't think I was clear enough that I wasn't kidding when I am saying that the birds thing bothers me. I'm not playing along with the bird universe where nobody likes the birds and they're sticky and annoying and they're failing out of classes and their teachers are reporting them. I really, really don't like it. Like I couldn't say that or I wasn't saying it right. So I think that it was like it always felt like it was playing along until I had a tantrum. And I would scream at her that they're not real, which I think

did hurt her feelings. And looking back on it now, Eva says her mother was giving her an appropriate amount of attention, affection, praise, all of that. But back then, she really felt like she was in competition for it. And after all, the birds didn't deserve it because, you know, them not existing at all. Anyway, for the first couple of years, it was just Birdley, just the one bird. And then this one fateful day, Eva took action.

I'd had enough and I stole him and I hid him between the box spring and the mattress of the bed that I slept on. And then I forgot that I did that. I honest to goodness forgot that I had done that. I felt panic. I tore the house apart. I mean, I felt the panic that you feel if you have an indoor outdoor cat and they don't come home at night.

I was so disappointed in myself that I had, you know, carelessly lost him." Which, of course, in Eva's mind, confirmed all of her fears that Maddie loved Birdley more. She got even more jealous. And then, finally, Peter went out and bought another Birdley. Exactly the same doll, same color, whole thing. But instead of telling Maddie like, here, honey, I know how much she missed that doll, so I bought you another one.

He claimed to have found the original Birdley, which was just more willful suspension of disbelief. Like, of course, Birdley isn't someone you can just go out and purchase at a store any old time. He's unique, a burden a million. And that was good enough for Maddie, which felt a lot better. But then, a couple months after that, Maddie's doing a really thorough cleaning of the house, his inner daughter, Eva's room, turns the mattress over. You can see where this is going.

She comes to me and she's like, look what I found, you know. And I was like, that's, that's, you're right. That's birdly. And that's because all this while his twin sister has been pretending to be him to make you feel better while he was, he had to go out into the world.

And his twin sister being the newer, more pliant, cleaner one. Correct. Yeah, who had an amazing likeness for him. It's like out of, you know, what is it, 12th night or something? You know, it's just like some, I'm kind of proud of that, although I'm also bewildered by it. And she just loved that. So that is how Berla Dutt was born.

birdlodette, birdly's twin, and soon all the other birds join the flock too. One of Peter's sons gave Maddie a doll she called Dr. Botley. He looks a little like a robot, but he's a bird and a doctor. He's received a Nobel Prize for medicine, for having cured space rash. Eva gave me the insider scoop on Dr. Botley. He's also missing. I think that I hid him and I don't know where. He's currently missing? He's been missing for years, but if you ask mom, she'll tell you he's on sabbatical.

Next came Hubeletta, or Hubezi. She's an owl. Then there's Penguino, a penguin, who's studying to be a bird mobile mechanic. He is, like, in the car, and we use him as, like, a lumbar pillow. And finally, there's Wing, who is not embodied, no physical incorporation whatsoever, stuffed or otherwise.

So, at this point, Eva's original goal, to disappear birdly so that Maddie wouldn't pay so much attention to him, could not have backfired more badly. Her parents' conversations now involved exactly 500% more birds than there had been. And to make matters worse, her older brother, Torsten, when he was home, would occasionally get into the act, egging their mother on to keep telling bird stories.

And again, it was like, there's no malice there. They thought it was just the same as any other teasing that we as a family did all the time. But I felt replaced. Like, you know, and there's like, there's no way that that could have been addressed. Cause what are you supposed to even say after having yelled at them? I know the birds are fake. Like I hate you. I hate you and your fake birds. They're not real. They're stuffed animals to then be like, but also I do feel they're real and you're hurting my feelings. I feel real. They are real. They are real.

I mean, what is real other than what everyone around you says is real, right? I mean, there's no, like, if everybody around you is talking about them, and they are having significant social, emotional, psychological impact on your life, like, I don't see what's realer than that.

Eva says she's still not a fan of the birds these days, but in the last couple of years, she's finally reached a little equanimity with them. The lot's changed. She's older, that's a good job. I'm not living at home anymore, has helped. Plus, she's unpacked a lot of personal stuff that made her especially hypersensitive and insecure as a teenager. She'll even ask her mom from time to time how the birds are doing, just as a way of connecting with her. She read me this text conversation she had had with Maddie a couple of days before our interview.

something about the birds needing an attachment in their bird mobiles to hold the dipping sauce for their french fries. I said birds need that there's ranch all over the bird mobile the steering column can barely turn it's gooey with honey mustard and then she said exactly honey mustard is the worst because it attracts fruit flies and I said yes the gear shift is all sweet and soured up also ranch has dairy in it it's a total nightmare so that was like a totally normal bird conversation totally entertaining totally fun I started it

And Maddie's met Eva partway too. She even apologized for filling the house with so much birdliness, especially when she learned through this story, amazingly, that Eva actively stole and hid birdly way back when. I had planned to ask Maddie about that thing Eva said earlier about the birds being quote unquote real. It was on my list of questions, but before I even got to it, she actually brought it up first, told me she had been worried I was going to propose the are they real question.

You know, so here I am, it's amazing that I'm a defense lawyer, and then I'm asking myself the question I didn't want to be asked. But I mean, I'm like, right, I'm putting it out there. But, you know, I can't say that they aren't real to me. I can't shift off of it. I won't shift off of it. Because what would happen if you did? I mean, okay, what would happen?

I think it would be a huge loss. I think it would be a huge loss. The kind of loss you might feel when you have to stop playing your favorite sport, as your body can't hack it anymore. Or maybe the loss you feel when you finish watching all five seasons of your favorite show. Except way, way more so, because this is their show. They created it, and constantly updated, and it's been going on since their real children were in middle school.

It gives them some of that feeling of being parents, I think. Except without any of the worries. And without having to watch the birds get any older. Or fly away. John Cole is one of the producers of our show. Guess what? I've spoken to no home.

We're gonna live in the trees Did he ever be transformed? We're gonna live in the trees We're gonna live in the trees I bring you a fat juicy worm I bring you millipedes

Open your beak and close your eyes We're gonna live in the trees We're gonna live in the trees

Warburgum is produced today by the man you just heard. Sean Cole, the people who put together today's show, include Bea Madawumi on the Baker, Susan Burton, Dana Chivis of either the Cornfell, Connor Jaffy Waltsett, Flynn, Mary Marge Walker, Tobin Low, Green, and Masitzi, Stone Nelson, Catherine Raymonde, or Melissa Ship, Louis Sullivan, Christopher Strutala, Mattierney, and Chloe Weiner. Our managing editors, Sara Abderaben, our senior editors, David Kestenbaum, our executive editors, and Manuel Barrie. Additional production on today's rerun from my Comite Valour, Kipnis, and Henry Larson.

It's been three years since we first broadcast today's program, and I am really saddened to tell you this next bit of news. Carmen Mulito, who you heard in the first act of today's show, talking about her then future husband, Sebastian, killing a chicken to impress her mom. In 2022, Carmen brought me to say that her beloved Sebastian died.

In addition to his marriage and his family life, Sebastian, by the way, coordinated movie set construction for lots of films and TV shows you may have seen, one of the Star Trek reboots on Mission Impossible, Vanilla Sky, if these walls could talk, Shawshank Redemption, Murder She Wrote, lots of others. Anyway.

Special thanks today to Chris Cole, Jennifer Bogo, Katharina Eggman, Emma Young, and Annie Chelsea. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos, there's lists of favorite shows, tons of other stuff there too. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is given to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

Thanks as always to our programs co-founder, Mr. Tory Malatea, who's actually sitting right here. Hey, Tory, could you look at your watch and tell me how much time do we have left in today's show? Just a minute. Thanks, buddy. I'm Aaron Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Live. We're gonna live in the trees. We're gonna live in the trees.

Next week on the podcast of The American Life. Ready? Here we go. A million people go to the Iowa State Fair. Some for the rides, some for 4-H, some to sell stuff, and some. So you have to shoot 10 balloons and change your gun and come back across a timer in 9 seconds. That's less than a second per shot. We go to the fair. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.