A Day, Transformed, by Lisa Novick
A Day, Transformed, by Lisa Novick
Creative Nonfiction
One December morning, rushing to the car to take my younger daughter to high school, I was stopped by textured, high-pitched whistling. So loud it competed with the noise of the freeway a half-mile away, the whistling sounded like many voices weaving around a common note.
Backpack loaded, plate of cookies in hand, Antonia dashed past me toward the car. “Mom, come on!”
Closing my eyes, I just stood and listened. The whistling was made of crystalline notes that seemed to seep into the air, each note growing louder before a pause, and then immediately starting again.
“Mom, let’s go!” Antonia called from the passenger seat.
I looked up into the canopy of the enormous ash tree in the middle of our front yard. The branches rose nearly fifty feet above the roof of our one-story house. High among the leaves were dozens of blush-brown birds with pale yellow bellies and blue-gray wings. Every few moments, dozens more birds joined them, the whistling growing louder and louder. And as the birds crowded together, calling to one another in greeting, I glimpsed their black masks and the swept-back feathers of their crests.
Cedar waxwings. I knew their name though, until that moment, I’d never actually seen one. Audubon’s Field Guide to Birds, Western Region, had been one of my older daughter’s favorite books when she was a toddler. Evelyn had carried it with her nearly everywhere, studying the photographs and memorizing the birds’ names until the pages fell out. I had learned right along with her.
“Maaahhhm!” Antonia called, making the single syllable a long, drawn-out groan.
“There must be a hundred birds up there!” I said, gesturing at the ash. “It sounds like a jungle, like we’re in the Amazon or something.” The expression “an ear-full of waxwings” suddenly made perfect sense.
I’d never seen so many birds in my Southern California garden. A dozen goldfinches feeding on buckwheat was my measure of abundance.
“Maaahhhm, we’re late!”
“Can we just stay a few minutes and watch?”
Antonia scrambled out of the car to retrieve me, green eyes flashing. I stayed right where I was. Some western robins joined the waxwings, punctuating the whistling with rapid CHEE to, CHEE too too sounds. The whistling and chirping were astonishingly loud, waxwings and robins swirling in and out of the canopy.
Antonia tugged on my sleeve with an imploring look, but then she glanced up and did a double take. “Oh, wow!”
“I wish I had a photograph,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Not even when you were young?”
“Nope, not even.”
Antonia smiled. “I guess the whole world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket. At least, not yet.” Raised on appeals from Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, Antonia knew the trend for wildlife wasn’t good.
“Can we go?” she pleaded. “I want to surprise my friends with cookies before class.”
“Can the cookies wait?”
Now, along with the waxwings, robins dotted the tree like ornaments, their rust-orange breasts shining in the morning light. The number of waxwings was growing so large that they were perching lower and lower in the canopy, close enough for us to see the bright red waxy tips of their secondary flight feathers and the lemon-yellow band at the end of their tails—colors that came from the fruit in the waxwings’ diet while the feathers were forming. The birds were named for those waxy tips and for the eastern redcedar, one of the many kinds of juniper whose berries the waxwings consume.
Just then, several dozen waxwings and robins flew over our houseand into the backyard. “What are they doing?” Antonia said. “Why are they here?”
“Let’s find out.” I took a few steps toward the house, hoping Antonia would follow. Time together was becoming scarce as she prepared for college and asserted her independence… the way it should be, but I missed her.
Antonia ran toward the car, and my heart fell. My subterfuge hadn’t worked. But then, instead of plopping down in the passenger seat, Antonia reached into the car for her backpack and the plate of cookies and pushed the car door shut with her foot.
I felt like I’d won the lottery.
We hurried into the house. Antonia retrieved her camera as I pulled some blankets from the hall closet. We crept out into the backyard, eased onto the patio chairs, tucked the blankets around our legs, and watched as waxwings and robins gathered in the leafless elderberry tree.
“Why are they in the elderberry?” Antonia whispered, “There’s nothing there for them to eat.”
“Look what’s close by.” I nodded toward two large toyon bushes. Festooned with bunches of bright red berries, the toyons were more red than green with clusters of berries at the end of every branch. Cedar waxwings are frugivores, eating mainly fruit and berries year-round. During summer—breeding season—waxwings supplement their diet with insects. Protein-rich, insects are fed to nestlings during the first several days of their lives, after which the nestlings graduate to a diet mostly of berries.
Antonia and I watched as more and more waxwings and robins gathered in the bare branches of the elderberry. About twenty-five feet across, the tree’s canopy was miniscule compared to the behemoth ash. I wondered how the elderberry’s relatively small, brittle canopy could possibly accommodate the growing number of birds. Seconds later, twigs and branches snapped. The birds rose and settled anew, whistling and chirping as loudly as ever. Then, on a signal perceptible only to them, about half suddenly flew to the toyon bushes.
Normally upright, the fifteen-foot-tall toyons sagged and dripped with birds, branches bobbing. An ebullient feast ensued, the waxwings and robins gulping down berries and chattering, unmistakably happy. When I’d planted the toyons seven years earlier, I never dreamed I’d see a scene like this.
“Are they going to take turns?” Antonia whispered, anxiously looking at the birds waiting in the elderberry. And, as if on cue, the initial group of waxwings and robins returned to the elderberry as the second group flew to the toyons.
“They’re sharing!” Antonia whispered.
I smiled, thinking she was anthropomorphizing the birds because of her strong sense of fairness. In fact, she was right. Waxwings are remarkable for their sharing. If several birds are on a branch but only one bird is next to berries, that bird will pass berries to the others. Likewise, as Antonia and I had just witnessed, waxwings also take turns feeding, flying in alternate groups from a staging area—the elderberry—to the food source. Instead of a competitive free-for-all with members of the ear-full left wanting, consideration was practiced for all the members of the flock, robins included.
Camera ready, Antonia crept toward the birds. Thirty feet, then twenty-five, then just twenty feet away, she took umpteen photographs. I was afraid the clicking might spook the birds, but their boisterous whistling chatter muffled the sound of the camera. Many photographs later, smiling broadly, Antonia crept back to join me on the patio.
“Should I take you to school now?” I whispered.
“I don’t have any tests today,” she whispered back, bargaining. “When will we see something like this again?”
For the next few hours, Antonia and I watched the waxwings and robins fly in cyclic waves between the elderberry and the toyons. Even the way the groups changed places seemed choreographed by the same spirit of consideration: The group flying to the elderberry would arc high over the tree and drop down onto the canopy, while the group flying to the toyons would swoop low and rise to the berries, the groups thereby avoiding awkward mid-air encounters. And as the birds cycled through the toyons, eating away, the bushes looked progressively less red and more and more green.
The waxwings were mesmerizing to watch. Their sleek, blush-brown bodies looked airbrushed, as though they were covered with satin rather than individual feathers. The toyon berries were large—it had been an exceedingly wet autumn in Southern California—and as the waxwings swallowed the berries whole, their satiny necks bulged with berry-sized bumps. It was a banquet of constant motion, the waxwings throwing out their wings again and again to maintain balance on the bobbing branches, waxy red tips flashing.
When they’re not breeding in southern Canada, waxwings are itinerant, roaming from the United States through Central America in search of the berries that keep them alive. I regretted I hadn’t planted the toyons a few years earlier. If I had, perhaps Evelyn could have witnessed the magic, too. A few times, Antonia and I glanced at each other and just smiled with delight. And as we watched the waxwings throughout the morning, we shared thoughts and feelings that needed quiet, unstructured time to emerge. The day was truly a feast.
By late morning, the bushes were nearly denuded but for the odd missed berry or two. The waxwings and robins drifted away, and so did Antonia. Rather than return to school for just two more classes, she went inside the house to do next week’s homework. I stayed outside, not wanting the enchantment of the morning to end.
Gazing at the toyons, I imagined being in a flock of waxwings high above my town, looking down, alert for brightly colored fruits and berries. Amid La Cañada’s 7,000 or so houses with swimming pools, lawns, and non-fruiting ornamentals, the toyon bushes must have stood out like bright, red-dotted beacons.
Before the engineering feat of the Colorado River aqueduct that brought imported water to La Cañada in the 1950’s cedar waxwings would have looked down in early winter and seen a patchwork of red-dotted beacons throughout the sparsely populated landscape. Toyon bushes were characteristic of the chaparral and oak woodlands that once blanketed the area. But with imported water came more development and the near-total conversion of La Cañada’s natural landscape to non-native plants, most of them water-thirsty: lawn, white birch, crape myrtle, camellia, hibiscus…all of which starve the local food web. Waxwings included.
The change brought by the imported water would have been swift enough to see in an average waxwing’s lifetime—about eight years. It must have been a shock. The advent of dams across the American West brought this kind of rupture to myriad insect and other animal species. I could only imagine the hunger gnawing at the waxwings’ bellies as the birds flew over the green but eviscerated landscape, scanning for berries. How disorienting and incomprehensible it must have been to recognize familiar landforms in a newly hostile place—a place that had been welcoming waxwings for at least ten millennia, then suddenly no more.
Antonia loaded her photographs into the computer. When we saw the images of the waxwings fluttering, gulping, and gliding, we could almost hear the birds’ ecstatic chatter. They’d found food, and their pleasure had been palpable. It’s such a deceptively small thing, planting what animals need. I hoped that, someday, waxwings might again look down and see bright, red-dotted beacons throughout the land.
That night, I went to sleep wishing the waxwings well on their journey, wishing them all the berries and places of rest they might need, deeply grateful for their appearance in my life. Grateful for how they’d transformed a rushed morning into a splendid day with my daughter, who was also about to take flight.
Lisa Novick lives in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, where she’s been recovering from an emotionally grueling job in environmental outreach in Los Angeles. In France, she’s been reading, reflecting and writing, and taking long walks through forests of oaks and hornbeams with her dogs, delighting in watching the seasons and being in a place where caring for people and the natural world is a cultural and societal priority. In Los Angeles, she was a member of Mayor Garcetti’s Urban Ecosystem Working Group and Biodiversity Expert Council, and director of outreach at the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers & Native Plants. She co-founded Landscape Integrity Films and Education (on YouTube), whose work has been supported by water districts in Southern California. Her creative nonfiction writing has appeared in About Place Journal, Camas, Canary, The Hopper magazine, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. You can read more of Lisa’s work at: www.lisanovick.com.