Rare Birds and the Compulsion to be Different

A Story of Community, Identity, and Challenging One’s Conditioning.

Photo by Mark Faherty from a story on WCAI’s Weekly Bird Report*

This morning I saw a strange-looking bird flying above the parking lot of the Cotuit Center for the Arts. I had just returned from delivering the Art Bus to a summer camp in Falmouth (my semi-retirement side gig is driving this colorfully painted school-bus-turned-mobile-art-classroom to various festivals and events around Cape Cod), and was getting into my pick-up to head home when I spied the unusual bird. It looked like a large seagull with black-tipped wings except it had a long, forked tail, like a swallow or a frigate bird, and unlike a seagull, which always has someplace to go, this graceful creature was circling silently over the treetops, much like a turkey vulture, sometimes soaring out of sight beyond the trees, then reappearing just when I’d decided it was gone for good, making picture-taking a challenge. I typed a description of what I saw into my mobile phone, and instantly received Google’s AI-generated response: “You have likely seen a swallow-tailed kite.”

But that didn’t make sense, because Massachusetts is far north of this species’ range, according to a Wikipedia search. A resident of South America, the swallow-tailed kite normally migrates only as far as the Gulf Coast region of the U.S. to breed.

And I found this on the American Bird Conservancy website:

This largest of American kites is a graceful, buoyant flier, so lightweight and maneuverable that it can capture a dragonfly mid-air or pluck a lizard from its treetop hideout—all without a single wing beat.

I don’t think we have lizards in our treetops!

I remembered that our local Cape & Islands NPR station features a program called the “Weekly Bird Report.” I’ve listened to the host read aloud messages from neighborhood bird watchers about bird sightings, or questions about species and habits. I thought, What the heck, I’ll give it a try. I found their contact page and emailed them while sitting on the torn seat of my Chevy pick-up with the door open. I wrote, “Could this possibly be a swallow-tailed kite?”

It was time to head over to my next job, maintaining a guest house in Yarmouth, so I closed the door and started my truck. By the time I got to the job, I’d already received a message back: “Yes indeed! There are six of them hanging out at the church thrift shop.” (The thrift shop is across the street from the Arts Center.) Apparently, this small band of swallow-tailed kites has been nesting on Cape Cod for the last three seasons, a thousand miles north of their regular breeding grounds.

Well, now, was I proud of myself for reaching beyond my comfort zone, for connecting with such a well-known Cape Cod entity, for definitively satisfying my curiosity, and for maybe-possibly having initiated a chance for my question to be read aloud on the radio?

You bet!

Emailing the radio station may seem like peanuts to some, but for me, reaching out to strangers for help is a departure from my deeply rooted social conditioning. My large, Catholic, blue-collar family modeled a rather insular approach to life; do it yourself, keep to yourself, don’t make a nuisance of yourself.

The only time I saw my parents socializing with adults who weren’t related was on Sunday mornings, and that for only a few moments on the church steps after mass. After that we would usually head straight to my grandmother’s house, where the aunts and uncles would bring donuts and homemade pie, and us kids would play outdoors with our cousins. I can still hear my stern grandmother admonishing us whenever we tumbled noisily into the house, excited about something or other. “Children should be seen and not heard,” she would say.

My father was a union construction supervisor, so obviously he spent his days working and communicating with strangers, but I seldom witnessed it. My parents didn’t go out with friends, weren’t involved in any organizations, and seldom traveled. Dad liked to take us camping but we ventured no farther than the car could take us in a few hours.

I’m not disparaging my parents; my father grew up in the same town he brought us up in, on a farm-of-sorts with nine siblings, where they built and repaired their own structures and out-buildings, fixed their own cars and tractors, cut lots of firewood, and found little reason to travel far from the homestead. Dad’s always been the strong, practical, no-nonsense type. He ordered us to do our chores, but he never asked for help. Mom came from a broken and dysfunctional family, and with eight kids to raise, had enough to worry about without guiding each of us to find and nurture our unique traits.

We weren’t encouraged to do out-of-the-ordinary things like call radio stations or join the drama club or learn an instrument, or even to go to college. To study for a unique career that excited or intrigued us or didn’t involve working with our hands would have felt like a journey to foreign lands; to spend a lot of time in activities unrelated to a future income, such as art or writing, would have seemed irresponsible. (I’ll never forget how dad frowned and shook his head when I told him I wanted to be a woodworker and make fine crafts rather than work on houses or bridges like he did. “That’s just a hobby,” he said. “You’ll never make enough.”)

The truth is, I was always a lot different than everyone else in my family. I was quiet and timid and was always reading. I was a late bloomer; a teetotaler and a virgin until after my twenty-first birthday. And I was very self-conscious.

I remember how once, at a family wedding reception, I noticed for the first time that my family never strayed from their assigned, or self-assigned, table. Even though I was still a shy teen, I decided then and there to move about the hall, talking to relatives and strangers, if only to prove I wasn’t unsociable or reclusive like them.

It's odd how some kids are determined not to be like their parents and others are proud to be just like their parents. I have actually seen one of my kin, it may have been a niece—a relatively new mother—share a Facebook meme about how spanking children is good for them: “My parents spanked me and look how I turned out!”

But I’m talking about sending an email to NPR, not corporal punishment. I know it’s not that big a deal. There was a relative in my family—I think it was my mom’s uncle—who was actually a radio show host back in the 1960s. Gee, I haven’t thought about him in a long time. He was a real character who did lots of interesting and unusual things. An exception to the rule, I guess. I want to say he once organized food drops for the deer population; there must have been a drought or something. And I remember an old black-and-white photo of him wrestling a black bear, taller than he was on its hind legs. Was he in the circus? I do remember hearing his voice once on an AM station. That was pretty exciting; my great uncle, the celebrity!

Holy cow, I just remembered my great uncle’s name; it was Donald! Donald Weeks. My namesake, maybe!**

Is that where I got my determination to be different?

I’m not really trying to be different anymore, though. I’m just happy to be alive. I’m satisfied that, through meditation and mindfulness, through reading widely all my life, and through learning from my many mistakes, I’ve developed the courage to just be myself, whatever that means, however that manifests. I don’t feel like a victim of the demands and responsibilities of life anymore, confused about my purpose and direction.

There is no direction, there is only here. Here and now. I’m content to look around and feel the awesome presence of that. And, of course, to look up at the sky once in a while, too, because you never know what you’re going to see up there.

DB 🙏💚

Doing things my way, and keeping an eye out for rare birds.

*”The kites are getting cozy,” by Mark Faherty on capeandislands.org
**After writing this essay, I asked my parents if they named me after my mom's uncle, Donald, and they said no, they were just trying to think of two names that started with the same letter, and came up with "Don" and "Donna" (my sister, Donna, and I are twins).

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