How Birds Fly

Procedures: I. Hold the fan blades in your handsII. Move your arms up and down TYPE OF ANIMAL: My brother is what you might call a bird aficionado. He can easily articulate the differences between a crow and a raven, and has even memorized the names of particular birds that live in zoos: Maria, Slidell, Mr. McBouncy-Pants, Leon, Virginia, Evan, Dino. I am what you might call a bird enthusiast. While we share a deep affinity for winged things, Daniel is the one whose website explains that a typical Wonga pigeon's nest is a “saucer-shaped twig/stick platform w/ 11.8 in diameter & built 9.84–65.61 ft above ground.”These days, Daniel's favorite bird is the cassowary. When I ask him why, he texts back, “I love cassowaries due to their prehistoric look, their badassery (peep the feet), & their coloration. They're the most dangerous birds on the planet.” Indeed, cassowaries can stand at an ominous six foot five, and are the only birds besides ostriches known to have killed humans. They are bestowed with a shiv of a middle toe that can tear through skin and even fracture bones. Cassowaries sometimes smash through windows, presumably attacking their own reflection, which they misinterpret as a threat. When faced with a charging cassowary, one should remain upright, as the bird kicks in a forward and downward motion—peep the feet. The early birds lost their teeth and shriveled their gonads, and what choice did they have? Evolution is a tale of sacrifice. For hundreds of millions of years, birds have had to contend with weight, shedding what they could so their descendants might soar. Bones hollowed out and bodies narrowed. Teeth replaced with lightweight bills, leaving gizzards to do the work of processing nuts, berries, fish, and mice. Birds could not fly until they had lost enough. WINGSPAN: Daniel flaps the palm fiber fan blades, a little more vigorously this time. With each gentle whoosh, it seems that he might just rise into the air, as though it were in his bones to levitate. But his feet never leave the table. Like the rest of us, he is subject to gravity.He nods, steps down, and writes in his notebook:Boys can't fly. There are more than 60 species of flightless birds, a classification that includes penguins, ostriches, emus, and cassowaries. While these birds’ ancestors could fly, their descendants evolved flightlessness. During the Cenozoic era, Phorusrhacids, otherwise known as “terror birds,” used to wander the savannas of what we now call South America. The terror birds, along with the dromornithids, the geranoidids, the gastornithiforms, and the eogruids, evolved long legs, long necks, and big heads, with giant bodies whose weight prohibited flight. For the flightless birds, natural selection favored alternative biological advantages, such as swimming in the penguin and the deadly saber toe in the formidable cassowary.Flight muscles come at a cost. Even when not in use, large wing muscles require a great deal of energy to maintain. Evolutionarily speaking, smaller flight muscles are favored when larger ones are not strictly necessary for survival. Given this evolutionary to and fro, flying is not a binary of flight vs. flightlessness but a full spectrum of abilities. Problem: How do birds fly?HEIGHT: Daniel won first place at the elementary school science fair. He was meticulous with his experiment and the presentation of results. He did not, at the time, have a favorite bird, and how could he? He was still cultivating an encyclopedia in his young mind, and could not make such a determination with insufficient data. He studied the intricate mechanics of bird flight and sought to determine whether such behavior was possible in humans. He took nothing for granted and cut no corners, consigning even the most tedious details to memory. After attempting to use fan blades as wings, Daniel confirmed in his notebook that no, boys could not fly.The presentation was titled “How birds fly and why boys can't.” My brother and I were an odd pair. While I was turning the living room into a vaudeville stage, Daniel was turning the basement into a miniature zoo where he kept plastic giraffes in enclosures made of Lincoln Logs. Where I was drawn to tie-dye, theme parks, and Tweety Bird tattoos, Daniel was into hoofed mammals, baked potatoes, and Andrea Bocelli. And as desperate as I was for my brother to like me, sometimes he could not look me in the eye. A long time ago, I fell in love with a boy who fell from the heavens. Icarus was a baby bird not yet fledged, trapped in the exquisite labyrinth his father built. In order to escape, Daedalus builds his son a pair of wings from feathers, wax and string, instructing the boy to fly neither too high nor too low, lest his wings be singed by the Sun or swallowed by the salt-Sea. As they fly, Ovid likens the scene to that of a bird leading her fledgling from the nest to the wind. A farmer, squinting at their silhouetted forms against the shapeless sky, mistakes them for gods.And then, Icarus catches wind of the heavens. Some ancient instinct drives him upward, toward the blinding light of the Sun. And before he is falling, cascading into the Sea that takes his name, I imagine a sublime moment of breathless ecstasy, a cleaving to the edges of space and experience, a becoming-transcendent, becoming bird. And when the wax melts, I imagine that it softens like a candle. And when the boy falls, he falls like snow.I think part of what drew me to Icarus was his pluck—the audacity of a mortal to think that he could fly so high. Where others saw hubris, I saw the realization of an ecstatic vision: a human boy who could fly like a bird. The tale's commonly stated moral is almost too banal to bear repeating: do not fly too close to the sun. In other words, stay in your lane. Do not imagine that you might touch the heavens. Do not disobey Daddy. Do not think that you might seek more than you are given. Flying is for birds and other gods. Boys can't fly.When I fell in love with a boy my own age, it was hot and sudden and had me hurtling into the Sea like a clay pigeon. What washed ashore was ruin. And yet, as I began to put the pieces back together, I would not have undone a thing. If only for those cresting moments, I had licked the seam between the atmosphere and the ozone, and found my heart was beating.And so I set about crafting my wings with wax and string. Hypothesis: Birds move their wings to make them flyBirds are born with the instinct for flight, but not the ability. A baby bird will learn quickly that she needs food to survive. A mother bird with berries in her beak will gradually perch farther and farther from the nest, daring her young to venture out into the world. As these chicks fall to the earth, they discover that they can ease their fall by spreading their wings. Eventually, the fledgling does not hit the ground.Not all birds survive this process. Recently, I discovered two dead sparrow hatchlings in my backyard, too soon fallen from the nest, no time to adapt to the concrete understories of Brooklyn. Even when young birds are not killed upon impact, predators like snakes, lizards, rats, or cats may await below. Learning how to fly is a dangerous education and a crash-course in falling. But what choice do these birds have? They are unlikely to live if they cannot fly, so they must throw themselves from the nest. GESTATION: It was around the time of the science fair that birds began to appear everywhere in my mother's artwork. Before long, her studio was a murmuration, strewn with etchings and encaustics, screenprints and lithographs depicting herons, seagulls, kingfishers, condors, and her two sons suspended midair on giant bird wings.One large etching, titled “Working On Wings To Fly,” depicts a heron standing in a sea of human hands that stretch out into an ocean. Instead of wings, the heron has two arms, and in one hand, woven through a hole in her palm, a little striped bird flutters its wings.Below the image on her website, she writes, “I realized halfway through drawing this image on the copper plate that it was about me trying to cope with letting my special needs son leave the nest. He's ready to fly, I want him to fly, but he'll always be part of me, I'll always love him, his absence like a hole in my hand.” Observations: I. I didn't fly when I flapped my wings.II. I felt the air resistance but didn't get off the ground.III. I must be too big to fly.IV. My arms are starting to get sore. TAIL LENGTH: Daniel didn't speak for the first few years, and it was unclear whether he would ever find words. He was irritable and easily overwhelmed; he would thrash and tantrum at the slightest provocation. One doctor suggested that he might need to be institutionalized, and that my parents should manage their expectations about the life prospects of their autistic son. As far as this doctor was concerned, mere survival would be an achievement. There are varying accounts for how the prophet Tiresias lost their sight, but in all accounts the prophet was not a prophet until after they were blind. Sometimes as a consolation for their god-given blindness, Tiresias is bestowed with the ability to understand the language of the birds and thereby foretell the future. I wonder, too, whether Tiresias sang back. It was around the turn of my 20th year that the night began to fade. I could no longer recognize the faces across dim-lit rooms and night-time avenues. An optometrist told me it was nothing to worry about. When an ophthalmologist diagnosed me with a degenerative eye condition called Stargardt's disease, I was living in the Balinese rainforest and could not metabolize the news. So I resolved to focus on other things, like the indecipherable songs of faraway birds. We walk along the berm, enveloped in the sun-baked must of marshland. A great blue heron perceives us from afar, serene and statuesque. An anhinga with wings outstretched sunbathes on the path, totally unconcerned with our presence. Snowy egrets fluff their white feathers like swamp brides swaddled in untold tulle. Frogs croak, insects chirp, the wind whistles in the trees.We discovered early on that observing wildlife was the rare activity we all liked to do, so we went on family vacations to places where interesting birds lived. In Florida, I would chase sandpipers on the shore while my brother flipped through dated pamphlets detailing local bird species. My father, with his sharp-eyed attention, could spot the slightest fleck or smudge of movement as a bird. My brother would identify the bird, rattling off facts about its habitats and eating habits, sparing us none of the gruesome details. My mother and I would take photographs, marveling at wings, crests, and colors. We exchange quiet pleasantries as the more experienced birdwatchers among us unpack their equipment—sleek DSLR cameras with protruding zoom lenses and unidentified gadgets clasped to so many carabiners. My similarly bird-enthusiastic friend Naomi and I have convinced our high school to give us academic credit for a self-directed independent study in ornithology, shorthand for early-morning birdwatching with octogenarians. Before school, we scour Chicago's North and South Ponds for red-tailed hawks, black-crowned night herons, kingfishers and chickadees. One time I think I see a nuthatch, but I may have only imagined it.As newly minted birdwatchers, we decide to seek a holy grail: the cedar waxwing. We are drawn to what appears to us an unutterable elegance. A seamless gradient of bronze and gold, shades of grey like frosted silver, a sleek black mask edged with white, and those wings, which taper like molten glass into the finest waxen black. But the seeing eye catches on those flecks of red and yellow that fringe his wings like fire. And we are engulfed in that flame.The year came and went and we did not see a waxwing. But eventually, graduation upon us, we found ourselves beneath a tree that seemed to vibrate with life. We looked up and there they were, flitting about in the foliage like some winged tabernacle of gold.That was before I knew about falling in love. That was before I knew a lot of things. When the prophet Tiresias admonishes King Creon for denying Polyneices a proper burial in Sophocles’ Antigone, he cites the birds as his source of divine wisdom: “They were all a-chatter, / As is their habit, when suddenly I heard / A strange note in their jangling, a scream, a / Whirring fury; I knew that they were fighting, / Tearing each other, dying / In a whirlwind of wings clashing.”1 It is the birds who recite the will of the gods and sing of crises unresolved.Tiresias responds to these fearsome by at the but the do not The first time I had my heart I found with little to do but little about that fly and fall I heart wax and a love that like and fell like love to the licked by her blue like an to the on the wings of And a little bird came to me, cedar on the she me how to my wings from feathers, wax and so was a about a boy who to fly the of a bird, a boy who and his wings love songs from the Sea to the Sun. I it and when the Sun was not in mother to to see the and she made an The image a upon a eye with that of a human I had the image on my where I a wing might have had I born a bird. I my mother a of the I didn't at the time that the bird my mother would always be I didn't that the of the image was an far what I could yet I first discovered Tiresias in the of I was drawn to this strange of the who as a and a with gods and between the of the living and the And of when I began my sight, I in to this of I if I made about my that would never have made And so I began to as in the of a degenerative As I was neither nor neither nor neither nor I was becoming One of my mother's lithographs depicts a with an in one and a pair of in the The are to a which to a of that from the absence where the might have of like some takes up the and is through with whose white across a the that my is a bird in the of the who a in her out into the of and light that the And it seems to me that should this cut the and they will not be the bird will us how to the mother was an odd at in a and her life to and My didn't of these But her they came to her In I that in my mother her wings, my found to her In her years, she the she had never to And her etchings were with bird mother me that she didn't birds until Daniel's science fair him his fan wings, and when he Boys can't fly, she he I was to a penguin in an about to than one of the who by the when faced with My mother the for the yellow felt the bird it with an she black for the I only had a few but I them with I had the to see a penguin in the my were with from the it took to put lenses in for the first I could not see through my In those my the first to spot a downward into the we the scene on the little I in It seemed that all I had ever was to see a penguin in the One had across the great big blue beneath my and I had then, as if by some divine and to my great we the and there he a young in an for his mother to imagine the little penguin and whether he is still I like to him, through the Sea on ancient penguin wings. Daniel has an for each of the species of the and the The can be found in these palm not found above are birds who can in the most of they find most dangerous bird, toe to and the Cenozoic of of blue as the ancient that make of and all this work on my brother that his favorite bird is the cassowary. Even though these birds no longer take to the as their ancestors they have found and in which to I that flight is a and are I. I didn't my with my I think I need to do some I think I made a a boy can fly.IV. should never at One time Daniel was with who that they were the of for On a I looked in his to see whether his was it I our parents that he had not in but was on a to When we found him, he had nothing with him but a a of and the this is what and Icarus and cassowaries have that there are and we might yet How could I my brother for such I knew where he was I was on my A might that my brother and I have little in other than a family While Daniel memorized the names of that in he would never I was that in that didn't Daniel to the facts of science and I was lost in of My brother did the deep to the with to the I would have never to I was too to focus on for so I was on the across forms and only a for too many I began to understand that Daniel was not like the other birds, I saw how the could be to those of us who were Even as I was for those almost in the of young I could not bear to as other on Daniel like the time I began to the of my own I knew about the to the on the our bear little I now see them as toward the to understand what it to be what it to be other, how we might how we might Daniel flaps the fan blades, a little more vigorously this time, and I for a just like a bird. I found out how birds fly from the wings have special The bones of a bird wing are with light the bird rise and stay in the Birds are light weight so they can fly And the part of the bird is between the wings, which is called the of If there is one my brother and I must it is boys can fly. I I have it have that like and with I have a his wings, like some into the heavens. I have a take to the to love songs to the Sun. I have my brother ever so above the of that and he is the of what I cannot my mother's like an It the between my I am the language of the birds, on the of Icarus was a prophet by the Sun. Icarus was an who licked the of Icarus was a who fell in love with an father has up birds. My on in the she My mother's studio is a for things. We are our on wings of wax and I still do not how to identify birds by for the most I cannot the of these do not the in their But I am still my wings, and we are a family to one to our to our to our of my encyclopedia are into the wind. And when I close my and to the we are