Pretty Bird as Formidable Touchstone

The Goldfinch in Nature, Art, and Fiction.

An American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) on the shore of Lake Ontario, July 2024. Unless otherwise noted, all images here are © John Degen

Back in early 2014, if you weren’t shifting a copy of Donna Tart’s soon to be Pulitzer-awarded novel, The Goldfinch, around your living space, you most definitely did not live in a bookish home. At over 750 pages in length, this bulky brick of paper was a reliable anchor for anything the wind might disturb, and its clever cover tearaway revealing a small painted bird drew the eye and intrigued the curiosity.

Image courtesy Little, Brown.

2014 was long before I got into birding, but I was hooked by that image nevertheless, and I remember looking up the referenced painting before I even opened the pages for the first time. What the cover carefully does not reveal is that the goldfinch in question is a prisoner. This is no wild goldfinch perched ever so briefly on an outside wall. It is chained and kept indoors as a pet. Now go read close to 800 pages if you wish to find out why that symbol is appropriate to Tartt’s story. No spoilers here.

The 1654 painting Het puttertje is by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, and rather importantly was involved in a deadly explosion and then lost to the world for a period of time before being rediscovered far from where it was last seen. Again, read the book. It’s a smart pastiche of history in fiction.

Het puttertje, by Carel Fabritius, image courtesy the Mauritshuis.

What’s compelling to me about Tartt’s novel is her use of the bird-as-object to stand as multi-purpose and often oppositional touchstone. The bird is both joy and deep grief. It is at once freedom and confinement. At the hand of a master storyteller, this one creature has almost too many meanings. Or perhaps that’s just one reader’s meandering thought.

I am always gladdened at the sound of goldfinch calls on my birding walks, because they send me right back to 2014 when this little bird-on-a-book was an everyday sight in my life. 2014 was a good year. That was, for me, the last good year before “the troubles,” and so the sound of this bird is a moment of welcome emotional transportation.

I love how these beautiful finches twist themselves to get at the fruit of pinecones, and how the darkness of their feather base shows through the gold. Photo from 2023 in Etobicoke, Canada.

In the frigid early weeks of 2015, my small family became suddenly homeless when a huge water tank failed on the roof of our condo building in Etobicoke. Three quarters of the building’s suites were flooded out, including ours, and we were forced to store all our belongings and live for months in a downtown rental while insurance made the repairs. 2016 brought a serious and frightening health crisis to our family, followed year upon year by another and yet another, culminating, of course, in the great enshittening of the world in early 2020.

So, I hear a goldfinch and I am able to leap through time — but not in a simplistic, nostalgic way. More profoundly, back and forth, landing first back in 2014 and then squarely in a present where I have somehow come to terms with this last tumultuous decade, and can look to the future with something resembling optimistic acceptance.

The wild version of Fabritius’s bird. Captured, 2023 in Etobicoke, Canada.

Seeing a wild goldfinch is even more powerful for me. I find these birds ridiculously difficult to photograph. Flitty, nervous, and stand-offish, they are usually too far away, too protected by twigs and branches or simply moving too damn fast. I have MANY blurs of gold to admire in my collection, and quite a few very nice shots of where the damn bird was moments before I clicked the shutter. That flash of yellow through the branches is an avatar of both hope and deliverance for me, and when I actually manage to freeze it in my frame, I feel a little bit like I’ve captured a myth.

And these days, whenever I see a goldfinch I am almost always in the company of my little dog, Birdy. Talk about avatars of hope and deliverance. Really, one of the only good things to come out of the troubles was this perfect creature. Arriving in our house after the flood damage was repaired, and just weeks before the first terrifying diagnosis, Birdy the puppy demanded an emotional steadiness and physical thereness that might otherwise have been impossible to muster. In that way, she saved us. Golden.

The dog who arrived just in time to take on the troubles.

“And isn’t the whole point of things — beautiful things — that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
                                                     ― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

It’s also a movie!



The Littlest Falcon... Getting Littler

I finally meet my kestrel

One of a pair of kestrels hunting a hay field in Northern Ontario earlier this month. All photos, unless otherwise noted, © John Degen

Maybe a decade ago, when sweeping the terrace outside our condo in Toronto, I came upon a fairly fresh bird carcass in the little well created by where our glass balcony front dips below the concrete deck. Having never seen anything larger than a house sparrow in our seventh-floor container garden, I was impressed by the bird’s size. Larger than a kingbird, smaller than a crow… it was an American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), North America’s smallest falcon.

While our glass frontage has a smoky glaze and is supposedly bird-friendly, this little creature did not get the memo, and had clearly plowed headlong into the glass while chasing prey (perhaps one of those aforementioned house sparrows — in some areas, the kestrel is called a Sparrow Hawk). It dropped out of sight into a perfectly kestrel-sized concrete and glass coffin, and was slowly being covered by blowing autumn leaves. With rubber gloves on, I extracted the poor thing, bagged it, and gave it the best bird funeral I could manage in an urban environment. But before we parted company, I had a good long look.

This magnificent kestrel capture is © Alex Shipherd / Macauley Library

Kestrels are beautifully patterned and coloured, with gray/blue and tan sections, bold cheek stripes, and a speckled breast plate. I’d never seen one up close before, and it was entrancing. I can say with confidence that has been the one and only bird-strike I’ve experienced in 14 years of living here, but I’ve never gotten over it. And once I started birding in earnest, the American Kestrel was an immediate target species for me. I wanted to see one flying and hunting. I needed a live spectacle to soften the memory of the one who didn’t make it.

My kestrels shared this prey-filled meadow with an American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and an Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus).

Out for an evening birding drive recently in the farmland around my northern home, I finally got my wish. A pair of kestrels were hunting a once-mown hay field from a perch on overhead wires. The late day sun deepened their colour patterns, and made them instantly recognizable, even from a distance. I pulled to the narrow shoulder, checked my surroundings and started walking toward them. Thus began a game of kestrel and mouse that gave me a good long walk. I’d stop when I thought I was close enough for a good shot, raise my camera, peer through the lens and… they were gone. The little falcons swooped low over the field, circled wide and came back to the wire a hundred or so meters further down the road.

Walk, stop, raise camera, swear.

Walk, stop, raise camera, swear.

This went on for a while.

The best I could manage of these little tricksters while on their track.

Worried I was maybe stressing the birds away from their dinner, I took the long trudge back to my car and tried a different approach, driving casually down the road as though I was just heading home. One of the kestrels took off again, but the other stayed. I managed to stop and take a short series of the wary little creature leaning from my driver-side window, and then quickly left it to hunt.

The massive range of the American Kestrel. The north shore of Lake Huron, where I spotted them, is right in the middle of their breeding grounds. Thanks to Cornell University for the range map.

Kestrels have an expansive range in the Americas, but their numbers are in a distressing decline. The north shore of Lake Huron, where I saw my kestrels, is a comfortable, wild, breeding territory, but the fierce little predators head south for the winter. Scientists speculate that loss of habitat and predation from larger raptors have contributed to a 50% decline in kestrel numbers over the last half-century. What’s more, this small falcon has responded to its population stress by becoming even smaller. According to Living Bird magazine from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “over time, kestrels have lost both weight and wing chord (a standard measure of bird wing size). In several regions, the body shrinkage is considerable, with the weight and size loss particularly acute in places where the population decline is most severe.” Read Cornell Senior Lecturer Lauren Chambliss’s full article on the shrinking kestrel here.

And you can help protect and encourage kestrel populations by building and installing a kestrel nest box on your property. Plans and info here, thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s NestWatch project.

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. 

— The Hawk in the Rain, Ted Hughes



Currently Reading:

Olive, Mabel & Me: Life and Adventures with Two Very Good Dogs, by Andrew Cotter

Evening reading on the northern porch. All images unless otherwise noted are © John Degen.

The Covid-19 lockdowns that took over most of the world in early 2020 will be pulled apart and analyzed by historians and social commentators for the next half-century, no doubt, and then likely spotlit again in a hundred years’ time at the outset of the next global pandemic, just like we all looked back and relearned about the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1920.

I won’t dwell on the horror. We all saw it, and experienced it. Families lost members in numbers too painfully large to contemplate. The world lost major personalities to an illness that respected neither wealth nor fame. The anxiety and uncertainty were heavy and numbing. Kids lost irreplaceable educational and social experiences, and I know from personal experience in my own family that those losses will never be recovered, and will leave lifelong scars.

But do we ignore the good that may have happened alongside all that bad? I spent Canada’s various periods of lockdown in a kind of unexpected early retirement in rural Northern Ontario, in a hamlet of 1400 people, called Thessalon.

Lake Huron’s far north shore is a rather frigid place a good six months of the year… and a perfect spot for lockdown, IMHO.

The panic of early lockdown saw my family pack our city lives into the car and drive eight hours north to a small house we’d bought years before… for retirement. We thought we’d be in Thessalon for a couple of weeks. We lived there for the better part of two years. While there, I walked my 10,000 steps a day usually before 9 am and always with my dog Birdy at my side. Birdy and I trudged our way through snow and ice, spring rains, summer heat, and blissful autumn chill. I grew, harvested, preserved, and prepared food in a natural rhythm I didn’t know I’d ever learn. For me — and certainly for Birdy — the lifestyle shift, while abrupt and unnerving, offered gifts.

The daily morning trudge. Not sure Birdy and I have been in better shape ever.

My lovely wife, Julia, and a very determined-looking Birdy, ready to tackle one of the local trails.

I continued to work my job every day from a hastily prepared remote office, like so many of my desk-work compatriots. In fact, given the nature of my job heading up the staff at The Writers’ Union of Canada, I would say 2020 through 2023 were the busiest years of my career. Turns out writers do not pump the brakes when a global health emergency threatens their lives and livelihoods; rather, they hit the accelerator and write even more. Membership in the Union grew by at least 25% during the pandemic, and the work our fabulous staff used to do in a very studied, regimented way at scheduled in-person meetings, seminars, and conferences became necessarily ad hoc, spontaneous, and remote. It was suddenly injected with a nowness and immediacy that made each day an exciting discovery of new ways to make things work for the creative process.

But before my workday began and then again when it was over, I giddily accepted the gift of living in an elemental landscape of fresh air, abundant wildlife, natural social distance, and a soothing slow pace measured in seasons rather than hours. Our kids — separated from friends and their familiar, comforting structure — remember it all very differently, I’m sure; and my lovely wife Julia will always be more a city than a country mouse. But I don’t think I can apologize for the tonal, spiritual shift I experienced when the world ordered us to stay in small bubbles away from everyone else. That, it turns out, is where I want to be.

I doubt I’m introducing any of my readers to Olive and Mabel, the black and yellow labrador duo who came along on social media at just exactly the moment we all needed them to be there. The phenomenon of their virality is well documented. The sudden fame of Andrew Cotter, beyond his already appreciative audience of British sports enthusiasts, was an event that hardly needs a barely-read blog post to highlight. But for those who may have moved on and forgotten, have a look:

This inaugural Olive and Mabel video is dated at March 27, 2020, which by my records is exactly ten days into my family’s residency on Lake Huron’s north shore. I don’t remember exactly when I first saw the breakfasting competition, but it must have been very soon after it was initially uploaded. I was terminally online at the time, working through each day on a laptop on the dining table, and then checking every available social channel in the off hours to get some sense of where the world was going and what might be left for us all when the light returned. If I had to guess, I’d say the video link came to me via my childhood neighbour Janet Somerville, who also owns a black and a yellow lab, and who no doubt would have been right on top of this video’s debut.

I sent the link to everyone… family, friends, co-workers, probably international colleagues around the world. And I waited for every new edition of the adventures of Olive and Mabel much as I used to wait for new volumes in a favoured book series. The premise was hokey and charming in a slightly embarrassing dad-humour way. And I loved it. Often overlooked, I believe, in Olive and Mabel appreciation is just how much some of us were missing live sports commentary. I readily admit that on my first viewing of the video, I DID NOT get the joke. I was simply hooked by Andrew Cotter’s expert play-by-play and perfect commentary voice. For me the race to the finish of the breakfast bowls of kibble, or who would get the bone toy in the end, was very real, and totally gripping.

So, a couple years later, Julia gifted me this volume, and here we are now at the reading stage. Would we know this book and these two dogs without the pandemic lockdowns, and Cotter’s surprise virality. Never. Of course not. I would guess Andrew Cotter was surprised by a phone call one day, and by the end of that conversation an agent had convinced him there was a lucrative book contract to be had. I hope the money he was offered fattened his retirement plan. He brought a brief window of sunshine to millions in a very dark hour, and he deserves just reward — the kind of substantial monetary reward online video virality probably doesn’t deliver on its own. What a weird gift of the global information age, though, this opportunity to learn more about the lives of two dogs I will never meet in person.

Birdy has become a courageous dog of the north. No wild animal or enormous lake intimidates her… though she is still a bit uncertain about her new little brother.

Samwich Doggenstein III… the new terror of the North Shore.

Olive and Mabel are canine athletes in a way my own Birdy (and now Samwich, a late addition to the family) will never be, and not just because I have no capacity for play-by-play and certainly no broadcasting voice. Andrew Cotter seems to have a passion for climbing very tall hills in Scotland, and bringing his two labs all the way to the top with him. I’ve no doubt Samwich and Birdy would put their best effort into such a climb. I’ve certainly seen Birdy bound up steep trails while I labour behind her. But my dogs are disadvantaged by having me and not Cotter as a companion. While I like a good long, level walk in the countryside, I’m more of an admire-the-mountain-from-the-pub-at-the-bottom sort of climber.

This book is allowing me to look backward to an odd yet unexpectedly fulfilling time, and simultaneously gaze forward to my many — hopefully great many — remaining years of dog companionship.

“…Olive… focused, relentless, tasting absolutely nothing…”

—Andrew Cotter, The Dog’s Breakfast Grand Finale.

Go Ospreys Go!

Seattle's Misnamed Sports Franchise

I wish I could claim this photo as my own. A gorgeous Osprey photographed in Florida in 2017, from Cornell’s All About Birds website. © Kris Perlberg/Macaulay Library

Years ago, I travelled to Seattle with my lovely wife, Julia, and that west coast city became one of my favourites. Many of my in-laws — Julia’s parents and two older sisters with their families — live in the scenic suburbs outside Seattle. The green splendour surrounding Seattle is wondrous, but the city itself is gorgeous, full of culture, fabulous restaurants, and undeniably exciting sports teams (no matter how much I may like to deny them).

The Seattle Kraken are professional hockey’s latest expansion phenom, with a logo borrowed from the Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver Canada, just a three-hour drive north. The Seattle Mariners are my second favourite Major League Baseball team, as they entered the league in 1977, the same spring as my beloved Toronto Blue Jays. Listening to Mariner/Blue Jay games on the radio is a favourite childhood memory from my summers in the late-70s early-80s. The time difference between Washington State and Ontario meant that evening games started at 10 pm for me, and I would drift off in bed to the game commentary, a comforting habit I maintain to this day.

Lots of beautiful aquas and greens in Seattle sports logos, though that didn't stop the red 2017 Toronto Football Club from winning the MLS Cup in a freezing cold final against them. I attended that championship match with my soccer buddies. Sylvia Hotel image courtesy Vancouver's iconic hotel. Soccer image courtesy Sportsnet.

The Seattle Sounders (named after the spectacular inland seaways of the Puget Sound) in Major League Soccer are established enemies of my Toronto FC soccer club. The two squads have contested for the League championship three times in the last decade, with Seattle coming out on top twice, dammit.

And then there are the National Football League Seattle Seahawks.

I don’t have much time or patience for American football. It’s way too slow, full of unnecessary delay, and lacks the overall athleticism and artistry of real football… the kind played around the world with a round ball and eleven players per side. But that Seahawk’s logo? That is an enviable bit of sports branding, capturing the angry intensity of the game itself, the natural beauty of the surrounding area, with an artistic nod to the indigenous history of a municipality named after a celebrated Native American leader.

And, for the ornithologically obsessed you can’t go wrong with a bird on your gear.

But what the hell is a Seahawk, anyway?

The Raven and the First Men, by Bill Reid, at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. © Leszek Wrona.

This was my question on acquiring my first bit of NFL swag, a cap for a friend in Toronto who immediately dubbed it “the angry Blue Jay.” No… not a jay, or any kind of corvid for that matter. It unquestionably has a look similar to some of the raven iconography I’ve seen on the west coast of Canada. Bill Reid sculptures come to mind. But it must be called a hawk for a reason, and it certainly has the steeply hooked beak of most raptors.

Turns out, there is no bird officially named a seahawk, but a couple birds that do enough hunting around the salt water of the Puget Sound for them to stand in. None of them sport blue and gray face colouration and moss green eyes. The mighty Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) does not approximate the lines and markings on the Seahawk. The NFL Seahawks do have an actual live bird mascot they bring out at home games, but it is an Augur Buzzard (Buteo augur augur), which is not native to the Pacific Northwest and is in fact an African bird that mostly hunts on land.

My feeble attempts to capture the majesty of the Osprey, here in Northern Ontario. I’d be proud to cheer for such a mascot.

If any bird is actually appropriate to the logo it’s the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus). These large, fish-eating hawks breed and hunt along the Washington State coast, and sport the dark eyeliner and extreme beak of the Seahawk logo. Osprey populations have rebounded since the banning of certain pesticides that were thinning their eggshells and poisoning the birds themselves. They are now considered a low conservation concern.

So why not the Seattle Ospreys? Only the marketers know for sure.

 “At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not altogether powerless.”

                                                             — Chief Seattle, 1854

See here for a post I did about books I’ve recently read. I didn’t send it out to subscribers as it was not bird-related in the least. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to get all the posts as a newsletter, even the bookish ones.