Bird Brains

by David Waters

Three condors hopped toward the microphones and introduced themselves. The scrum of reporters and cameramen took in the scene, jotting down notes and filming clips for TV news, but not really listening. The story was talking birds, not what they had to say. Unlike the others, I had begged my editor to let me attend and was standing in the front row.

“G’day. My name is Bomber, and this here is my mate Sky Girl, and our colleague is Leadbelly. We have government numbers and names in our own language, but these are the names we use with humans. We’ll make a statement and then take questions.”

He spoke with an avian accent but was easily understood. We were on the deck of Nepenthe in Big Sur. As a restaurant it is overpriced, and the food is ordinary, but it sits on a cliff eight hundred feet above the Pacific, and the view down the coast is a knockout. The morning fog had receded offshore, and bright sunshine flooded the scene.

The condors stood on cement seating two feet above the deck. They spoke into old-style standing microphones. And the condors stank. They smelled like they had been eating the dead, which is what vultures do. You know condors are vultures, right? They had magnificent ten-foot wingspans, but their heads were small and oddly shaped, a mix of pink and yellow skin, warty, with bulging, alert eyes. You won’t keep a pretty face flying up to 15,000 feet and fifty miles an hour all day without a helmet and goggles or even sunscreen. Their shiny, black plumage was fastidiously groomed.

Bomber began: “We belong to the genus Gymnogyps californianus, the largest bird in North America. We have teetered on the brink of extinction for a while now; only five hundred of us remain. We acknowledge your efforts to help us survive. We are here today because we want your species to survive, too. We are not optimistic.”

Bomber continued, “In India, the vulture population declined... precipitously.” He stumbled over that word. “And human deaths increased by half a million, four percent, due to more infections, because rotting carcasses were not being removed by vultures as expeditiously as before.”

Bomber may have been a great orator among his own kind, but his appeal did not extend to humans. The crowd became inattentive and were talking among themselves. He plowed on, “We are interconnected. The loss of one species sets off a chain reaction that hurts us all.”

A woman reporter from People magazine took advantage of a pause in Bomber’s monologue to shout out a question: “Hey, Sky Girl, what do you do for fun?”

Sky Girl eyed the woman’s gold hoop earrings. She wanted them. You know birds like shiny objects. She could see herself perched on an outcropping in the Sierras with those hoops dangling from her tiny ears, glistening in the setting sun.

“Well, last year Bomber and I drifted down to the Hollywood Bowl for the We Can Survive concert. We circled in darkness, high above the crowd, higher still from all the weed whiffling the air.” She chuckled as only a condor can. “We did barrel rolls to Lizzo and grooved to Taylor Swift.” The journalists applauded. This was the stuff they liked.

Leadbelly felt the need to explain. “It doesn’t take much weed to affect a condor. We have high lead levels in our blood because we eat lead-laced carrion. Lead makes us unstable to begin with, some of us more than others. Banning lead bullets would save many condor lives. It’s our leading cause of death.”

Leadbelly realized he sounded like a public service announcement. Bomber tried to get back on topic, but humans have a short attention span. His head flushed red, as happens when condors get upset. Sky Girl spotted fresh roadkill, a flattened raccoon, on the Pacific Coast Highway, a mile south. It took all she could do to restrain herself from an early departure.

“OK, we’ll take questions now,” Bomber gruffed, abandoning his speech. “Please state your name and affiliation.”

“How did you bird brains learn to talk?” A sloppy, unshaven man with a tiny, tight mouth spit out the question as if birds had no right to language. Arms crossed, he exuded contempt and condescension.

Bomber glared at him for ten seconds, but it seemed longer. The press conference was in tatters. He unfolded his wings and suddenly appeared formidable. He flapped twice and was airborne. He caught an updraft past the edge of the deck and soared two hundred feet in the air. Leadbelly followed, while Sky Girl set off for the raccoon.

Condors, being vultures, will shred and devour your body if you are dead, but they don’t attack living creatures. However, they are not averse to shitting on you. As with all things flight-related, they are astonishingly accurate. Bomber dive-bombed his antagonist, placing a large payload of condor excrement on target with no collateral damage. Leadbelly did the same.

The two condors caught updrafts and circled up to two thousand feet. Condors rarely flap their wings; they soar. Bomber clicked his airpods to vintage Jimmi Hendrix, for Jimmi’s electric guitar riffs fit well with the delicate movements of his wingtips and soothed his churning soul. Leadbelly, a classic jazz aficionado, settled into Dave Brubeck.

Lords of the skies, their domain scrolled out beneath them. A succession of worn brown ridges running down to the sea, clumps of dusty olive trees and eucalyptus, vacant arroyos, Highway 1 a black line snaking along the coast, past the Henry Miller Museum Library.

Bomber told me later that this was the moment he decided to write his book. Bomber Bird would be his pen name, and I would be his editor. He wanted to teach Homo sapiens about the real world. I wanted to shield him from the human world and, of course, make us both big bucks.