BIRDS, GRANDPA, AND ME

No child should grow up unaware of the dawn chorus of the birds in spring.

—Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

It was my paternal grandfather, Morris Mansberg, who opened my eyes and ears to birds. His world was the city, but even in a city there are birds. From Budapest to the Bronx, sparrows and pigeons are never far from humans. 

Among the few memories I have of my Grandpa, the most vivid are our encounters with city sparrows on the grimy windowsill of my grandparents’ four-flights-up Bronx apartment. He would scatter bread and cake crumbs on the sill, and a band of tiny brown birds would arrive. 

They tilted their heads to look up at us with black-bead eyes. He smiled, I giggled. By example, he taught me to be still and watch. I wondered how anything so small could trust us. 

Grandpa was quiet, reticent. More often than not on my visits to the apartment, I would find him sitting in his chair, reading a newspaper or listening to classical music with his head slightly tipped to one side. He adored classical music, and he adored his grandchildren.

You could say Grandpa and I were birds of a feather. Shy, somewhat uneasy at noisy family gatherings, both of us tended to retreat into the background, preferring to observe. It’s strange, but decades later I can call up the aural memory of voices—those of my parents, my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles—yet I cannot hear my Grandpa’s voice.

Three of my four grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe around 1921 as young adults (my maternal grandmother came as a child in 1914). By the time I came along, 1954, they all had upgraded from tenement living on the Lower East Side of New York to modest rented apartments in the Bronx. Was this what they had in mind when they stepped off the ship at Ellis Island? I have little information on what their lives in Poland and Hungary were like.

During my visits to this pair of grandparents, I often heard Grandma Regina berate Grandpa Morris for “wasting time” but could not understand the source of her irritation. Yet when we were at the windowsill with the sparrows, she would smile and bring us more crumbs. Sometimes I went down to the street with her to shop at the sidewalk grocers and there noticed sparrows and pigeons gleaning crumbs and scraps. Birds were everywhere!

Grandpa was old and tired by the time he and I fed crumbs to the sparrows. My grandparents’ first three decades in America had been a struggle. In 1923 their first child, my father, contracted polio at the age of six months. They desperately sought help for his resulting handicap and spent hard-earned money on quack cures. The classic indignities immigrants everywhere experience—poor options for housing and employment, extreme and minor acts of prejudice—surely colored their days. And then there was the Great Depression. My father once explained to me why he always chafed when he was forced to stand in a waiting line: it reminded him of bread lines of his childhood.    

For Grandpa Morris—my father’s father—it was difficult to find and keep work as a hat-maker. He did not arrive in New York with this skill but learned it on the job. The bosses were mean and the work was hard on his hands. At one point, he “borrowed funds from the union,” intending to make more money on the horses. Apparently he failed. All I know is that he left town for a couple of years and Grandma took in a boarder, a Greek man who made booze in the bathtub from raisins, according to my father. For years afterward, she berated Grandpa. Her complaints were mostly in Yiddish, a language I never learned, though I easily sensed the lingering shame.

It seems that Grandma was the more consistent breadwinner, employed along with other immigrants in the garment industry. Even when her children were very young, she spent most days sitting at a sewing machine in a stuffy room, scissors snipping, bobbins spinning, air thick with dust. At home in the evenings, she coughed and kvetched while he listened to music and scattered crumbs for sparrows. 

One year at my birthday, Grandpa brought me a canary. In looking back, I think he must have wanted to bring together two special things: the music of birdsong and the good fortune of grandchildren. Sadly, that bird and its gorgeous song had a short life: one day it dropped dead in its cage from unknown causes. 

Canaries in cages are delicate things, lacking the spunk of city sparrows. My attention soon shifted to wild birds. I watched them in my parents’ suburban backyard using my first pair of binoculars, a gift from my parents on another birthday. I was still in grade school and a shy, homebody type. Bird-watching and other solitary pursuits like reading occupied my time. At least once, I attempted to feed the wild birds out of my hand. I picked a spot in the woods at the edge of our lot—a place where the house builders had pushed the sandy soil into a mound—and sat for maybe as much as twenty minutes on my folding chair with one hand out, a sprinkling of seeds cupped therein. No birds came.

By the time I was eighteen, I had started a “Birder’s Life List.” This was actually the title embossed on the pine-green spiral-bound notebook. I was keen to see every type of bird I could between Canada and Manhattan, and future travels farther afield were at least theoretical. By then my grandfather’s heart had failed and only my grandmother would witness my burgeoning interest in wild things. When I left home for college, then graduate studies and field work in ecology, I doubt she comprehended what I was doing, though I faithfully wrote letters to her. There had been no such opportunities in her life.

Once I became a fully fledged adult, I remembered that my own mother had described Grandpa as “a dandy” because he longed for fine things, most of which he would never possess: stylish hats and suits, seats at the opera, a car. There is a frayed photo from Budapest, taken before he came to America, perhaps even before he met Grandma Regina. He is barely more than a boy and in this photo he poses with cane and hat, his manner expectant, confident. 

It seems only fair to acknowledge that both of them wanted “things”—furniture, jewelry, clothing, china—the things that would signal to themselves and the world around them that they had “made it.” Safety, security, and status were what they sought, and at least in post-World War II America, buying a home (they never could, but their sons would) and filling it with things, even at modest levels of acquisitiveness, gave one that sense of safety, security, and status. 

It’s impossible to predict where breadcrumbs on a windowsill or the gift of a canary will lead. When I began college, I planned to become an ornithologist. The summer after my freshman year I spent six weeks at an ornithological research station on a small island in the Bay of Fundy, Canada. Here were people like me who would pull a car off the road at any moment, safe or not, and leap out with binoculars in hand to spy on a wading bird in a marsh or a raptor on a fence post. It was important not only to identify but also to appreciate the vivid beauty and unique qualities of each bird—plumage, behavior, voice, habitat—and of course to make notes in my notebook. For six weeks, my days were filled with bird observation and research, including counting gull eggs, mist-netting and banding birds, checking on petrels that nested in burrows on the island. Nights were warmed by friendly companionship among our small group, making music and reading aloud from The Hobbit.

Then, in my mid-twenties, my career swerved toward botany. By the time I turned twenty-nine I was pulling over to I.D. plants. I understood now that birds cannot exist without plants, and vice versa. Humans, of course, cannot exist without all of it—though we persist in behaving as if we can.

Bird-watching is a practice I’ve held onto since those early days with my Grandpa. And for more than forty years I have watched the birds that stay or pass through the place where I live and work. I make mental note of the birds and plants that come back after winter, which plants seem to have disappeared for good, how squirrel abundance tracks with the previous fall’s acorn drop. 

Now in my seventies, I am experiencing the despair that all who notice and follow birds are experiencing today. The decline in bird populations is shocking. Of course I understand that change is the norm. At night I used to hear a lot of Barred Owls, but these days there are more Great Horned Owls hooting out there. Last summer it seemed there were more woodpeckers around, but was I simply not noticing them before? Some of the day-to-day differences in who I hear and see were always as much about how the forest I live in matures and responds to the effects of climate change as they were about my own fluctuating awareness—how preoccupied I might be by thought or worry. But today, even the winter stalwarts, Chickadees and Titmice, are noticeably sparse. My worry deepens.

It’s true that my enthusiasm for naming and listing waned over the decades, but my respect for the lives of birds, all creatures really, broadened and deepened. Birds are not merely colorful, curious others. Their habits and lives are interwoven with the world around them. Birds, plants, insects—all have been evolving over time in concert with the ever-changing conditions on this planet. But we humans have an outsized impact: we have accelerated the pace of habitat change, making it difficult, if not impossible, for most species to evolve quickly enough.

Here at my home, in the not distant past, Pine Warblers and Phoebes announced the arrival of spring, Tanagers and Wood Thrushes the slide into summer. Will I see and hear those old friends next year? Nothing is certain. My world differs from the two worlds my Grandma and Grandpa occupied in their troubled lives—Eastern Europe and the Bronx—but I will always remember that it was at their Bronx windowsill that I learned to pay attention to other living things.


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Laura M. Cotterman walks and writes in North Carolina, where she has lived for forty-plus years. Her essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time (online) and the anthology, “Rooted2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction.” She is coauthor of the field guide, “Wildflowers of the Atlantic Southeast” and is writing a memoir about her relationship with her paternal grandmother, an immigrant.