Birdy

hours, all the babies are hatched. I help Perta take the shells out of the nest. I can see that two of the young ones are dark and two of them are light. Perta tells me there are two males and two females. Both the males are dark and the females are light. I’m a father! Perta lets me feed them and it’s such a wonderful feeling to put the small bits of food into their mouths. The little cries of demand and delight are a special bird song.
    The next morning before breakfast, when I go out to the aviary, I check Perta. She has eggshells under her nest. I put some egg food in the bottom of the cage and she comes down immediately. I look and there are four little babies, two light and two dark, the same. When I go out she flies up and starts feeding. I wish I could help her, too. I feel I’m using her, having her live without a male. I’m afraid to put a male in with her because of the dream. I might be jealous, too.
     
    During the days, I do everything I’m supposed to. I go to school, do my work, help at home and do some designing on my bird models. I’m trying to use things I’ve learned as a bird to improve the models. It also helps the days go by. It’s not so much I want to fly or make a model I can fly; I’m only trying to bring some of the dream into my life.
    During the course of the breeding season, Perta and I have three nests. For each nest we have, I take eggs from other nests and give them to Perta in the daytime cage. I’m afraid not to. We have twelve babies but one of them, a young male, dies. Perta says she could tell from the first that it wasn’t meant to live or fly, there was nothing of the sky in its eyes. In my dreams, birds have a kind of knowing humans don’t. I don’t know why this is. I’m only human, so I suffer very much at the loss of this young one. It is five weeks old when it dies. In bird time, it was in Scheen.
    Birds don’t have any kind of time except in relation to themselves.The movement of the sun or the earth doesn’t mean much to them. They have two kinds of time. First, they have the time which is one year or breeding period. It begins with Ohnme. This is the period after the molt and before breeding. Then, there is Sachen, the time of courtship, till the first egg is laid . Kharst is the fourteen days of sitting on the eggs. The next time is from when the young hatch till they leave the nest; this is Flangst. After this is Scheen, which is until the young can crack seed on their own and live without their parents. It is in Scheen when our son dies. Then, there is the first molt period of young birds; this is called Smoor. The molt time for older birds is called Smoorer. After Smoorer the adult birds go into Ohnme again. So, the bird year has six different periods. The longest is Ohnme and the shortest is Kharst. Kharst, Flangst, and Scheen are repeated three times in the typical bird year.
    The other kind of time birds have is related to the individual bird and not so much to the mating-molting season. The whole first year before breeding is called Tangen. The years of breeding are called Pleen and the last days before death are called Echen. Sometimes in old age or illness a bird goes into Echen. It is a time when a bird does not want to fly or eat. The birds have no word for death. As far as I can tell, Echen includes our idea of being dead. When Perta told me our son had gone into Echen, I went down to help him; he was not dead yet but there was nothing I could do. He was in Echen. When he finally died I told Perta and she only said:
    ‘Yes, he is in Echen.’
    The strange thing is that on the same day our son dies, one of the young birds in Perta’s nest in the cage also dies. It has the same markings as our son. I take it from the bottom of the cage and in the dream our son’s body disappears. I tell Perta this but she doesn’t want to listen. She never talks of him again. When I try to speak of him, of his death, of my sadness, she only gives the same response: ‘Yes. He is in Echen.’
    All these words are the closest I can come to what I’m hearing in canary. I have no way to know if they are bird ideas or Birdy ideas. In my dreams I’ve begun to hear the bird sounds as words like these, although to my ear, as a bird, they sound like bird sounds.I don’t know how this is happening. No bird word sounds in itself like any English word, but the birds sound to me as if they’re talking English. I’m converting the sounds as I’m hearing them