Birdy

the displaced water. I’m amazed at how light a bird is.
    The next day I do somewhat the same thing on myself. I half fill the bathtub, mark how high the water is, then climb in, get completely underwater, and mark how high the water rises. I measure this rise and all the dimensions of the tub. With this I figure my volume. I weigh myself accurately and do the dividing. I’m one hell of a lot denser than a bird. That’s something I have to get around somehow.
    That night I put the baby bird in a bottle of alcohol I snitched from school, and hide it with the sterile egg under my socks. Later I want to cut the bird open and look at the bones. I read that thebones are hollow and I want to see what they’re like. There are also supposed to be air sacs in a bird, like in a fish. I want to see if I can find them, too. I can’t do it yet, I couldn’t get myself to face Birdie if I did.
    The other birds get out of the nest without any trouble and go through the same business of learning to fly. I watch them by the hour. I sit outside the aviary mostly and watch through the binoculars. I have the binoculars tied to the back of a chair and I kneel down to keep my back from breaking. I must look like a very religious character praying all day long.
    With the binoculars I can concentrate on one bird and watch it. I’m trying to find out what it’s thinking. I can get the feeling I’m a bird after a while. After two or three hours like that, when I look around my room and at myself and it all looks strange. Everything’s huge, exaggerated, and falling over. It takes me several minutes to come back inside myself.
    The babies are easy to watch because they don’t fly around so fast. I’m still trying to see the difference between the way they flap their wings when they fly and when they’re being fed. For one thing, when they’re being fed, they squat, pushing against the floor and curving their backs in. The wings flap without any pull from the breast muscles. When they try to fly, it’s the opposite. They hunch forward with their shoulders thrust ahead and give a quick powerful push down and back. It’s as if they’re pulling themselves up a wall. I practice running around the yard doing this.
    It helps considerably in jumping up to the perch. Now, I can do it without falling. I can jump up, turn around in midair, and come down facing the other way. I can also get into a squatting position on the perch with my arms held down at my sides like wings. Squatting, I get the feeling of being a bird.
    I practice out in the yard doing these things for about an hour every night and I flap a half hour in the morning and another half hour before I go to bed at night. I close my eyes when I flap and try to imagine I’m flying. I’m trying to get the rhythm of it across my shoulders. If I can just loosen the scapula and open up the accrumen process at the shoulder some and then develop thetrapezius, deltoid, and triceps muscles, I could build up a lot of flapping power. I practice jumping with each flap so I’ll get a smooth movement.
    In my room, I take off my shoes and double up the carpet so my mother won’t hear me. She’s already asking questions about my perch exercises but I tell her it’s something we do in gym class at school. I have the feeling she’s looking for something. I’ll have to figure some way to get her to go along with the idea of the birds.
    As soon as the second bunch is out of the nest, Birdie is off and building her third. I put back the strainer from the first nest and more burlap. Alfonso has to dash around protecting all the birds from her feather-snitching. The first bunch is fast enough now so they can get away, but the little ones are easy victims. I wonder how many feathers she’d really pull out if Alfonso didn’t fly to the rescue. I hate to think she’d strip them bare. It seems so crazy.
    As soon as this nest is finished, she starts laying eggs. She lays five, again. The entire cycle is started. It’s May now and she’ll just finish her third nest before the hot summer comes on.
    The second nest has worked their way out into the big aviary. They still like to be fed and they chase their older brothers and sisters around. These fly away, except for one I’m calling Alfonso II, that’s the dark bird. He usually gives them a quick clout on the head or neck.
    Alfonso I is being run to death by the babies. He flies up to hide on the top perch whenever he can. Gradually they all