ZIP A DEE DO DAH
The collage artists of the bird world
Emily Hiestand

Selected for Nature Writing: The Tradition in English (W.W. Norton, 2002)
First published in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press,1998); revised slightly 2024
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“The blue jay is the bird of inventive recycling, of flexibility and found art. This spring the nest outside our window has grown into the most extravagant heap yet.”

For more than twenty years, my husband Peter and I lived in a small urban village in metropolitan Boston, on the top floor of what is known locally as a triple-decker, or sometimes a three-decker. By either name, this is a house style indigenous to urban New England, a big, boxy design that stacks three identical flats, one atop the other like layers of cake, and wraps the exterior in enough Doric columnry, balconies, parapets, and railings that the front façade recalls a Greek temple — a domestic temple, designed for the American worker.

The triple-decker house emerged in our city in the late 19th century in response to a campaign headed by Boston’s do-right Brahmin women, who used their social clout to protest the city’s growing tenement slums, dwellings so miserable, unhealthy and crowded they were described in the Boston press as a local version of Calcutta, a city then the model of urban misery. By contrast to the dank, sprawling tenement buildings that housed thousands, the triple-decker was an airy and livable house, with a host of windows and open porches that provided light and cross-ventilation. It was a house of bread and roses, an enormous step forward for Boston’s working class families. 

Not long after our triple-decker was built in 1919, someone had the further good idea to surround it with trees. These many generations later, Peter and I look out from our third floor condominium directly into limbs and leaves, into the upper canopies of a white oak, an aging, still-bearing apple tree, and a Norway maple.  And, closest to our rooms, so close its limbs brush the windowpanes and blur the boundary between tree and house stands a tall, willowy, wild black cherry.

We have always loved this tree especially, observing and tending it in all weathers, and seasons, and moods. Each spring the black cherry tree has also appealed to a pair of nesting blue jays. In mid-May, as I am writing, this year’s jays have already arrived and are well commenced on their annual project of building a nest, a task for which ornithologists have the word nidification. As I watch the blue jays making their nest, moving slowly so as not to startle them, I feel myself fluctuating between a mild panic at having a life so loosely structured that I can spend most of a morning watching blue jays nest, and another, better feeling that this apparently obscure event — two birds nesting in a backwater of town and me watching them — is, in fact, taking place at the very hub of the universe. That second, stabilizing and, I believe, correct feeling comes courtesy of Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux medicine man who said of this world “The circumference is nowhere; the center is everywhere.” This remarkable idea has the power to convey proper dignity and mystery on every place and every life, and to counter the swirly, centrifugal energies of an intensely commercial culture in which we are invited, even urged to feel that the center is always out there somewhere, not in any precise place but a somewhere always elsewhere.

Until Peter and I moved into our triple-decker house, I had never seen a wild black cherry, which is surprising because its range is the whole eastern half of the country, from New England to northern Florida. It is a beautiful tree whose youngest limbs are covered in a smooth, lustrous bark flecked with ruddy gold nicks. Over time, the swelling of the underlying cambium layer causes the youthful bark to burst and split into separate sections. As they age, these sections thicken, maturing finally into the rough, almost curling plates in which the older limbs and the entire central trunk are clad. The black cherry leaf is slender, and shaped like a canoe; in spring, the canopy looks like a flotilla of bright green boats, rustling, ready to go; in fall, it is a fleet of yellow. When fully leafed, the black cherry canopy filters the afternoon sun that enters our flat from the west; that warm western light fairly shimmers over the pale plaster walls of our kitchen, making of a solid something more like water. The cherries themselves emerge in late spring as hard, round green dots. By early August, the fruits are plump and soft, and as shiny and purple-black as the berries of fairy tales. 

No sooner than they are fully ripe, the cherries are discovered and set upon by a horde of grackles: a true horde, two hundred birds, maybe more, will swirl suddenly out of a hot August sky, descending in a drove on the tree by our window. The grackles rustle and dart through the leaves, flashing their dark iridescence. Happy is not a strong enough word for their mood. They are wild with excitement, and as they gorge on the cherries, they unleash a high, twittering ruckus that fills an entire urban block. This flock of birds will haunt the tree for a fortnight, until they have plucked it clean, and all that time the grackles make a joyful noise. It is an impressive amount of sound, as much sound, although in a different register, as the sound that comes from the cars that mosey along our urban village streets on summer nights, pulsing with dance jams. 

In May, however, long before grackles are on the scene, the black cherry tree belongs to a single pair of blue jays. This year, as always, the jays have chosen to nest in a junction of the tree where three limbs meet and make a shallow pocket.  Everything about this little wooden platform — its shape, and size, and location — must speak to the blue jays, must say in their inner pattern-language: “This is the perfect place for eggs.” For three days, the birds will labor over their nest, pausing only briefly, now and then to cock their heads, to review construction, and to emit their suite of calls which include a musical queedle queedle, a slurring jeeah, and the sharp jay, their namesake sound. While watching the progress, and in that moment before you remember your scientific manners, it might occur to you that the two birds resemble a married couple building a barbecue pit over a long weekend, companionably, and with the occasional debate.

On the third or fourth day, whenever the pair has gathered up enough nest material, the female’s task is to plop herself in the middle of the assembled mound, and begin squirming and shifting her small body around, molding the interior of the nest to the shape of her breast. I believe the female is the only one to fit the nest to her body. I have never seen the male do the shaping, but I am not a student of birds — although I have on several occasions traveled with serious birders to blinds and sanctuaries and have watched them — the birders — for many hours and been very moved by their behavior.

“In another kind of guide, I would place the blue jay alongside the great collage artists, all those bricoleurs who practice a recombinatory art, linking decorum and glitz, high and lo, the funny and elegiac, making a moody frisson of the commonplace.” 

Even without major birding credentials, I am willing to go out on a limb and declare that the kind of nest that blue jays make has never once provoked anyone to an encomium to nature's symmetry and perfection. The thing taking shape outside our window is no chambered nautilus shell, with its faultless, secreted spiral of form, the kind of form often invoked in the This Is All Just Too Exquisite To Be Random argument. Here are some other things a blue jay’s nest does not resemble: the fine teacup of a nest made by the ruby-throated hummingbird; the public works facility nest engineered by the rufous-breasted castle builder; the evening bag-like nest of the Baltimore oriole, something an Upper East Side woman would carry to the opera proudly; the handsome Greek vases turned out by cliff swallows; the flying saucer-shaped structure made the hammerkop, eight thousand twigs formed into a dome strong enough for an adult to stand on. None of these possibilities for ordering and smoothing out chaos has much impressed the blue jay, and at the end of all their labors, what the blue jays’ nest most closely resembles is a heap of, well, trash. 

And that is what I like about it. The blue jay nest is a fantasia of refuse, a temporary, provisional architecture made chiefly of discarded materia plucked from the sidewalks, gutters, and yards of our neighborhood, a landscape well enough tended, yet teeming in the detritus so attractive to a blue jay eye. Here the blue jays can find a supply of tossed aside, losing, lottery scratch tickets with names like Set For Life and Pharaoh’s Gold (it’s the foil coating that catches the blue jay eye); also wooden Popsicle sticks still sticky with grape and lime flavored syrup; twine from the block of morning papers delivered to our corner Mom & Pop market; and silvery liners from Kit-Kat candy bars. In his Guide to Eastern Birds, the late great man of birds, Roger Tory Peterson, places the blue jay on the same page as the black-billed magpie, famously the creature of this and that, who gives us the verb “to magpie.” In another kind of guide, I would place the blue jay alongside the great collage artists, with Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Jean Arp, and Louise Nevelson, all those bricoleurs of modernity who took the occasion of a rapidly fragmenting world to practice a sweet and steely recombinatory art, linking decorum and glitz, high and lo, the funny and elegiac, making a moody frisson of the commonplace. 

And however motley its heap, the blue jay is surely guided, no less than the meticulous nautilus, by some inscribed-in-nucleic-acid knowledge. This messy assembly is the blue jay way — the way the blue jay continues its kind. So these bricoleurs of the upper canopy know a good heap when they see one; and they know when that heap is fully realized. When that moment comes, the female takes up residence in her nest, and at some point she lays her eggs. Over the next few days, during the rare, fleeting moments when she hops off her nest, anyone close by our window, waiting or just lucky, will see four tiny oval eggs. There is only a glimpse: the eggs are smooth, with a faint gloss, some years an olive color, others, a gray-blue-green like the ocean on a cloudy day.

And does the blue jays’ affection for the motley give them an edge in the urban world, an advantage over fussier birds like the chickadee and lazuli bunting? I ask a serious birder, a man named Emerson Blake, and known to his friends as Chip. The answer from Chip is yes — an elaborate yes that builds into a learned riff on why birds are particular in the first place; why some are disadvantaged by a metropolitan scene; why others are having a hard time making any nests at all these days. One of the hard cases is the situation of the spotted owl, a bird that wants peace and quiet, and wants it over an immense territory, over a great hushed swath of forest. As that kind of forest disappears, the spotted owl’s endocrine system begins to shut down and its hormones cease to deliver the old imperative to mate. Other birds are very particular about building materials; if the right twig or grass is not present, they simply do not nest. It is not whim, of course.  The absence of proper materials is a potent sign for these birds, a leading indicator, signaling that the conditions for life are not right, that the great energy and effort to create young would almost certainly fail.

The kinds of birds that require certain materials or foods to breed and nest are known as specialists. The advantage of being a specialist can be very great: it often allows a bird to thrive in some uncontested niche.  Think of it — a strategy that allows a creature to smoke not only its competitors, but also competition itself. Ingenious. Thus Bachman's warbler prevailed in the southern canebrakes. Thus the ivory-billed woodpecker once lived undisturbed in virgin pine forests. Thus the snail kites of Florida eat only the apple snail, for which purpose they have grown a special beak. But the risk of being a specialist is the highest risk imaginable, a double or nothing gamble, for if canebrake, or virgin forest, or apple snails disappear, the specialist is, as Chip puts it, "out of business."

That was the fate of the dusky seaside sparrow, a small bird perfectly adapted to the tidal salt marshes along the Florida coast, and not counting on Cape Canaveral, nor the draining of the marshes for mosquito control. It is likely that a little planning by our species would have spared the niche of this sparrow — a bird whose name alone, the dusky seaside sparrow, so beautiful to say, made it worth sparing. A specialist like the California condor is another story. The condor’s idea of what Southern California should be is now so profoundly at odds with what Southern California has become that the condor can probably no longer survive without perpetual human assistance. 

“Above all, this is the bird that comes to our window. It has come to us, like the puppy that toddles across the room from the cardboard birthing box, who puts its head in your lap, and chooses you. When life comes to you like that, you refuse it at your peril.”

Our birds, the blue jays nesting outside our living room window, are neither specialists nor maladapted to this century. In fact, blue jays are the most general of generalists. More intelligent than many birds, they are able to withstand competition on several fronts, and if out-maneuvered think nothing of taking up life in another site. "The blue jay," Chip muses, "is almost too adaptable." By which he means, he explains, that the success of generalists can mask the demise of specialists, who have the more sensitive bonds to place. Birders like Chip know what once existed in the avian world, and they miss it. I believe that the “too adaptable” blue jay may make them feel the way I did the day I discovered a Taco Bell franchise standing where a Deco-era diner had been, a place that served, among other delicacies, Southern style grits and red-eye gravy. It was an aluminum diner, with pale green and black booths, and a sun-bleached palm tree painted on the side.

Adaptability, however, is what allows blue jays to nest here, on the margins of an old metropolis, and I am glad for that. Naturally I gasp at the colorful avian gems that live in the dappled suburbs ringing our city — the golden birds, the wax-winged, pileated, tufted, and gorgeously cerulean birds. But on this outer-metropolitan street, where the airborne population consists of pigeons, grackles, and the occasional promotional blimp, the bright blue jay passes for beauty. And although I, who require cups of Assam tea every morning, who will go miles for grits and red-eye gravy, am temperamentally in sympathy with the specialists, I admire the blue jay's resiliency. Indeed, I study the blue jay’s ways. This is the bird of buoyant making-do, the bird of inventive recycling, of flexibility and found art.

And, of course, above all, this is the bird that comes to our window. It has come to us, like the puppy that toddles across the room from the cardboard birthing box, who puts its head in your lap, and chooses you. When life comes to you like that, you refuse it at your peril. So I am a partisan of the jays, I take their part and root for their eggs. And however successful blue jays are in the larger picture, on this street their eggs are often greatly endangered. The danger comes in the form of squirrels, those Visigoths of the urban forest who travel swiftly by telephone cable, who can raid a nest and turn four blue eggs into a glob of yellow slime in less than a minute. In less time than it takes to watch the shivery Samuel Beckett play called Breath, in which the complete stage action is as follows: “Curtain rise; Cry and one breath;  Curtain fall.”

It can be just that swift and iconic with these nests. Sometimes the wild black cherry becomes a downy nursery, and sometimes it is a bare ruined choir. In ruin, however, the blue jays are exemplary. They do not stand around in stunned silence and in mute disbelief, as my husband and I did recently after absorbing some mournful news. They do not reel between the great cosmic equanimity where all must be balance, and the immediate realm where they have been roughed up, and in the worst possible way, according to Darwin. They seem not to mull the more-than-human scheme of justice, variously felt as a benevolence whose eye is on the sparrow, as a magisterial indifference, as a mocking voice in a whirlwind. The blue jays whose eggs have been eaten, whose nest has been upturned, merely fly away, on those coveted wings.  

Eggs, they know very well, are fair game in the gulping world. The eager mouth of the ocean swallows most of its own children, and as it turns out, the blue jays’ own favorite food is — brace yourself — other bird's eggs. It seems our very own jays, with whose loss I empathize, may have been out destroying other nests. "Trash birds," another of my bird world informants says of the blue jay, almost sniffing.  "They’re like the roughnecks of Dickensian London,” he adds dismissively, “doing whatever they can to get by, and not thinking too much about the ethics of it." Listening to this friend get steamed about the riffraff of the bird republic, I find myself wondering if we Americans have decided to deny that class exists in our society mostly so that we can have the fun of unconsciously projecting it onto flora and fauna.   

”I go on rooting for the blue jays’ eggs, and because the odds for the eggs are long, I root with hope that is close to the mood that the French name une douce resignation, a sweet resignation, which yields to the effects of time, kindness, and tragedy, and the ever-unpredictable play of these forces.”

Well, obviously I do not defend the blue jays' eating other bird's eggs. They should stop that right this minute, and also they should start eating more bright-orange and leafy green vegetables, more soy, and less fat. I honestly cannot vouch for our birds. I don't know what trashy things they might be doing when they are not close by our window, working, brooding, conveying warmth, being brave and patient, being all that parents can be. Let's just say that when a creature lays four speckled eggs close by your house, you like for those eggs to hatch.

So I go on rooting for the blue jays’ eggs, and because the odds for the eggs are long, I root with a certain kind of hope. It is not the usual kind, defined in my OED as “desire combined with expectation.” And it is certainly not the hope described as “expectation without desire,” which becomes the near certainty of prospect. The kind of hope I must hold for these eggs is hope without any expectation at all.  This hope is familiar to seasoned Red Sox fans (even now, after the curse has been reversed), and by fans of the still woebegone Chicago Cubs. It is a brand of hope far from pie-eyed optimism, and very close to the mood that the French name une douce resignation.  

In our new world, the adjective that most often appears before the word resignation is "bitter."  But douce resignation is not the bitter, defeated mood so repugnant to the American spirit. Although it is, of course, resigned to the fact that the world is "a funny old world" (as Margaret Thatcher put it the week she was, hooray, booted out), this mood is sweet. In certain climates and cultures, sweet resignation seems to arise from the formidable effects of time and kindness, and chaos and tragedy. It grants and yields something to the unpredictable play of these forces. The Belgian born poet, my friend Laure-Anne Bosselaar, tells me she finds Americans too doggedly, even eerily optimistic for douce resignation (she doesn't know about Red Sox fans), while her people, the Flemish, are too taciturn for the mood. The spirit of sweet resignation flourishes most in Mediterranean regions, in southern France and Italy, in Corsica and Spain. Another pal, a Buddhist, tells me that douce resignation seems a close cousin to his practice of detachment — a Buddhist tradition that fuses passionate caring with letting-be, a way of moving within the world’s own startling juxtaposition of loveliness and violence, of sadness-to-the-bone and summer games. 

This spring, in the penultimate year of the millennium, the nest outside our window has grown into the most extravagant heap yet. This year’s birds have made the nest equivalent of Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, those sui generis assemblies of steel, seashells, and broken glass Rodia built over many years in the Watts section of Los Angeles. I believe the masters Cornell and Schwitters would smile on this year’s nest. Joseph Cornell might even want it for one of his elegant boxes. Regardez,  interwoven with the staples of twigs and dried grasses are these nesting materials: bits of green and red telephone wire; a gum wrapper; part of a pre-tied drugstore bow; most of a label from a pretty good Beaujolais, George de Boeuf's Brouilly; and as the piece de résistance, an object the birds have queedled and queedled over for hours — an entire white plastic picnic fork. The birds wrestled long with this prize, patiently nudging it into place, dropping it to the ground, flying it up again, finally getting the handle end embedded in the nest, with the tines pointing outwards so the utensil bristles from the nest at a jaunty angle, like a miniature pitchfork. 

Is the fork for show, something to give the Visigoth destroyers pause? Will a plastic fork help this pair and their eggs make it over the Darwinian divide? We shall see. For now, I can say with confidence that the fork came from one of two nearby spots: either from Marcella's on the avenue, which makes the Classico, a sandwich of prosciutto sliced to translucency; or from the House O' Pizza, where, if you ask, Sal will make a sub that does not appear on the menu, a sub that is meatless and cheeseless but with all the condiments, including hot peppers — a superior sandwich that Sal and I have settled on calling a Nothing With Everything.

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