We are excited to share Aaron Rabinowitz’s essay, “Young Bird.” This piece is the Grand Prize Winner of the 2023 CNF Contest.
Judge Suzannah Showler had this to say about the piece:
The winning essay, “Young Bird,” impressed me with its precise imagery and deft tonal acrobatics. Like the two eagles it describes who swoop down to converge on a robin and “wishbone it in their talons in midflight, each taking half,” this essay pulls the reader between tenderness and melancholy, violence and humour. Good-natured banter and quick turns belie an unsettled and unsettling tour of a natural world in which predators pick off the edges of a flock, carrion split open the bodies of dead mother animals, and fledglings are cannibalized by parents and siblings.
Young Bird
Aaron Rabinowitz
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
—Wallace Stevens
I.
Ezra and I plundered our local library for every available documentary on birds. But before we get to birds, let me tell you about stars.
II.
And before stars, Ezra. The first year my wife and I homeschooled Ezra, we outsourced science to his grandfather, my father-in-law. A baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano led to a static electricity experiment and suddenly Grandpa was up and running with Einstein’s equivalence principle, the Drake equation, and an inappropriate wager made by Stephen Hawking. (Ezra was in grade one.) Start with the sun, I suggested. He conjured up a basic lesson. The sun is a star. The sun is more than a million times larger than our planet. The sun’s light takes over eight minutes to reach Earth. The sun is what keeps our solar system together, the reason there is life on this planet. The sun is on track to vaporize all of our atoms in 5½ billion years. Forty-five minutes of stuff like that. What did you learn? Grandpa asked Ezra at the end. He puzzled for a moment. That nothing lasts forever?
III.
Now the birds. Stanley Park. Ezra, his older sister, brother, and me by the water’s edge. Two bald eagles circled overhead. How majestic, I said. A teachable moment. Majestic means— Without warning, both eagles swooped, converged on a robin, and wishboned it in their talons in midflight, each taking half. Majestic means murder? my daughter asked. The pair alighted in the treetops of the far shore with food for their young.
IV.
We opted not to renew Grandpa’s contract the following year. Scheduling issues. Thus began my tenure as science teacher. I replaced household lava, twentieth-century physicists, and quantum mechanics with forest hikes, gardening, and battered DVDs from the public library’s wildlife section. Nature, very often, means birds.
V.
A good rule of thumb about birds: it’s best to be among the first to hatch.
VI.
Ezra and I watched a DVD on pink flamingoes the very day we pink-slipped my father-in-law. Thousands breed in Tanzania on an evaporating lake. Before the little ones fledge, they face three dangers. (1) The sun: they must wander for days in perilous heat to reach fresh water. (2) The marabou: these massive storks loiter beside the flock, delivering baby flamingos to the underworld. (3) Sodium chloride: the dash across the corrosive salt-encrusted flats can be fatal. The camera zooms in. One fledgling tumbles to the ground. Its tiny legs hopelessly caked with mud and salt. The camera zooms out. The chick labours to rise, struggles to keep up.
VII.
Ezra struggles to keep up with his older siblings. He’s the one chasing after them with untied shoes. Too young to call shotgun or run solo errands. The shortest one, the one with the shortest leash.
VIII.
A famous Canadian actor baritones a special filmed on Vancouver Island. Bald eagles lay two eggs, though usually only one will reach adulthood. The second one is a genetic insurance policy. In this case, Luna hatches before her brother River. She crowds him out each time their parents return with regurgitated fish. But there’s a drought. When it gets that hot the fish don’t surface, the parents fail to find them, and River dies of dehydration. The nest is large. Big enough for a growing eaglet and a desiccated one. Luna bides her time. Days pass. No parents. No nourishment. To stay alive, she resorts to, according to the baritone, drastic measures. She hops closer and jackhammers her beak into River’s beaten heart, ripping and twisting. Feathers fly everywhere. When the rains return and she finally spreads her wings, it’s thanks to her brother’s blood.
IX.
I was the last to hatch in my family, too. The youngest has broken-in parents and little to prove, yet also limited options. I told my friend about River’s fate. (He relates. He’s also the youngest.) He was rooting around his empty fridge. Our siblings probably would’ve consumed us, he said. But it never came to drastic measures in the nests of our childhoods.
X.
More birds being birds. An emperor penguin produces only one egg per year. Cannibalistic siblings need not apply. But when a mother-to-be loses her single egg to the elements (Ezra burrowed into me on the sofa for warmth), she tries to egg-nap one from her neighbor. The Galápagos was our top destination until we witnessed finches of the northern islands pluck off plumage of red-footed boobies and (Ezra turned away from the screen) drink their blood. The Serengeti was never a safe space, especially after vultures knife open the hide of a dead zebra mother (I put my arms around Ezra and kissed the top of his head), compelling her orphaned colt to bolt for the safety of the herd.
XI.
Ezra and I don’t know what to make of birds. Whose side to be on. Predator or prey, weak or strong, carnivore or vegan. Nature keeps making us switch teams.
XII.
Today. Magic of the Snowy Owl. Sixty minutes of fluffy raptors on the wholesome tundra. Funded by the Public Broadcasting System. TV-PG. This will be anodyne. However, one father cannot hunt enough lemmings to satisfy his owlets’ appetites. By the time the mother notices her fifth hatchling is wasting away, it is too late. She scans the skies for her partner. She looks at the remaining four. She mourns, maybe. A wing beat later, she pecks apart her son’s lifeless body, severing and decapitating, divvying his entrails for her starving family. That’s so sad, Ezra’s brother comments. (He’s watching while making paper birds.) And then, Did they really eat him? (He sells them at the farmers’ market. People buy origami cranes from kids. It’s a lucrative business.) Yes, they did. They ate him, I say. Ezra is silent. Indifferent, to the untrained eye. Scarred, to mine. He’s seen too many birds.
XIII.
There will come a time when he will stop reaching for my hand; it happened with the others. A time when he won’t wake up early and jump in our bed. When he won’t run barefoot into the rain to celebrate a storm. When he’ll be done with nature docs of aberrant birds. There may be a time when he won’t make friends, won’t understand his homework, when the herd might go off without him. He may become a smoker, become a vaper, marry a smoker or a vaper, hire a bad divorce attorney, lose his job to AI, lose his sense of humour, go for a hike and fall off a cliff and get eaten by vultures. He may become sick from particulate matter in wildfire smoke, his home may burn down, his town may burn down, the world will burn down. Nothing lasts forever.
Aaron Rabinowitz is a BC-based writer. He won Meridian’s Short Prose Prize and was a writer-in-residence at PLAYA. His writing has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and is published/forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Acta Victoriana, and elsewhere. Aaron also makes jokes at the wrong time.