Six Birds

A guest post by Sarah Crowder

May 31, 2024

I am fundamentally extremely lazy, so it was kind of inevitable that this week, with a great deal of good writing time at my disposal, I would fail to do any writing.

Luckily, others aren’t so feckless. So this felt like a good opportunity to solicit a guest post. Specifically, on this occasion, from Sarah Crowder, whose excellent Substack, One Stone, I commend to the house. It’s rare to find someone writing about birds with this mixture of love, wit and irreverence. Seriously, go and subscribe right now.

She also has a fine Etsy page with beautiful things.

Sarah has chosen six excellent birds for her guest post. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Six Birds

One of my mum’s favourite topics of conversation is reincarnation: asking what I would like to be reincarnated as, worrying about what she might be reincarnated as, and feeling like she has to make a decision on the matter urgently. She also once asked a moth, very sincerely, if he was my dead dad.

I find it hard to picture any kind of afterlife (as much as I would love to be able to), especially reincarnation. My brain won’t stretch that way. Here’s an example of how one of these conversations can go - mum tells me she’d be an owl, I point out she’d have to eat mice, she tells me she’d like mice because she’d be an owl, I think of my mum as a person who wants to eat mice.

I wouldn't say I usually lack imagination, but for whatever reason, I just can’t picture myself not having all my same human thoughts and feelings and urges, whether I was a blue tit, a tree, a hyena, or a stone. I feel sure if I was reincarnated as something other than human, I would still want to eat ice cream, have human sex, and be able to go on the internet.

My answer to her question is always a bird. They’re the obvious choice, not just because I would get to fly, but because I think it would make bird-watching a whole lot easier. I’d be like an undercover agent.

You should think of this less as a list of birds I wouldn’t mind being reincarnated as and more as a list of birds I could cope with being turned into if a wizard suddenly appeared and told me he was going to turn me into another animal and I had ten minutes to choose which one. The list is very much in order, with the best (and most obvious) choice saved for last.

Bird 1 – Wren

PRO – My partner is making multiple nests (up to 6!) for me and I get to choose my favourite. How could I feel anything other than thoroughly wooed by this?

CON – Oh, he’s got other mates at the same time? Okay, I’m less wooed. Do I at least get first pick of the nests?

PRO – Maybe I’ll enjoy having sister-wives, and at least my chicks will have lots of cousins to play with.

CON – People are calling me a Troglodyte, twice.

PRO – They also call me Jenny (like Agutter – hot, and Eclair – great on Taskmaster) and King of the birds.

CON – I have to eat spiders. I thought I’d been getting in some practice for this during my sleep (as a human), but it turns out that’s a myth.

PRO – If it’s a cold winter, other wrens (maybe my sister-wives from the breeding season) will be up for communal roosting, aka a cuddle puddle. This feels like a nice, cosy way to spend the winter.

CON – Christmas is much less fun as a wren because instead of spending Boxing Day watching TV and eating turkey sandwiches, I’m worrying that people are going to re-introduce the wren hunt.

Bird 2 – Cuckoo

PRO – I could split my time between the Congo rainforest and the woods a few miles from my mum's house, and people would celebrate when I returned to England in the spring.

CON – I’d prefer not to eat caterpillars, but maybe I can trick myself into believing they're the Haribo kind.

PRO – I love hearing my own name (who doesn't), and my partner would be constantly calling out CUCKOO CUCKOO. Actually, I guess that’s more like someone shouting HUMAN HUMAN at me instead of saying my actual name.

CON – Starting to think the whole shouting what kind of bird I am constantly might be quite annoying.

PRO – I am very lazy. I’m not saying that’s the only reason I haven’t had children yet but it has factored in, so the cuckoo’s way of parenting appeals to me. Just dump them in someone else's nest and let them raise them. I get all the fun of making chicks without the hassle of having to build a nest or parent them.1

CONS – I expect I’m going to have a bad reputation with the birds whose chicks my offspring kill, especially reed warblers and dunnocks. Bird-watching might be less enjoyable if they’re all watching me back, and hating me.

Bird 3 – Peregrine Falcon

PRO – I’m getting wooed, properly this time. The male Peregrine (a tiercel) is bowing to me (a move right out of the Wood pigeon’s playbook) and bringing me food (I once fell for a person almost entirely on the basis of an elk and chanterelle meal they cooked me, so this will work on Peregrine Crowder too, I’m sure). Unlike the little wandering-eyes Wren, Peregrines mate for life and are monogamous, which means once I’ve found a good tiercel I don’t have to bother with the dating game anymore.

PRO – I can live on top of churches and cathedrals, some of my favourite smelling places in the world.

PRO – I love duck meat, and I think I recall pigeon tasting okay, so I can get on board with the Peregrine’s diet.

CON – The stress of having to worry about gamekeepers, nest-raiders, and poisoned meat would get to me pretty fast.

PRO – I’m going to be able to win races against everyone I’ve ever lost to in a running race, which is everyone I’ve ever had a running race with.

CON – I can see how they might quibble that flying vs running isn’t really fair. Also, I don’t know how to communicate to my brother or my friend Sophie that this is me, Sarah. Hi, I’m a bird now, and I just beat you in this totally fair race.

Bird 4 – Mute Swan

PRO – I’ve been waiting my whole life to turn into a swan.

CON – King Charles owns me.

PRO – I’m the perfect combination of beauty and brawn, or perceived brawn at least. Almost nobody will mess with me because they’ll all assume I’d break their arm.

CON – I said “almost nobody” because.

PRO – I read a thing on the RSPB website that advised not feeding human food to swans, they specifically advised no “cooked meats, bread, pizza bases, cakes, or sandwiches," which must mean that there are some people throwing cakes in ponds. When I lived in London I used to get very frustrated (internally, in a very English way – under the breath tuts) at all the people ignoring the ‘Don’t feed the wildfowl bread’ signs dotted by my local pond, but if I’m ever turned into a swan I hope I’m in a spot with the worst offenders.

PRO – It seems like of all my bird choices the swan is the closest I get to having human sex, with the others I just get a cloacal kiss2. I’ve tried googling if they have “awkwardly long, corkscrew-shaped” penises like ducks but there are only so many times you can ask Google questions about swan sex and swan dicks before the RSPB turn up at your house.

CON – I’ve got to do a mating dance, and I’m a terrible dancer.

Disclaimer – I went on about how if my mum wanted to reincarnate as an owl she must actually want to eat mice, and now I’m banging on about banging swans. I want it on the record, I don’t want to have sex with a swan as a human. But this wizard has transformed me for the rest of my life, there’s no going back to my human form, and this is just what the birds and the bees get up to.

Bird 5 – Magpie

PRO – As a corvid I’m super smart (I haven’t kept my full human smarts, just what can fit into my new bird brain). I figure this is the best shot I have of being a bird that gets to surf the internet. I’d email my friends and family and let them know I’ve been turned into a magpie, although I feel like only my mum would take this seriously.

PRO – Since I’m on the internet anyway, I’d even carry on posting on Substack. I’ll be forced to edit myself to 3 minute reads, because pecking at the keys will probably get tiresome if I try writing anything longer.

PRO – The novelty of being the first bird writing a newsletter on the internet means I’ve suddenly got loads of subscribers. I don’t even need them to be paid, if I want nice shiny things I can just go and grab them in my beak and fly off.

PRO – If I’m on my own and it’s before 12pm I’m going to get lots of people saluting me and asking how I am.

CON – They don’t seem to know me at all! They’re calling me Mr, and asking how my wife is.

Bird 6 – Herring Gull

PRO – I can live right in Brighton again, but this time I’ll live by the pier instead of in Moulsecoomb. I probably can’t play the slot machines and print out endless fortunes from Zoltar Speaks (I’m not a crow after all), but I reckon just hanging out around them will make me happy.

PRO – Hanging out by the pier in Brighton also means I can watch the starling murmurations in the winter.

PRO – I can shit on my enemies’ heads. I know that all flying birds can shit on people's heads, it’s just that I associate it more with gulls. Maybe because they’re the only birds that have ever taken a flying crap on me. I say “enemies” but I’m not actually a crazed warlord, I only have one enemy. His name is Phil and he dug my angelica and strawberries up at the allotment for no good reason. I was going to say I will shit on his head every time he has a good hair day, but he has never knowingly done this, so I will just do it at random times.

PRO – I can live on a diet of ice cream and fish and chips. When I lived in Moulsecoomb I had a housemate called Satoko who was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known and would never dream of shitting on anyone's head. One particularly hot summer day she was really craving a Mr Whippy style ice cream so we walked the 3 miles down to Brighton pier in the kind of sticky oppressive heat that makes lesser people (me) quite grumpy, but that Satoko was totally fine with. She’d had maximum 2 licks before a gull swooped down, grabbed the whole thing in its greedy beak, and flew off. I’m going to really lean into my shadow side once I’m in gull form: I won’t care how good your heart is, how fresh your ice cream is, or how hard you worked for your chips; I’m just going to steal it all.

CON – People will call me seagull3 instead of Herring gull (just like they do with Little, Common, Great black-backed, etc)

PRO – I don't care what people call me (they can even call me Jonathan if they want) because I’m living my best life, eating ice cream and chips, shitting on my enemies’ heads, and hanging out by the flashing lights and slot machines on the pier.

My mum recently told me she wants to set up a ‘Cuckoo school’ to teach all of the cuckoos in the world how to build nests. She proposed getting pigeons in to teach them, which is possibly the most bonkers part of her whole plan.

If you decide to google “cloacal kiss” put the word bird before or after it and avoid reading the urban dictionary definition, and don’t blame me if you don’t.

This may get me exiled from birding circles, but I am often one of those people.