In our July-August issue, we speak with Andrew Furman, an English professor at FAU’s Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, about his new nonfiction book “Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Guide to My Suburban Wilderness” (University Press of Florida). In this alternately witty, sobering and personalized read, the outdoorsy author reconnects with the flora and fauna whose imprint has shaped Florida’s past and present, for better and worse. In this Web Extra, enjoy his chapter “The Problem With Pretty Birds.”
The problem with pretty birds is that they are so hard to ignore.
There we were in our breakfast nook, my wife and I, assailing each other over our oatmeal with our respective workplace obligations, which ought to excuse us from competing childcare duties this afternoon. We hurled the important words of our important professions like stones across the breakfast table. Mediation. Office hours. Deposition. I knew pretty early on that I was going to lose this particular battle, mediations and depositions (whatever the heck they are, exactly) taking precedence over office hours, which I could cancel. But I wasn’t ready to give up so soon. It was a bad mood that I was nursing, which I intended to nurse for at least a few more aggrieved sentences.
But then a painter’s palette with wings over my wife’s shoulder flashed against the sun outside the glass door, uttering silent sentences of its own. Here I am! it cried, alighting on our bird feeder, jutting its cherry chest and throat. Here I am! it cried, pivoting on its perch, showing off its emerald backpack now, munching millet between its mighty bunting mandibles. Here I am! it cried, dipping its whole royal blue head back inside the feeder’s mouth for more millet, seed-hulls flowing from its beak like something molten as it emerged. A male painted bunting, first of the season. Around this time each year, late September, these birds abandon their twiggy, grassy, leafy, cobwebby, horse-hairy, and rootlety nests in north Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia and stay with us in the warmer subtropics until mid-April or so. So we’ve sort of been expecting him. Yet not now. Not now-now, in the middle of our domestic spat. I wasn’t feeling cherry, or emerald, or royal blue. For crying out loud!
Have they no sense of occasion, these painted buntings? The answer, of course, is no. They don’t care a fig about us or our moods, which is another problem with pretty birds. It’s nicer to imagine, in the spirit of Emerson and Thoreau, perfect sympathy between the realm of nonhuman nature and us. Wallace Stevens, however, probably hews closer to the truth about birds and people in his poem, “Of Mere Being,” when he writes, “A gold-feathered bird/ Sings in the palm, without human meaning,/ Without human feeling, a foreign song.” Though we eavesdrop, shamelessly, the birds don’t sing for us. Our relationships with them, and with most wild creatures, are terribly one-sided. Hardly relationships at all.
Still, it’s not like I could exactly ignore this pretty, problematic bird outside, over my wife’s shoulder.
“There’s a painted bunting at the feeder,” I said sharply, joylessly, as if to say, I’m angry at you. Which is what my wife might actually have heard, as she continued:
“You know I can’t cancel the mediation, honey. My clients are flying in from Omaha.”
“Do you fricking hear what I’m saying, Wendy!?” I had the sense, anyway, to constrict my voice through my windpipe to spare our four-year-old from hearing these curses from the family-room. “It’s a goddamn painted bunting for Christ’s sake! At the feeder!”
“A male?” Wendy asked, nonplussed, finally hearing the key words through my ludicrous tone and timbre. She pivoted in her seat, glanced over her shoulder out the glass door. “Oh, he’s so pretty,” she said, as if to say, Oh, he’s so pretty, adjusting more seamlessly than I was able or willing to adjust to the morning’s shiny new terms.
The thing is, it’s not merely pretty, the painted bunting. It’s outlandishly, ludicrously, ridiculously pretty. “The most gaudily colored North American songbird,” Roger Tory Peterson writes. Nonpareil, the French name for the bird, “without equal.” Its blue head somehow bluer than blue. Its green back “electric,” opines Peterson. The chest and neck not a mere red or even cherry, quite. Vermillion, rather, smacks closer to the truth. And all three of these colors on the same small bird! Colors so vibrant that the winged creatures do seem electrically enhanced. A Christmas-light bird. Look here! male buntings seem to say. This is what blue and green and red ought to look like!
Hard to fathom that such a bird has evolved over millennia, existed, and exists, alongside scruffier sparrows and finches and flycatchers in North America, alongside scruffier us. A male painted bunting makes you wonder, if you’re the wondering type: why this particular, improbable animal form? Why these bold contrasts in hue? Why emerald green here, royal blue there, vermillion here? More ordinary, extraordinary curiosities arise, while you’re in a thinking mood: This beak? These wings? These spindly legs and tiny claws? What strange and wondrous forces issue such a creature into being?
Moments like these, when a pretty bird interrupts an irascible mood, I’m reminded of how poor a watcher I truly am, or have become in my harried adulthood. The greater patience of other writers frequently puts me in my place. Like Annie Dillard, who summons spectacular imaginative resources in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) to engage with the natural world ever more mindfully. “When I lose interest in a given bird,” she writes in the “Spring” chapter of her classic, “I try to renew it by looking at the bird in either of two ways. I imagine neutrinos passing through its feathers and into its heart and lungs, or I reverse its evolution and imagine it as a lizard. I see its scaled legs and that naked ring around a shiny eye; I shrink and deplume its feathers to lizard scales, unhorn its lipless mouth, and set it stalking drangonflies, cool-eyed, under a palmetto.”
The male painted bunting sports a naked ring around its eye too, a crimson contrast against its royal blue head. Rarely, however, do I look at these birds concertedly enough to really notice this crimson ring. There’s the person that we are and the person we’d like to be, and the best we can probably do in this life is nudge ourselves, through conscious Dillard-like effort, ever closer to the latter. The other thing we might do is adjust our expectations for ideal selfhood every once in a while, as I’ve done (and as the preservation of one’s sanity dictates). But I still feel that it would behoove me to exercise more patience, more mindfulness, before the actual outdoor world. I doubt that I’ll ever match Dillard’s patience—or the patience of so many other writers whom I admire, past and present—yet I can surely do better.
And so . . .
Wendy and I rose from our seats at the table, stood before the glass door and watched the pretty, problematic bird, outside. What else could we do in the presence of such a visitor? I called Eva over from her puzzle on the family-room rug to glimpse the painted bunting, too.
“You see it?” I asked, hoping that her spongy brain would absorb the image before it flitted off into dense cover. She’s just at the age when memories begin to stick. Wouldn’t it be nice if she were able to summon, years from now, this fleeting, feathered vision?
“I see it,” she uttered, nose to the glass, pleased but undazzled. She watched the bird for a few moments, then skittered past my knees back to her puzzle. Okay, maybe. Okay, that for now she felt that it was perfectly ordinary and unremarkable that she shared a world with these bejeweled birds.
Three female buntings—now four!—emerged from the nearby firebush and necklace pod foliage to join the male at the feeder. Pretty in their own way, these females, green ship to stern, a bit darker-dashed here and there, as if these few feathers were dipped in water. If these green and dark-dashed birds were the male painted buntings, say, and female painted buntings were a drab brown, all we’d talk about was the beauty of these small green and dark-dashed birds. But these aren’t the male painted buntings so no one talks about the prettiness of plain-old green and dark-dashed buntingness.
Five females at the feeder now and still this single male. His harem? Why is it, I wondered, that we always see so many females and so few males each year?
The problem with pretty birds is that that they tend to get eaten by other birds. Cooper’s hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, peregrine falcons, merlins. All of whom seem to make a decent living here. Solitary, pugnacious killers. The merlins, especially. I saw one just the other day in coastal scrublands near my home, perched atop a withered sand pine surveying its domain, silencing the nervous warblers and vireos in the canopy below, its slate-gray back and speckled chest puffed up against the salt wind.
It may be that male painted buntings, who surely winter here in equal numbers to the females, are simply more skittish and covert than female birds, given their outlandish, ludicrous, ridiculous prettiness. Their feathers, after all, simultaneously shout Love me, love me, love me! to female painted buntings and Eat me, eat me, eat me! to most everything else, including merlins, including (come to think of it) the ever-expanding band of feral cats in my neighborhood, which rove about most suburban neighborhoods these days, unfortunately.
The problem with pretty birds is that they tend to get trapped and sold by resourceful humans, too. Easy to lure inside wooden cages with “rival” decoys, the ornery painted bunting males. Thousands caught every spring, observed John James Audubon in 1841, shipped from New Orleans to France where they fetched a handsome price. Still taken in large numbers in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, sold at flea markets, some for the cage-bird market, some to compete against one another in underground singing battles. I suppose that such clandestine events are somewhat analogous to cockfights or dogfights, but it’s tough for me to imagine these gatherings in quite the same light. A clan of human malfeasants, drinking and smoking and gambling over the singing prowess of pretty birds? Is it possible that a more formal air perfumes such contests, that men and women don their Sunday finest to listen to the sweet warbles of painted bunting competitors?
Text from “Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Guide to My Suburban Wilderness” by Andrew Furman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, March 2025. Reprinted with permission of University Press of Florida.
