On Amazon, there’s a used copy of the triple-disc set from 1985 for sale, the first version issued on CD, in one of those chubby old double jewel boxes. Supposedly, there’s a Verve Master Edition version from the nineties that added a fourth disc, I guess of alternate takes or rarities, but I can’t find that anywhere. On eBay, I could get the original vinyl box set from the fifties or sixties, but it’s really expensive. Plus I have the first LP already. I could try to track down the other LPs one at a time. But what I really want is that fourth CD on the Master Edition version.

This is how my nights unfold as the days get shorter and darker in these uncertain times. After the dog’s last walk, after heaving my son into bed with the Hoyer lift and attaching his CPAP, after the third time my daughter comes out of her night-lit room to share another phrase she’s come up with that contains all the vowels, but before my smoking time on the back deck, before the anxious and rambling conversation with my wife in my little book-and-record-crammed office, and certainly before the Hour of Enforced Unplugging when I finally roll into bed—I scour the web for out-of-print CDs and vinyl. They’re artifacts from a lost time when I was young, and not so poignantly terrified, or from an even more distant past I never experienced, a past that was gone long before I arrived. It’s easy to imagine that those times were simpler, better, easier than the interminable weeks of COVID-19 in Trump’s wrecked America.

Of course, last night interrupted this pattern—I gave in, like any sane person under the thumb of this insanity, and spent the hours on the opposite end of the couch from my wife, the two of us refreshing counters, screaming at virtual needles, in the thrall of our fear and hope for this election. And today, as we’d dreaded and expected, we wait, and I call on one of my time-tested coping mechanisms for, if not solace or even distraction, a kind of anxious business that might help pass the hours between now and the end of forever.

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I had planned for weeks this trip to the ocean, to think about birds. And I did go. But the night before, police officers lynched a man in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. Then came the insult of low and constant helicopters, and cops terrorizing our streets, and curfew, and troops deployed in the city, again. So maybe I did not think about birds the way I had intended—though I did think about birds, impossible not to think about birds on the ocean where they take up all the space, where even air and water they push out of the way. Laughing gulls, herring gulls, great black-backed gulls, Ross’s gulls; terns, oystercatchers, sanderlings, sandpipers, plovers. Ospreys. Brown pelicans.

Why birds? Because to make sense of things this desperate fall I have been rereading the Greeks, and the Greeks say birds tell us what is to come.

In ancient Greece and later in Rome, augurs foretold the future by interpreting the flight patterns and calls of birds. Augury, in Greek ornithomancy, from ορνις (ornis, fowl) and μαντεία (manteia, divination): reading birds for the will of the gods. Pliny the Elder says Teiresias, the seer in the court of Thebes, invented augury. (Teiresias told Oedipus that the king was his own father’s murderer.) What birds said, went. The bird-savant Calchas prophesied that Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter in order to sail his ships to win his war at Troy, and so, by most accounts, the maiden was put to death. Taking the auspices—discerning divine will from the flight of birds—makes sense because birds fly closer to the empyrean, where gods dwell, which makes the bird’s-eye view closer to God’s.

How to read the birds this year, this fretful year pierced by planetary sorrow and the siren call of ambulances and police cars? In the American Southwest, autumn began with migratory birds falling out of the sky, dead. It could have been the West Coast wildfires that caused the birds to deviate from millennial routes and lose nurturing layover grounds, and polluted their lungs with toxins. It could have been an unprecedented swing in air temperature, a token of climate change. It could have been a combination of factors: the Anthropocene has been killing North America’s birds for some time. A year before the mass die-off in the Southwest, ornithologists reported that three billion wild birds (one bird out of four) have vanished from the continent’s air in the last fifty years.

And not only on this continent. On the last day of 2019, I pilgrimed to the wetlands of Djoudj, one of the world’s largest sanctuaries for migratory birds, many of them Palearctic, where a longtime game warden told me that fewer seasonal birds come each year to the Senegal River delta, and entire species no longer come at all. Cities and deserts swallow their habitats, men hunt their kin, pesticides poison their eggs. Climate change uncouples the timing of resources from the timing of migrations, syncopates their traveling cycles, puts the birds out of step with themselves. The birds are confused.

TEIRESIAS [to KREON]: I hear the birds they’re bebarbarizmenized they’re

making monster sounds

—Sophocles, Antigone, tr. Anne Carson as Antigonick (I am using the translator’s spelling here and below).

This September, after it rained dead birds, a Ph.D. student of ornithology and phylogenetics at the University of New Mexico collected and photographed 305 bird corpses representing six species: 258 violet-green swallows, 35 Wilson’s warblers, six bank swallows, two cliff swallows, one northern rough-winged swallow, a MacGillivray’s warbler, and two western wood pewees. Laid out on a grid and photographed from above, the birds make a pattern like a page of text, each bird a word. The breasts and abdomens of the warblers beacon a startling yellow alarm. Read More