Grackles!

The grackle is a rather discouraging, miserably vicious-looking bird. Many people loathe it, but I have an increasing fascination for it. A grackle is living proof of monsters, of goblins, of creatures that we otherwise claim as fiction. At times I do not think it can be a bird at all. Perhaps it is actually a thing, a thing made from the souls of dead glum people. It appears not to be made up of feathers and flesh but rather of old leather, bits of broken umbrellas, of torn kites, of old Victorian ladies’ fans (or old Victorian ladies), of abandoned toupees where the rubber underneath the hair is very visible. Instead of a rib cage, perhaps its anatomy boasts a rusted and bent bicycle wheel, or perhaps a coat hanger. For lungs? Abandoned gloves (medical ones, most probably). Its long tail feathers might be a shoehorn or the minute hand from an old station clock. Surely a black tie from a funeral is among its wing feathers. Perhaps a handsaw, too, an exhaust pipe, a ripped flag, a hot dog, a shoe, a stethoscope, dollar bills, bin liners, plastic bottles. Sometimes, looking at the grackle, I wonder if its legs are made of barbed wire and its feet plastic cutlery.

Am I being unfair? It’s just that grackles seem somehow constructed, artificial, made up. The noise they make, too, is not like any noise I’ve ever heard coming from any other bird. It doesn’t sound like anything in any way natural. It sounds man-made, like the loud and unwelcome shrieks of rusty machinery. It sounds mechanical. It sounds like something failing.

The grackles hop and strut outside my home, looking grimly at everything, twisting their heads, letting forth their attitude. They have no majesty. They look like beggars, plague doctors, bitter humans sucked of all juice. There is nothing liquid about grackles; they are all cartilage. Sometimes you see a flash of blue or purple in their iridescent tail feathers, and this seems to have come from some of the color glimpsed as you move an old daguerreotype in your hand. Perhaps they are the physical embodiment of lost portraits of the dead. They are what happens to photograph albums after they have been abandoned or lost or orphaned. Living with these creatures seems unwise and full of bad luck, but there is something almost mythical in watching morphed human souls or burnt abandoned objects taking a vaguely bird-shape form, hopping, screeching, perching on everything, accusing, lamenting, blaming, chattering, shrieking, laughing as you go about your personal business.

I can’t help but think of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous comment that animals are “good to think with.” Looking at grackles—unafraid, indifferent, suffering from verbal diarrhea, with never an unexpressed thought—it is tempting to think they are commenting on humanity. I suppose there are old nursery rhymes about grackles because the creature is so illustrative, so ripe for storytelling. They also seem like they would fit very neatly into children’s cautionary tales. Surely some old, deceased-age grackle tales were told in the household by the light of a fire to infants who would not settle. Surely once upon a time in Texas, where these things dot the landscape in abundance, parents soothed their babies to sleep by singing old lullabies about grackles. But I have not found any, and so I have made some of my own, a handful of which I have dropped in here as possibilities.

Grackles seem always to be performing. Not just the males putting on the deafening displays of courtship as they fluff their feathers, but also stalking and watching and pushing others out of the way.

In Mexican folklore, the zanate, which is what the grackle is called in Spanish, was silent at creation. But then it stole seven songs from the sea turtle. The noise a grackle makes certainly feels like a strangulation: unharmonious, unlovely, purloined. It seems when the grackle stole the turtle’s songs, it neglected to learn them very well—or in its performance, the songs, possibly cleverer than their stealer, betray the crime in performance. Is the grackle desperately trying to get the songs right but ever failing? Does it have a distant memory of a beautiful noise, and yet each time it attempts to reproduce it, it’s cursed with its own creaking cacophony? Or, over time, has the grackle made the turtle’s songs its own—a sound astonishingly lovely to other grackles? Regardless, no one makes music like the grackle.

Grackles tell it like it is. Endlessly quarreling, singing out of key, keeping close together, yet always seeming alone. Physiognomy would declare grackles villains—those pointy beaks!—and yet they are just themselves, stubbornly, wonderfully, darkly, noisily the grackle. They are superbly dramatic, dressed in mourning like Hamlet, and as they slope along there’s something of Richard III in them. They are always theatrical, always soliloquizing. They are also evidence of survival, heroes of longevity, of a singular life.

Grackles add salt to our daily diets. Or is it a memento mori? Whatever it is, whatever they are saying, they are these shadows in our lives, our daily shadow, not going anywhere; they are going everywhere. Coming soon or here already, grackles scream on.