As the Crow Flies

by Max Gruber 

Humans have always understood that the shortest distance between two points is not the same as the distance we must travel from one to the other. The expression “as the crow flies” almost always precedes a convoluted land route dotted with man-made infrastructure, geographic obstacles, and political boundaries. While we imagine that the crow is limited only by their will to take flight, we are restricted from crossing into neighboring villages, some of us taking journeys that put our lives at risk in order to circumvent frontiers that cannot be extended to the sky. The more rules we invent on land, the more we seem to romanticize the sky and the creatures that inhabit it. Free as a bird. That is, free to move.

Freedom in the sky is repeatedly marshaled as a foil to containment on the land.¹ Inas Halabi’s film We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (2019-20) is full of sweeping views of the West Bank. After one of the film’s participants points to his ancestral home and its neighboring security checkpoint, Halabi cuts to a sequence of a buzzard gliding overhead, framed only by an azure sky and the sound of a man reading a poem by the artist: “In my dream is an empty village/ Built from bare cement/ It is located at the top of the valley/ The water from the clouds pours down/ Endlessly/ But the dust remains intact.”² 

In the United States, artist Mark Menjívar uses birds as a way to engage communities and think about issues of mobility, control, and belonging. At Upper Manhattan’s El Museo del Barrio, a drawing produced by a public school student depicts birds huddled together on a branch with the text “We are all migrants.” The project La Misma Canción (The Same Song) stems from a question the artist asked himself: “are the birds I’m hearing in Texas the same as the birds my family in El Salvador would have heard?” Through collaborative drawings that bilingually describe migratory species, artist-led birding outings, and other initiatives, the project invites participants to see their family histories in terms of the birds that surround them. 

Unlike human patterns of migration, the freedom birds experience in the sky is defined by their ability to return. Our relationship to the land, and the dangers we face to traverse that land, often make this an impossibility. The drawing at El Museo is part of an installation of over 70 renderings of birds with greetings in Spanish and English. Every week, the signs are flipped over, filled with messages bidding their avian friends farewell. These birds’ ability to return, la ida y vuelta, becomes an ideal that is held up against the grim reality of contemporary migration.
Unlike human patterns of migration, the freedom birds experience in the sky is defined by their ability to return.
Our idealization of the relief that we imagine birds feel must be why we try to keep them close. In the United States, our relationship to birds has been so mediated by our efforts to manicure and subdivide land that we have seemingly invented an entirely new category of bird: “the backyard bird.” The term sites these creatures in that quintessentially American crabgrass unit. It implies that these birds are so common that we don’t even have to cross the imaginary border between the natural and the human in order to see them. Never mind that these birds may travel hundreds if not thousands of miles before depositing themselves on an overly designed, stainless steel feeder to gorge themselves on sunflower and millet. The moment they land on that feeder, birds enter the built environment. Their interactions with these spaces tell us as much about our failings as environmental planners as they do our desire to live an untethered life among the clouds.

Over the years, my parents have lovingly and attentively created infrastructure for their avian visitors to bathe and nurture themselves. They take their stewardship seriously, varying ratios of seed, cleaning and taking down feeders during seasonal bouts of avian illness, and even brewing a homemade cocktail of simple syrup for the delicate palates of the Ruby-throated hummingbirds that visit throughout the summer. For my parents, the birds that visit the backyard help them understand this place, their home. And yet, the liminal human/non-human space of their backyard is more of a hazard than a sanctuary. 

The large, glass windows that look out over their four-and-a-half bird feeders reflect the surrounding foliage, confusing birds and causing them to fly into the windows at full tilt. Collisions like these are an anthropogenic threat to the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of birds per year in the U.S.³ Millenia of natural selection are no match for humankind’s preferred amorphous solid. To be better hosts, my parents have put up dangling, reflective wires, applied translucent stickers, and replaced the window shades. Still, I still see the outlines of birds imprinted on the windows every holiday season. 

Birds don’t need engineered solutions. Instead, artists like Mark Menjívar reframe this conversation in a more productive direction, asking how the lives of birds may mirror our own, and what an engagement with that kind of life might cause us to rethink, and, perhaps, to undo, in terms of our relationship to land. One of the greetings posters hanging in El Museo, written in a joyful, amateurish hand, reads: esta ciudad es alta y ruidosa, pero puedes hacer amigas si te lo propones. “This city is loud and noisy, but you can make friends if you put your mind to it.” 

Menjívar’s practice centers possibility and connection, even joy, over any cynical examination of how birds are unbeholden to the perennially militarized southern border of the United States. By looking at birds the artist suggests that we may begin to think about land differently—to think in terms of openness and possibility, to imagine histories of migration in terms of transformations instead of as rifts.