Set in the future where a divorced father takes his daughter to watch birds that don't exist, I enjoyed this spin on the ecological crisis. This is the 'The Ghost Birds' by Karen Russell, published in The New Yorker on October 4, 2021. The author is an amateur birder, and the years past have inspired her to write this story.
The father Jasper grew up in a very different world from his daughter, Starling. His childhood world had real birds. Hers doesn't. Hers has intergalactic travel and floating starships. He wanted to show her the real ghosts of the birds in this apocalyptic world where fires burn too hot for humanity to survive the way we know.
By the time I discovered the Paranormal Birding Society, extinct bird species outnumbered living ones. I should have been collecting feathers in 2040, not Orioles baseball cards and rotary telephones. I never suspected that every bird would disappear in my lifetime. Wavelengths of color and song. Ice pigeons. Yellow-eyed penguins. Great blue herons. Purple gallinules. Red-throated sunbirds. Somali ostriches. Rock doves. Day-old chicks, accumulating damage with each smoky breath. There was a last nestling of every species. On the nightly news, and outside our sealed windows, we watched birds dying from the smoke waves and the fast-moving plagues, from habitat destruction and hunger, from triple-digit temperatures and neurotoxic metals powdering the air. When I was Starling’s age, I did not understand, somehow—even as I lifted the greening copper of a twentieth-century telephone to my ear—that our time would end as well.
Sadly it is like that, isn't it? We only see many animals on National Geographic Channel or Discovery or whatever. These animals are still alive, but existing as an endangered species. Many have become extinct, and if we don't do anything about it, this fictional story might just become our reality. And I hope I don't live to see it.
Jasper is tracking down the migratory Vaux's swifts' ghosts, and is determined to let his daughter see them. Starling's mother, Jasper's ex-wife Yesenia isn't so enthusiastic about him doing that. In this new world, ghosts exist, and it only takes the right equipment to see them.
When the carbon sinks of the world’s forests began to burn—exhaling centuries’ worth of carbon, in a protracted death rattle that continues to this day—millions of birds were dispossessed. Now the ghosts return to nest in their old homes. With the right equipment, you can sometimes hear them, even in the domed cities. Often a ghost sings for months and never materializes, and a paranormal birder must make the identification from sound alone. This is a skill that I hope to teach Starling. Not just the waiting and the listening but the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.
More than a story about climate change, this is also a story about a father-daughter relationship and how he hopes to raise his daughter in this world. What are the values we hold dear? And what are the values we hope to pass on to younger people we hold dear? I know the values I hold. There're no younger people whom I need to mould. I'm no mentor, guardian or caretaker to any child, so I care a little less about the future in that sense. I do what I can now, feeble personal efforts notwithstanding, to not hasten climate change. In this story, I absolutely hated the ending. You gotta read it for yourself to find out why.
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