First and Last Songs: The Extinct Song of the Kaua‘i ‘Ö‘ö
I wanted to talk to someone who might have heard the last animal at the end of its species’ five-million-year run on earth.
...more
Posts Tagged: birds
A Book with Wings: Bird Book by Sidney Wade
There is an acceptance of the strangeness of things in these poems, even a generosity big enough to invite the oracle in for dinner.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Pigeon Manifesto”
The revolution will begin at your curb, in the shallow pool of shade that is your gutter.
...more
On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from I, Parrot
An exclusive excerpt from I, Parrot, by Deb Olin Unferth & Elizabeth Haidle, forthcoming from Catapult and Black Balloon on November 1.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Goldhawk”
In the last moment, the bird swerved away to the right. It soared high, wheeled in a circle, and dove again. This time, it pulled itself directly upward. Gold plumes flashed as it rose, wings churning as it turned.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Pet Store
The boy is looking for something specific. I can tell. It shows on his face when he scans the shelves and doesn’t find it.
...more
The Hawk in Me
I continue to adapt. I do all of this because I cannot run away, not really. There is nowhere to go. The hawk is the thing within me.
...more
White Noise
People never detail the confusion—the way days feel like years, and seconds like hours.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: To Prey on Birds
I am alone. Alone with my small size, my cracking bones, and the guilt that wraps around my spine like a jungle vine. Don’t be hysterical, I repeat to myself.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Boy meets lichen, proves 150 years of science textbooks wrong. Want to improve your social skills? Try fiction, not speed-dating. How wasps gave us Shakespeare. In psychology, American undergrad = caveman. Birds lose sex appeal when singing over city noise. (Unlike Benedict Cumberbatch.)
...moreWeekly Geekery
If Klingon is a living language then Latin sure as hell isn’t dead. “I think therefore I am,” but for animals. Solving history’s mysteries with poop. The Internet is ruining the planet in more ways than you think.
...more
The Hermit and the Hawk
As the morning progresses I become less interested in where Zirrer had lived, and more interested in what brought him here to begin with. Why, I wonder, does a man choose to opt out of the world?
...moreOn Birds in the Wild
In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world: In grief, what I found: birds reassure. Birds as representatives of a universe that will go on with or without us. […]
...moreSave the Birds: A Rumpus Roundup
Jonathan Franzen is an avid bird lover, as anyone who read Freedom might have guessed. Two weeks ago, Franzen wrote a piece for the New Yorker that, among other things, condemned the Audubon Society for focusing too much on climate change and not enough on conservation, the society’s original mission. Focusing on climate change is […]
...more
Waved Albatross
How do we make the good thoughts stay? Can we make them stay? It’s so hard to keep in mind the slivers of time that change our lives for the better.
...more
The Most Terrifying Art Project in the World
Here’s a totally normal thing that exists: a lake with a pH so far to the base end of the scale that when birds crash-land in it, they not only die but also calcify. Of course, like any everyday person would do, photographer Nick Brandt gathered up the mummified bird corpses, posed them, and took […]
...moreGENERATION GAP #8: Eleazar Albin’s Yellow-Hammer
In a special visual edition of the Generation Gap column, renowned Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak and I team up to bring you a tale on the very edge of natural history, a story about haunted 18th-century illustrator of bug and bird, Eleazar Albin.
...moreThe Diviner’s Tale
Morrow’s supple prose is grounded in lyricism, prose unafraid to give the reader both the forest and the trees. Bradford Morrow’s new novel, a feminist interpretation of fairy-tale tropes, explores the life of Cassandra: single-mother, teacher, dowser.
...moreGet Off Your Ass and Blow Shit Up
The Avian Gospels is a strange, compelling parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds.
...moreMorning Coffee
Wired looks at the fine art of pulpy vhs box art. A handy Christmas facts info-graphic for you. Scienceray wants to talk to you about the Trogon family of birds. I link to this begrudgingly because birds are terrifying. I’ve got a pretty unhealthy time fixation, also I love the Big Picture which makes this […]
...moreMorning Coffee
A recent death gives the NY Times reason to consider the origin of the Hokey Pokey. The Rotating Kitchen. Cities before and after catastrophe. (via Gerrycanvan.) Friendly bird feeders are changing evolution. A look at all the buildings Dubai could have seen.
...moreThe Age of Orphans
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
...more