The False Raven of Sorrows

I've never been a bird person.

My girlfriend dragged me to see The Big Year when it came out. Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson raced around the world, trying to spot as many rare birds as they could, competing for some sort of weird birding record. I fell asleep before they reached a hundred. When I woke up, the credits were rolling, and my girlfriend was gone.

There's this writer, pretty famous, Jonathan Franzen, who wrote a few bestsellers and even got into a fight with Oprah, I think, but he totally lost it when he started writing about birds. SO MANY BIRDS. I don't think people talk about Jonathan Franzen much anymore.

My ornithophobia, or rather ornitho-simply-don't-care, is rooted in the bird we lost when I was a kid, Jonny, ironically, a parakeet, cute, yellow and green, pretty standard parakeet, talkative, until he said something Dad didn't like, I never found out what, and then Jonny was gone – POOF! – in a flurry of feathers I found when I took out the trash.

Dad didn't like a lot of things.

So, given that, given the lost girlfriend, the dead bird, Dad, it's ironic I ended up the custodian of the last surviving member of an entire bird genus, the Pseudocorvus dolorum, Latin for "false raven of sorrows", because for most of natural history, from antiquity to the Victorian era, and even recently, birders thought it was a real raven, because it looked like a raven, but it wasn't, which made it sad. Its common name is the Mourning Fluteback – mourning, because it's sad, and fluteback, because its back bears a ridge of hollow quills, open at the tips, through which wind passes to produce its call, which sounds like a sad flute. That's the only call it has. It has no syrinx, the lower larynx that allows other birds to sing, so it can only communicate on blustery days.

Which is probably part of the reason it's going extinct.

If only those ancient and Victorian birders, and all the other bird fanatics, had stuck around to listen long enough, they would have realized the fluteback wasn't a real raven, because real ravens gronk, or cronk, depending on the dialect, quite loudly, even when there's no wind. But because they weren't good listeners, those birders, because they weren't patient enough, the fluteback, the false raven, passed as a real raven for millennia, and so no one realized that Jonny – I named him Jonny in honor of my dead parakeet – was the last of his kind until it was almost too late.

I'm a patient listener, I have to be, because there's no one left at home to listen to, except Jonny, so I spend hours listening to him, since my girlfriend left – not the girlfriend who had a celebrity crush on Jack Black and dragged me to see The Big Year, but the girlfriend who came back from a trip to a Pacific island known for its bird droppings and pulled Jonny out of her suitcase, drugged. Except she called him something else I don't remember. I started calling him Jonny after she left.

Jonny was very stinky.

"How did you end up with a raven in your suitcase?" I asked.

My girlfriend shook her head and pursed her lips, as if that was a silly question.

"I thought he was dead," she said, rummaging through her suitcase for the antidote. "And he's not a raven."

She found the syringe and stuck it into Jonny's stomach, below his crumpled wing. Jonny woke up and looked at me. He took a deep breath and exhaled, wordlessly.

This girlfriend was into birds, too, which is why she visited the Pacific island known for its bird droppings, Naoero, known until recently as Nauru, because foreigners couldn't pronounce it. Birds made Naoero rich, for a while, because when they fly over the island, they poop, and the poop turns into phosphate, and everyone in the world wants phosphate, or at least farmers do, because it fertilizes their fields. Now, the phosphate's all been mined away, Naoero is wrecked, environmentally and financially, but the birds don't care, and they continue to poop.

Jonny pooped on Naoero too, until he almost died and my girlfriend took him home.

"He looked so sad," my girlfriend said.

"When he almost died?"

"No, before that. Female flutebacks lay an egg only once a decade, at most, and male flutebacks stand next to the egg for a full year until it hatches. Before he almost died, Jonny" – or whatever she called him – "had been standing next to the egg for two years. It never hatched. Jonny [sic] was so tired after all that standing, he keeled over and I thought he was dead."

"What happened to the female fluteback?"

"She really did die."

"There's a lot of dead birds in this story."

It's hard to have a conversation with Jonny, because he doesn't speak human, like Jonny the parakeet did, but maybe it's better that way, and because he only speaks when there's wind, which there isn't in my house, unless I open all the windows, and even then only on blustery days. So I bought several high-powered fans, industrial strength, and set them up all over the house, so Jonny can sing whenever he wants.

It's hard to have visitors, though, or read books, unless I download them, but I like paper, so I don't read much anymore.

I mainly listen to Jonny.

Jonny's song really is sad. I should record it someday, because there's only one known recording of the fluteback's song, made by a Nauruan phosphate miner, back in the day, but he recorded it on a wax cylinder that melted in the sun during his lunch break, so it's incomplete and corrupted.

But I'd rather just listen to Jonny by myself, alone. I don't have to share Jonny.

Jonny sits on my kitchen table, next to a rock I found that looks like an egg. He looks at the rock sometimes, and I think he still has hope, even though his expression is hard to read. But mostly, he turns away from the rock, aiming his quills into the industrially generated wind, and he sings his song, the Mourning Fluteback call, the false raven's call of sorrows, so that the rock can hear him better.

I don't have the heart to tell him it's just a rock.

Jonny's been getting tired lately. His wings are heavy, his feathers gray, his quills collapsing, and his call isn't as strong as the day I decided to call him Jonny.

One of these mornings, I'll wake up, and I won't hear Jonny's call anymore, and I'll sell back the industrial-strength fans at a loss, and I'll bury Jonny in the yard, like I always do, the last of his kind.

But I'll keep the rock, because I still have hope.