“Facts swooped like swallows, darting across her mind; there was a rush of pride in things still remembered. Singing was limited to the perching birds, the order Passeriformes. Nearly half the birds in the world didn't sing, but they still used sound to communicate- calls as opposed to song. Most birds had between five and fifteen distinct calls in their repertoire; alarm and territorial defense calls, distress calls from juveniles to bring an adult to the rescue, flight calls to keep the flock coordinated, even separate calls for commencing and ending flight. Nest calls. Feeding calls. Pleasure calls. Some chicks used calls to communicate with their mothers while they were still in the egg.” FactsCommunicationBirdsBirdsongOrnithologyCallsAlice Kessler Book:The Gravity of Birds Source: The Gravity of Birds
“Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter.” GreenWoodsHidingBirdsCamouflageBirdsongAlice Kessler Book:The Gravity of Birds Source: The Gravity of Birds
“The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart. "Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.” NatureKnowledgeSpeciesBirdsAlice KesslerAvianThomas BayberAlice And ThomasMusic Genre Book:The Gravity of Birds Source: The Gravity of Birds
“The train was moving too fast to see much beyond the pines stepping up rock walls, but she knew from memory the bird species that would be endemic. She could picture the colored plates in her textbooks- the greater roadrunner, with its shaggy pompadour crest; the yellow eyes of burrowing owls; the shiny, jet-black plumage of the phainopepla, which gobbled up hundreds of mistletoe berries a day. She'd missed the Festival of the Cranes by only a few weeks. How tempting, to find herself just hours from Bosque del Apache, and the Rio Grande. She imagined lying on her stomach, binoculars trained on the sandhill cranes and snow geese in their winter quarters, watching in wonder the mass morning liftoffs and evening fly-ins. It was an old desire, but even now, though she knew the impossibility of it, it persisted; the world as one giant aviary she ached to see, all of its feathered inhabitants in their natural environment, a thousand times better to hear their cries dampened by verdant jungle foliage or echoed across the wells of canyons than to listen to abbreviated bits of captured songs emanating from a machine.” BirdsCanyonsMigrationsAlice KesslerSouthern America Book:The Gravity of Birds Source: The Gravity of Birds
“In 1972, Bayber's work underwent another metamorphosis, yet refused to be defined by or adhere to any specific style. Elements of abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, and neo-expressionism combine with figurative art to create works which remain wholly original and highly complex, both delighting and terrifying at a subconscious level. There is nothing fragile here, nothing dreamlike. No protections are offered, not for the artist himself and not for those viewing his work. All is called forth in a raw state, human values finessed on the canvas, softened and sharpened, separated and made aggregate. While there are certain motifs in these works- often a suggestion of water, the figure of a bird- and various elements are repeated, aside from an introverted complexity, the context in which they appear is never the same from one piece to the next. What ties these works together is the suggestion of loss, of disappearance, and of longing ( see figs. 87-95)" The figure of a bird. He had forgotten his own writing. Finch took the book back to his desk and pulled a magnifying glass from the top drawer to study the color plates. Thomas had completed six paintings in 1972, four of them after July. In each of those four, Finch managed to find what he had seen long ago, the figure of a bird. Was it Alice, flown away from him?” LossBirdsArtworkThomas BayberHidden ImageDennis Finch Book:The Gravity of Birds Source: The Gravity of Birds