Q&A: Ursula Heise on the important stories that birds have to tell
Courtesy of Ursula Heise
Heise says she was wowed by the intelligence and communication skills of a young Jardine’s parrot that entered her home in the mid-1990s.
| September 6, 2024
Birds, as Ursula Heise can attest, have profoundly important stories to tell — if only we know how to listen.
In the short documentary “Urban Ark Los Angeles,” which she wrote and produced in 2018 as director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, or LENS, Heise explored the world of red-crowned parrots, those noisy neighbors that frequent the skies of East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.
“They are an endangered species from Mexico that entered Southern California via the pet trade,” said Heise, UCLA’s Marcia H. Howard Professor of Literary Studies, who holds appointments in the department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “They’re now thriving in an urban environment that offers them an unlikely sanctuary — perhaps a model for rethinking urban species conservation.”
While a precocious pet parrot first piqued her interest in the world of birds, feathered fauna of all kinds have since become integral to Heise’s distinguished work as a leader in the field of environmental humanities.
“Birds led me to an interest in their habitats, their migrations and into ecology and environmentalism more generally,” Heise said.
For a UCLA College digital mini-magazine themed around birds, we interviewed Heise about her personal passion and her research, which spans 30 years. (Read more of the UCLA College mini-magazine, “We Are UCLAvian,” on UCLA Newsroom.)
What do birds mean to you personally?
My personal interest in both pet and wild birds originated with a young Jardine’s parrot who entered my household in the mid-1990s. I was so blown away by her intelligence, sociability, communication skills and ability to cleverly manipulate even the most stubborn of my friends into doing exactly what she wanted that I couldn’t help but become curious about bird cognition, communication and behavior more generally.
I turned into a birdwatcher and have had adopted — never bought! — bird companions ever since. I’m typing this with a 16-year-old female red-bellied parrot perched on my shoulder, so I guess they have turned me into the prototypical bird lady! I love finding birds, watching them, trying to understand their behavior and taking pictures of them.
How are they an important part of your work at UCLA?
I research and teach environmental storytelling across media and genres, particularly stories about biodiversity, urban ecology, animals and plants. More in general, I teach lots of classes that have as one of their goals awareness of urban biodiversity.
I like to take students down to Kaufman Hall in the spring quarter, when the cliff swallows arrive on their annual migration and reoccupy the gourd-shaped clay nests that they built in previous years. Often, you see lots of other birds in the process: the Western bluebirds that take over some of the cliff swallows’ nests, the juncos on the lawns that have taken over the entire campus, and many other species. Who coinhabits the city with us, and how could we make our city a better habitat for both humans and nonhumans? That’s the question that takes us from birdwatching to broader issues of multispecies justice in the metropolis and beyond.
Currently I’m working on a research article, “Follow That Parrot: Bird Guides in Latin American Narrative,” that analyzes the role of parrots and other bird characters in Latin American novels and short stories who serve as guides to humans.
What do you think birds would have to say about humanity?
This question is an interesting one, and I don’t think it has a general answer for the broad category “birds.” A lot of birds are seeing their habitat destroyed and their numbers diminished by human intervention — so I think many birds would think of humans as dangerous predators and destroyers. That’s why I love Ted Chiang’s story “The Great Silence”: It has a bird looking at us and commenting on our actions in a melancholy mode.
But there are also quite a few bird species that benefit from human-created habitat either in agriculture or in the city, and they’d probably be OK with us! Such species are called “synanthropes” — species that live well in human environs. Pet birds, who are typically hand-fed by humans when they’re chicks, consider us family and often love hanging out with us and want our attention.
I like this question a lot, though, because writers and also filmmakers and artists have tried to explore this fascinating question of how other species look at us. The Swedish film “Falkens Öga” (“Kestrel’s Eye,” 1998) by Mikael Kristersson is a great example: It shows a pair of European kestrels nesting in a Swedish church spire, and everything that happens is filmed from their perspective, including weddings, tending of graves, joggers and a national day parade. In that film, what’s interesting is how small, repetitive and ultimately unimportant humans appear to the kestrels. Maybe a salutary reminder that perhaps a lot of birds and other animals don’t think much of or about us at all?
Birds in books: Ursula Heise names her avian must-reads
Fred Bodsworth, “Last of the Curlews” (1955)
This book is a fictionalized account of the last Northern Curlew’s migration from the far north of Canada to South America and back. It’s about species extinction and well-researched in terms of the facts. The narrative strategy is unusual: The entire journey is focalized through the curlew, and human characters only appear marginally. Perhaps inevitably, this strategy anthropomorphizes the curlew protagonist to an extent — but not in any superficial Disneyesque way. It’s a fascinating and moving book to experience migration from a bird’s perspective.
Patrick Chamoiseau, “Les Neuf Consciences du Malfini” (2009)
This novel by well-known Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau presents the entire plot through the eyes of a bird — the first-person narrator. “Malfini” is the Martinican common name of the broad-winged hawk. The narrator is a male broad-winged hawk who accidentally becomes aware of the unusual behavior of a colibri foufou, or crested hummingbird, and gradually becomes fascinated with the tiny creature. Through his observations of the hummingbird, whom he affectionately refers to as “Foufou,” over several years, a whole scenario of social and ecological change unfolds on the island and beyond that is narrated in the most vibrant and exquisite French you’ve ever read. The novel has not been translated into English — and it would not be easy to do that and preserve the beauty of Chamoiseau’s language. This is the most riveting and surprising bird novel and indeed animal novel I’ve ever read.
Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence” (2015)
Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence,” in his collection “Exhalation,” is narrated by a Puerto Rican Amazon parrot who meditates on the Arecibo Observatory telescope and wonders why humans eagerly search for extraterrestrial intelligence but neglect the nonhuman forms of intelligence and communication right on their own planet. Chiang originally wrote the story as an accompaniment to a video installation by Puerto Rican visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Text and images together make a powerful appeal for attention and conservation of the birds (and other animals and plants) that co-inhabit the planet with us.
And more…
In poetry, birds’ singing skills often function as a metaphor for the poet’s craft. Children’s books often feature birds — the dodo in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and the owls in the Harry Potter universe famously among them. And there are many, many nonfiction books that focus on the writers’ encounters with birds and their impact — Scott Weidensaul’s “Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds,” Chris Cooper’s “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World” and Amy Tan’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” for example — as well as outstanding books on bird intelligence and bird song written for a general audience. Lots to choose from!