Learning to Love Birds Helped Me Beat Writer's Block

sweet tweet

Before C went into the hospital to have his entire immune system wiped out and a bone marrow transplant put in place, his friend E gave him a present: a Bird Buddy bird feeder with a camera that would not only attract birds to our backyard but also send them to an app that he could access in the hospital, too.

Prior to C’s entry into the hospital, we’d paid a bit of attention to the feathered bunch who came to visit us, but not much. We knew that finches came, for example; C hung up feed for them, but then the feed attracted rats, and that was the end of that. Once C was put in medical isolation, we freshly understood that not only would he have to remain in an air-locked, heavily sanitized room, but that he also wouldn’t be able to go outside. Not only that, but the one window he had provided a less-than-desirable view: a fence on a construction job site, where not much was visible except for metal and plastic sheeting.

Cancer sucks, as the saying goes, but it sucks even more when you can’t be outside or even look outside at anything even resembling nature.

So C became acquainted with the Bird Buddy app. Spoiler alert: he loved it.

A clever feature of Bird Buddy is that it also uses AI to tell you the species of bird you’re looking at. It’s not always correct (yesterday, it said a fledgling finch was a red crossbill), but it was correct enough so that C began to get a sense of the types of birds that like to visit our yard—finches, white-crowned sparrows, pigeons, towhees, and house sparrows—and non-bird species (mostly naughty squirrels).

With C in the hospital, I started paying attention to the birds, too. It gave me something to talk to C about cancer and everything related to cancer—we started giving the ones we recognized nicknames, and I was overjoyed to discover that a different kind of sparrow (of the white-crowned variety) sometimes stopped by for some seed. We began to identify specific birds that were frequent customers of the Bird Buddy’s dining facilities, including one hilariously furious-looking finch that popped up on several occasions.

I’ve never been someone to gaze out the window while writing. For one, I tend to need an overabundance of stimulus in order to work (see: listening to podcasts and audiobooks while writing my books, which is a habit that absolutely bewilders me and those who love me), and the outdoors tends to not do much for my brain. My father loves traveling to far-off lands so that he can enjoy landscapes and vistas. Me? I see the landscape. Nice. Okay, let’s go back to the hotel!

But something I do enjoy is drawing and painting, and I had begun to draw and paint again over the beginning of the pandemic. After C got home, I began a habit of drawing and/or painting a bird every morning—at first, one of the birds in our yard, captured by the Bird Buddy—but after I ran out of backyard birds to paint, I transitioned to painting whatever birds caught my attention on Pinterest. I fell in love with a bird known as a “snow fairy” in Japan, which is a rotund bird so cute that I can’t quite believe it’s real.