Fall of the Birds

By Bradford Morrow

A new novella by acclaimed author Bradford Morrow about a man who tracks an inexplicable plague of bird deaths, and the mystery’s profound effect on his family   Hundreds of red-winged blackbirds are discovered scattered, lifeless, around a greenhouse in Warwick, New York. Heaps of common grackles litter the fields of a farm upstate near Stone Ridge. And in Manhattan, a Washington Square restaurant is forced to close its doors when a flock of pigeons inexplicably dies on the sidewalks out front. From Pennsylvania to Maine, birds are falling from the sky en masse—and nobody can figure out why.   An insurance claims adjuster and avid birder is one of the first to recognize that something is wrong. His stepdaughter, Caitlin, has also noticed—their common interest in birds is one of the few things they share these days, since her mother died of cancer just six months ago. As they travel the Northeast together to investigate the ominous deaths, a bond forms that might prove strong enough to mend their broken family.   Fall of the Birds is a moving story of a haunting near-future and a tribute to the power of love that can survive even the most harrowing of circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781453239339

Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow (Baltimore, 1951) es un reconocido novelista, poeta, ensayista y editor. Además ha sido profesor de literatura y fundador, junto a Kenneth Rexroth, de la revista literaria Conjunctions. Sus obras le han valido numerosas distinciones, incluyendo la beca Guggenheim o el premio de la Academia Americana de las Artes y las Letras.

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FALL OF THE BIRDS

Bradford Morrow

For Lily, who asked

They stood and looked over a gate at twenty or thirty starlings feeding in the grass, and he started the talk again by saying in a low voice, ‘And yet I love you more than ever I loved you in my life.’

—Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

I should have been the first to notice. But my eyes—generally the sharp eyes of a seasoned insurance adjuster trained to assess losses and damages—simply failed, in the beginning, to see the change. Instead, it was my teenage stepdaughter, Caitlin, who asked, with a cloud of concern shadowing her snowy-egret-pale face, So, what’s with the robins this spring?

A mid-April Saturday. Caitlin frustrated because I’d gotten a call from the office and needed to take the car she’d planned to drive to Bear Mountain with friends to go hiking. An overnight emergency at a commercial nursery near Warwick, in Orange County, and nobody else available to inspect the damage, start processing the insurance claim. My supervisor, Jim Helms, a man typically calm as stone, had informed me that the circumstances surrounding the damage were pretty weird and that he needed me, one of his trusted veterans, to investigate the scene. Though I immediately agreed to make the trip, I was no less upset than Caitlin about this unexpected change of plan. After a long, tedious winter, drawn out by damaging weather—snow and hail, lightning-strike fires, freak tornados, melt-off floods—not to mention the recessionary economy that had lured more people into filing suspect claims, I was tired. I’d been working six- and seven-day weeks and was looking forward to some downtime, maybe taking a hike myself in the woods behind our rural house to unwind.

Even beyond work and weather, this had been a rough phase for the two of us. Just over half a year after Caitlin lost her mother and I my wife, our precious Laurel, to a fatal constellation of lymphatic tumors, we survivors were having a bit of trouble getting through to each other. Our problems were understandable. After all, Laurel had stood at the very center of both our orbits. And now Caitlin and I were like stray moons that had lost their host planet and were flying blind, wobbling as we went. She had developed an odd habit of tossing out non sequiturs back when Laurel’s untimely death was still raw—is there such a thing as a timely death?—so I didn’t answer her robin question right away, figuring it for a verbal bridge to nowhere. I’d told myself this was a benign, if bewildering, part of her mourning process. An emotional tic that I’d thought had passed.

She repeated her question, this time a little more urgently. I mean it. What’s up with the robins? I followed her gaze out the window at our backyard, where the last stubborn patches of snow punctuated the velvety grass beneath the evergreens that shaded them from the sun.

To keep the peace, I decided to play the straight man. Besides, I felt rotten over my hasty shift in plans. I don’t understand, Cate. What about the robins?

Like, there aren’t any? Not a one.

It’s early yet, I said, realizing that the question had been put in all seriousness. Nights have been pretty cold. Ground’s still too hard for the worms. Makes sense to me.

They’re always here by my birthday, turning back toward me now. I knew at once what lay behind that look in her eyes. Mom would have known. Mom understood her birds better than anybody. She’d have had an explanation.

I’m sure they’re on their way, I consoled her, wishing that Laurel were here every bit as much as Caitlin did. She would have known how to answer, whether and why they were late. Besides, your birthday isn’t until next week.

She finger-combed her long auburn hair, unevenly parted down the middle, off her furrowed forehead. Her sky-blue eyes, catching the morning sun, looked almost backlit. I still think it’s weird. And have you looked at the feeder? Same sunflower seeds I put in there a week ago. Nobody’s touched them.

Glancing outside at the bird feeder that hung deserted from the porch eaves with not a single chickadee or dun finch in winter plumage or even one common junco perched on it, I saw she had a point. It wasn’t as if Caitlin didn’t know her birds. For any differences we’ve had over

Reviews for Fall of the Birds

[lostinalibrary · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An insurance adjuster and his stepdaughter Caitlin are trying to cope with the loss of her mother just six months ago. The only thing the two have in common, besides their separate grieving, is a shared love of birds and birding, something her mother gave them. Caitlin is the first to notice that there are no longer any birds at their backyard feeder. Then he begins to get calls to investigate damages caused by birds falling dead from the sky.Suddenly everywhere birds are dying. Not only is there no obvious cause but many of the birds are out of their proper time and place. Caitlin and her stepfather begin to follow the path of this disaster to try to understand what is happening and, as they do, a bond begins to grow between the two - in the midst of this tragedy, they are becoming a family again.Fall of the Birds is a beautifully crafted novella about love and loss, about the overwhelming sorrow and loneliness of grief and the sense of wrongness in the universe that comes with it. But it is also about the resilience of the human spirit to cope and transcend tragedy and to form strong and lasting bonds despite or because of it. For anyone who has ever lost anyone they love, I cannot recommend Fall of the Birds enough!

[Danielle Whitney · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

⭐️⭐️

Plot: Six months after the loss of his wife, a man and his stepdaughter are among the first to notice what appears to be a plague of bird deaths occurring all over the world. As the two investigate to try and discover the cause of (and perhaps put an end to) the ongoing deaths of all birds, their strained relationship begins to heal.

Genre: Literary fiction, novella.

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Thoughts While Reading:
Thoughts at 100%:
1. I read Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy early this year (2021), and it has remained one of my favourite books of the year. Fall of the Birds was like a much worse, less polished, and unfinished version of Migrations. Migrations was so full of emotion and mystery, and I cared about all the characters, and a lot for the birds. Fall of the Birds was just so much less. I'm aware that Fall of the Birds came out first, and I'm not saying anyone copied anything; I was just reminded of the awesomeness that is Migrations whilst reading Fall of Birds, and Fall of Birds is just a wisp in Migrations' shadow.
2. This story felt like it finished before it even started, and I barely connected to old mate (sorry I forget his name) and his stepdaughter at all. I know that I need to stop comparing this book to Migrations, but Migrations had a resolution to all the plotlines (including the birds), and in Fall of the Birds, we get no resolution to anything. We don't discover what's happening to the birds, we don't find out how old mate copes when Caitlin leaves for college (in fact we get very little resolution for Caitlin at all except in relation to her stepfather, like her relationship to him is all that matters). All we get is a possible (?) nod to the fact that old mate is finally coming to terms with the loss of his wife.
3. How strange that the author included a biography of his life (including photographs! ?) at the end of this book. I've never seen anything like it, and it truly read like a puff piece that the author had written about himself. So weird (and also arrogant lol).

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Conclusion and Recommendation:
2 stars. I can't help but compare Fall of the Birds to Migrations (which is just a masterpiece), and Fall of the Birds is just not as good in every single respect. My main quibble however, is that there is no real ending to this book. I wanted to know what happened to the birds and why. I wanted to know more about Caitlin and how old mate gets on when she goes away to college. All of these thinga are hinted at but never given any answers. It's just so frustrating.
I wouldn't recommend anyone to read this. Go read Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy instead, it's an infinitely better book.

[bibliophyte · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a powerful novella-- memories of the past, revelations about the present, and a determined resolve concerning the future all woven into thirty-five pages. Instead of detracting from the work's meaningfulness, its compact size makes Fall of the Birds even more poignant, driving home its message concerning the fleeting nature of companionship and life itself. The diction is beautiful, drawing the reader into the lives of the characters so subtly that their pain and sorrow become the reader’s burden. Only on the last page is it remembered that the characters one has come to care so much about are, in fact, fictional, leaving the reader with a sense of catharsis.From the very beginning I strongly empathized with the narrator and main protagonist, a middle-aged man struggling with his many roles: insurance claims adjuster, birding enthusiast, grieving widower, and struggling step-father. His first-person musings are thoughtful and honest, exposing his extreme vulnerability to the reader as he shares his deepest fears and greatest joys. Throughout the novella he mourns the loss of his wife Laurel to cancer, narrating not only his struggles and loneliness but those of his teenaged step-daughter Caitlin as well. While privately grieving he attempts to maintain as normal a home-life for her as possible, understanding fully that through their mutual loss their single channel of communication has disappeared as well.Communication becomes increasingly vital, however, when Caitlin notices that, though spring has come, the usual birds have not returned to nest in her and her step-father's back yard or even to eat seed from their overflowing feeders. Then the narrator is called to survey the destruction wreaked on a client's greenhouse when hundreds of birds simply fall from the sky to their deaths. These eerie mass bird deaths become regular occurrences throughout the narrator's region and beyond, though not only are the birds perishing, they are also behaving erratically with many far outside of their typical zones and flight paths. No one, from civilian witnesses to ornithologists, are able to provide any explanation as to why this is happening, and as time goes on the narrator is called to more and more such sites to record the resulting damage.These violent and disturbing scenes combined with the recent trauma of losing Laurel put both the narrator and Caitlin on edge, straining an already delicate situation with yet more images of death and loss. The seemingly pointless nature of the birds' deaths also reflect the sentiments Caitlin and her step-father feel about Laurel's, though they find it impossible to directly express their true feelings to each other. As the narrator and Caitlin band together to try and determine what is killing the birds, however, a bond grows between them, this very tragedy being the means through which they learn to communicate independently.This bittersweet story of loss, acceptance, and the discovery of peace through the most unlikely of circumstances is a testament to human resiliency. It serves as a reminder that it is possible to rise up through tragedy and embrace the good that remains in our lives, however little we think we have left. I would encourage any reader to spend just a couple of hours reading this memorable piece, as it carries a significance that far outweighs its small size.