This Sunday, September 22, marks the Autumnal equinox, when summer officially turns to fall.
Rainer Maria Rilke, as translated by Cliff Crego, wrote in his poem Autumn Day:
“Lord: it is time. The summer was immense... Command the last fruits into fullness... ...press the last bit of sweetness into the heavy wine.”
T.S. Eliot wrote in Preludes of “…smell of steak in passageways,” and “…the burnt-out ends of smoky days.”
And in his poem Splinter, Robert Frost wrote:
“The voice of the last cricket
Across the first frost
Is one kind of goodbye.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.”
Fall is a time of migratory birds, which brings the Pasadena Audubon Society to its feet at dawn, including amateur birder, watercolorist, and Caltech neurobiology PhD student Jieyu Zheng.
In the height of the heat wave, we caught up with Zheng via Zoom, shortly after reading in Psychology Today that gull chicks whose parents are chatty, exposing the unhatched gull egg to lots of vocalizing, grow bigger and faster. This finding, that the embryonic gulls are sentient, listening, and responding metabolically, defies the long-held notion that an egg is a tabula rasa at best, the makings of an omelet at least.
“I’m interested in animal behavior from a neurobiology point of view. I love seeing birds, photographing them, and then drawing and painting them,” says Zheng, “because we gather a lot of information from them. Morning walks are just loaded with more info! The presence migratory birds like White Crown Sparrows and Yellow Rumped Warblers can signal seasonal change. And then there’s other information to interpret. I just observed on a field trip to the Colorado Lagoon last week that there were far fewer birds than my last year’s visit around November 2023. Should I be concerned?”
Her illustrative painting style, using watercolor pencils on rag paper, is humorous and upbeat. But her camera can’t avoid uncomfortable truths, such as birds gasping for relief at the Arboretum during our recent triple-digit temperatures.
A striking photograph she shot of a Great Blue Heron in the lower Los Angeles River contains a subtle warning: the wading bird perches upon an overturned steel shopping cart moored in the spillway.
“I started doodling around age three,” she says. “I don’t have much professional training, but as a kid I took some summer lessons in sketching, using colored pencils. Then I discovered watercolor pencils, which you draw with and activate with a wet brush.”
She left China at age 19 to attend Cornell University, discovering her love of things avian while watching the university bird cam there that captured the activities of local Redtail hawks. Then on to the University of Cambridge in the UK, where she observed “…Eurasian magpies, the black and white ones. Very smart, very loud. One magpie would take an entire suet ball.”
Cambridge is where her love of birds truly took flight. She says. “A river runs across the campus, and it became a sort of birdy-set coffee shop. Mallard ducks, moorhens and swans were just everywhere.”
The swans in question were Mute Swan cygnets. Zheng says, “I couldn’t really tell them apart, but they always came in packs of four, like Danse des petits cygnes. I often went to sit with them if I wanted to read a book, and fed them some pellets, special healthy diet for waterfowl, no bread.”
She points out the gloves she’s wearing in the photo of herself with the swans, noting “Sometimes swans become aggressive and will nibble you for food. I communicated with them using the same language of ‘shooing’ they like to use– it’s a type of hiss. They knew when to respect my space and keep a distance. It was very effective, and that’s how I got the nickname of ‘the Swan Whisperer’ from my friends.”
Zheng joined the Pasadena Audubon Society in 2023, and recommends membership for many reasons, including “the wonderful opportunity to visit The Huntington Library, and the Arboretum, and other beautiful spots with fellow birders. I’ve been telling all my friends to join!”
“Birding changes your view of animals in the wild,” she says. “I had caged parakeets when I was a little girl. But now I’d much rather see birds fly free.” Her future academic plans include seeking a faculty position at a research university. “One thing that will not change,” she says, “is my love of birding.”
This week’s pets in need of homes:
Click on photos to see larger images and captions.
