IZABELA DŁUŻYK: THE BIRD LADY

Come, I’ll show you something. We’ll just have to climb the stairs. I’ll go first. But don’t forget to shut the gate at the top, or Cashmere will make a break for it between our legs. He’ll fall down the stairs and that’ll be that. Who’s Cashmere? My cat. He’s blind and has epilepsy. 

Right, here we are. I keep six cockatiels in this room. My ideal parrots. They don’t twitter on like budgies, and don’t have that old-married-couple temperament. They’re more like young sweethearts. Hardly any fighting, just love and cuddles. Joined at the hip. They’re fragile psychologically.

My cockatiels are pretty far from the ideal, though. I took most of them in from bird adoption groups on Facebook. From backyard breeders mainly. They keep the birds out in the cold, in aviaries. When they get bored of them, they post threats: ‘If no one takes them, I’m opening the cage and bon voyage.’ So I take them. 

Lemony! Her call is unmistakable. It’s even easier to recognise her by the legs. Or lack thereof. She’s also missing the long flight feathers in her wings. What can you do – she doesn’t fly. Still quite a gymnast, though. She hooks her beak over the horizontal bars of the cage sides and climbs nearly two metres high. Perching on the lower shelves currently.

You hear that? That’s a different kind of call. A shy one. Along the lines of, ‘I’ll sing, but I don’t know if it’ll be any good.’ My money’s on Pit-Pat. The leading songster of the six. He experiments with new whistles all day long. He does have legs, but no toes. The upper tiers of the cage are his domain. Today, though, I can hear him slightly lower down – on the second level. 

Ah, there’s the huffing. Followed by hesitant whistling. Caramel, obviously. He’s a twenty-year-old senior citizen, no longer fit to fly. He’s friends with Cookie – they clean each other. Except Caramel takes it too far, plucking feathers from his pal’s head. He’s occupying the top perch, right?

It’s easier with Minnie. Ailments pin her to the bottom of the cage. I’ve blocked her off from the side walls, otherwise she’d climb, fall and break something. And she’s suffered enough. Five wing fractures to her name and she might need one of them amputated. Legs fractured, too. Let me pick her up. I bet she’s hiding in the right corner. Gotcha! See how she’s breathing with her entire body? It’s the deformed sternum and spine. Her wing’s all the way by her chin. I give her four years. Such a worn-out body can’t last longer, really.

Okay, my turn to whistle. Ooo-we-ooo-we-ooo-we! They’re quiet – might be shy... Finally! Hi there, Ginger. I had to repeat myself three times for you to answer. He’s halfway up the cage, on the cotton ropes. He’s missing feathers on his head. Caramel’s the culprit; he’s stripped Ginger’s crest clean off. Just Kajtek left. There’s no mistaking him. He broke his wing long ago, which is why he doesn’t fly now. He’s squawking from the bottom shelf. He can’t climb any higher, since he lost his toes to frostbite. How on earth did I manage to locate all the parrots correctly? Sure, I can’t see. But I can hear. 

*

I greeted the world in 1989, thirteen weeks too soon. Doctors call those like me “very preterm” babies. That’s why they tried to keep me in my mother’s womb as long as possible. They ignored the water breaking and only delivered me once my mother was slowly losing consciousness. They were happy because I looked healthy. 

Nearly a year later, however, they diagnosed me with retinopathy of prematurity. The blood vessels of my retina were developing abnormally, and I was in danger of going blind. There was one last-chance treatment left – in the States. We couldn’t afford it, so my parents started a fundraiser. Thanks to that, we could pay for a few operations in Boston. 

One of the things I remember from those trips – though I was only two or three – is a storm. It cut short a walk with my mother. I had the impression it kept saying “come on!” to me. I must have been hearing that phrase a lot, because I associated it with the crash of thunder. My mother’s exhaustion wasn’t lost on me, either. On one of the flights, she didn’t sleep a wink. Meanwhile, I slept twelve hours, so I was acting giddy when we arrived. ‘No, we’re going to sleep now,’ she protested. I burst into tears. Aged three, I realised for the first time that you don’t always get everything in life. Soon, the doctors realised it, too. The damage to the retinas in both eyes was too deep-seated. Still, they tried to placate my mother. ‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ they kept saying. ‘At that age, vision can still repair itself.’

Later, my parents would check if I was starting to see. They’d show me a block and ask, ‘So, is it light or dark?’ I didn’t understand. A block was a block. What made it different from other blocks was its shape. I would guess a colour at random and had no clue I was getting it wrong. All I wanted was to get back to playing. So, it became clear: it was not for me to see.

*

Initially, I thought all the children at my preschool did it that way. That they approached the shelves and felt for the doll with their hands. That they treated each other anonymously. After all, we were a group of thirty. Too many voices to put to a name.

It’s strange, but I enjoyed drawing back then. Probably because of “The Crayon Song,” a Polish children’s classic. The kids sang it so wonderfully: “(...) and if I ask them nicely, they’ll always draw for me.” But the crayons didn’t listen. I never stayed in the lines, and grown-ups couldn’t decipher who or what I’d drawn. I didn’t mind, though. I knew children weren’t capable of everything. All around, I heard that colour meant beauty, which had to include my work – I was using all the crayons in the set, after all. I liked paints, too. Mainly because of the chorus of another song: “I’m gonna paint the whole wide world, the wind flies past in pastel colours.” I fared better with plasticine. Often, I was the only one playing with it. Meanwhile, the rest of the group drew. I got used to it.

My parents racked their brains for how to pave my future. With languages! They transferred me to Preschool No. 64 in Gdańsk – into a group where the teacher spoke solely in English. I learned not only a new language but also the rules that governed the sighted. My peers didn’t extend their arms in front, didn’t pat each other down, didn't check who was standing in front of them. So, I didn’t do it either. 

‘That sad little girl,’ people would whisper. It may have been because, aged six, maturity had stirred in me. I saw war on TV:

‘We must help Chechnya!’ the presenter called for the fifth time. 

‘Marek, why is the man saying that?’ I asked my brother.

‘Because people are losing their homes and have nothing to eat over there,’ my mother interjected.

Stunned, I marched off to my room. Once again, I learned that others have it different. 

I grew sad. ‘Can God not see they’re struggling?’

*

I started primary school with a problem: I couldn’t be in the same class as my brother. They wouldn’t take me because I was blind. In my class, the pupils would form cliques and exclude me. We didn’t have a good relationship. No, I wasn’t bullied. They were indifferent to me. Some say that’s worse than being hounded. I went to an inclusive class. There were children with Down’s syndrome and intellectual disabilities, as well as some who were emotionally unstable. I didn’t feel awkward. In fact, the teachers praised me for how well I got on with the other children. It’s the most cherished lesson I took from that school: feeling unflustered when I happen to speak to someone different. 

In the later years of primary school, we’d appoint a class monitor. Their responsibilities included watering the plants, wiping the blackboard, and guiding me from classroom to classroom. I could no longer move around without a white cane. I started learning to walk with it in my second year. The teacher told me to hold it like a soup spoon. In my right hand, because it was my dominant one. Right foot forward, cane swinging left. And vice versa. If I was walking without the cane along a wall, I would trail it with my hand; otherwise, I’d crash into an open door or a protruding plant pot. That same teacher introduced me to braille. The lessons were extracurricular, often before the school day, when my classmates were still sleeping. I wasn’t a fan of these sessions. I always worried I hadn’t done my homework properly. But soon I developed a cure for stress. I went to bed earlier and spent less time thinking about tomorrow. 

I could write thanks to a braille slate. You place a sheet of paper between two metal plates and use a stylus to write. Braille characters are called cells. Each one consists of up to six dots, arranged in columns of three. To emboss them, you press the stylus into the correct positions, writing right to left. You read the dots by taking out the paper and flipping it over – that’s where characters are raised. Sometimes, my ring finger would bleed from the stylus. A year later, I got a brailler. It had seven keys: six for the number of dots in a cell, and one for the space bar. If the letter B consisted of two dots, I just had to press two keys at once. Easy, right?

In the fourth year of primary school, I was given a page printed in your kind of letters. They were raised. I would memorise the little bellies, the tails, the strokes. I got to know the entire alphabet with my fingers. I couldn’t put letters together into a word without lifting my hand off the page, however. ‘Hieroglyphs of the sighted,’ I fumed, and abandoned my studies. 

As for the computer, I couldn’t use it. Without text-to-speech software, it wasn’t accessible to blind users. I barely watched TV, so books were all I had left. I had heard that some blind people read braille slowly. I read from dawn to dusk. I honed my skill. The books I read back then shaped me for life. I was struck by a line from “The Fern Flower,” a fable by Kraszewski: “A man will find no happiness, if he cannot share it with others.” And from An Argument About Basia, a classic children’s novel by Makuszyński: “The bitterness of pain and the sting of suffering make the incoming joy all the sweeter.”

I fell in love with the fables of Hans Christian Andersen, too. Do you know “The Story of a Mother”? The protagonist is a woman whose small child falls ill. Afraid it will die, she keeps vigil by the cradle day and night. When she finally dozes off, Death takes the child. The mother wakes up and runs after it. At the end of her journey, she finds a garden tended by Death. Each flower is enchanted with the soul of a dying person. Inside a crocus, the woman hears the heartbeat of her own child. Just as she is about to pick it, Death sets a condition. It beckons the mother to a well and shows her two visions of the future. In the first, the small child is happy. The other entails pain and squalor. It was unclear which scene applied to her child. “Pick the flower, and you’ll find out,” Death assures the mother. The woman decides against it. Resigned to her fate, she returns home. I was eight years old when I read it. Afterwards, I asked, “Why me?” less and less often.

*

A year later, we moved to the outskirts of Gdańsk, into a house my parents had built. They celebrated no longer having to pay rent. I know already I’ll have to leave it when I’m older. I won’t be able to afford it. But the house had its advantages – the surrounding meadows. I would marvel at the skylarks singing over one another, bewitched by their warbling: long, peppered with whistles, always high, delivered in haste and ecstasy. I took them for something near theophany. As if God were speaking through them, that is.

The first pet in our home was a little rabbit. It was a gift to me from my mother. She was taken aback, though – I rarely want to play with it. I would stroke it, give it a carrot, but that was about it. I think my brother wanted it more than I did. A few years later, a stray female cat joined us. Then, for my eleventh birthday, I was surprised with a German Shepherd. Her canine nature irritated me. The constant jumping, the wet nose prodding me, the barking. ‘She’s not mine,’ I said. My parents were shocked, as was I. I had read in children’s stories that dogs were humans’ best friends. I remembered, in particular, the folk tale of “The Dog and the Wolf.” I had it on a cassette tape. What pained me most was the song at the end:

If in your cottage a loyal dog lies, you may sleep calmly through the night.

He will not leave you, he will not let you – no harm shall ever come in sight.

I blamed myself. How was it that my friends begged their parents for dogs, while I’d rather listen for skylarks? ‘But they don’t even understand what you’re saying,’ my mother tried talking sense into me. ‘They don’t cuddle; they don’t wag their tails.’

But they sang! I studied their voices in the encyclopaedia we had on CD. Each bird came with a few seconds of recording. Had I forgotten one? Couldn’t tell if the song belonged to a bullfinch or a blackbird? I’d just pop in the disk. I’d nag my aunt – she was the only one in the family with internet access. We’d go online to the Great Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia. You could hear the domestic pigeon so clearly there, its grr-coo-grr-coo undisturbed by echoes or street noise. The pigeon was one of some fifty birds I’d learned to recognise. One Christmas, I found Bird Sounds under the tree – a CD with vinyl recordings of the biophysicist Boris Veprintsev and the biologist Fred Jüssi. Thanks to it, I heard the unfamiliar song of the mistle thrush. 

I listened to the record with excitement. The largest of Poland’s thrushes did a lot of whistling, known to perform in concert from February onwards. It sounded like a flute, not unlike the blackbird. But I wasn’t fooled: its voice softened when it sang. It paused more briefly between the phrases. After the thrush, the cranes would cry out. I knew each CD by heart. As for my family, they merely sighed. They knew I wouldn’t get any of the birds wrong. The recordings let me identify the species around the house. The common ones: bullfinches, golden orioles, willow warblers, cuckoos, nightingales, great tits, goldfinches, crows, yellowhammers, wood pigeons. And the extraordinary ones: northern lapwings, grey partridges, quails, linnets.

Animals were a kind of calendar. Towards the end of March, the black redstart would burst into song. Around April came the nightingale. May and June brought the shrieks of the corn crake. Listen to this guy! Its voice sounded like someone winding an egg timer. I recorded everything on my Sony dictaphone. Later, listening back, I would be thrilled with my field recordings, despite the crackle and rustle. I could finally draw up a list of the avian inhabitants of our meadows. I got seventy. I didn’t know I would soon lose them.

*

Wetlands, six a.m. ‘What on earth is that candlestick?’ the woman asked. It was no candlestick, but my two microphones. For better stereo, I would fasten them to a rail, fifteen centimetres apart. Usually, I’d set them up in the bushes. After a few days, I’d listen back to the birds they’d picked up. When people found out I was recording, they’d make suggestions:

‘How about you make a sound map of Poland? With birds.’

‘I don’t have the means,’ I’d reply. Because how? I couldn’t go to the beach alone at eleven at night to record the dunlin. I wouldn’t manage in a swamp. I could’ve emotionally blackmailed my family: I can’t see, can I? I didn’t want to exploit my disability, though. Or my mother.

I’m still grateful to her, all the same. What’s that? She must know plenty of birds thanks to me? Oh, far from it. She’s not all that interested. And yet she’s willing to get up at three in the morning in May, when I want to go to the forest. Why so early? There’s less wind. Fewer insects flying about. At that hour, the birds exchange morning information: who’s perching where, and whether anyone has been eaten. 

I used to think ears alone were enough to hear these sounds. Nothing of the sort. You also need headphones and a parabolic reflector – a domed surface for the microphone. It looks like a satellite dish. You aim it at the skylark – you must do it with great precision – and immediately you can hear the song more clearly. Field recording is no competition, though. I don’t want to check off one new species after another. Why birds? Apart from insects, no one in nature calls out so frequently. Birds are goodness and beauty. And it’s not without reason that Dostoyevsky said, ‘Beauty will save the world.’

*

I’ve never seen a person. But they’ve never seen me, either. As a child, I would show off my recordings in class. ‘Oh yes,’ the science teacher agreed, ‘you cannot give this up.’ I was the only one in the class who would choose bizarre topics for my presentations – always about ducks or pelicans. Hardly anyone was impressed. 

The same went for my knowledge of the other birds, reptiles, and insects. Although it surpassed the textbook, the A-pluses at the end of the year went to those who knew how to show off but stayed within the curriculum. This indifference made it clear to me: you record silly little birds that don’t mean anything. Birds won’t change your studies – or your life.

Thankfully, I had a friend – Weronika. It wasn’t a sweet relationship. We were in the same class. Weronika would cry if she didn’t want to do something. When it came to my recordings, she wasn’t interested. ‘Go away!’ she sometimes snapped. It was because of her intellectual disability. I didn’t mind that we couldn’t have long, in-depth chats. No one else did as much for me as she did. In our fifth year, she refused to be transferred to another school. Because of me, would you believe it?

A year later, my parents and I consulted a child psychologist. She opined that integration hadn’t worked. We scrambled to figure out what to do next. If the barrier in socialising so far had been my blindness, it would likely be a problem in a new school as well. And I wanted, finally, to get on well with my peers. There was only one solution. I chose a middle school for the visually impaired in Laski myself. It was run by the Society for the Welfare of the Blind, in cooperation with nuns.

*

‘Goodness – a chick!’ my mother cried during a walk in the forest. ‘Now what?’

‘It won’t survive if we don’t take it home,’ I declared proudly. I was twelve years old and by then knew a thing or two about birds. The poor creature was a magpie. Still featherless. We took it in, laid it on hay in the cage the rabbit had left behind, and offered it water, sometimes a fly. We had no idea it wasn’t enough. The little one just lay there, completely still. It died the next day. My mother broke the news. My parents buried it without me, and I was upset with them for that. After all, it should’ve been like Słowacki wrote:

While battle raged, at mast I stood, be as it may,

And with the ship I drowned when vanquished down she went.

Trans. Jarek Zawadzki

The little magpie came back to me in a dream one night. In it, I went up to see the bird in the attic. When it saw me, the bird squealed reproachfully, ‘Why – oh why – did you not care for me?’ I must have been feeling terribly guilty.

*

‘You’ll give it another thought, maybe?’ my mother suggested. She worried about the distance – the middle school was outside Warsaw, more than three hundred kilometres from home. I refused adamantly. I arrived with my father on a Sunday, just before the start of the year. I made it before six in the evening and managed to meet a group who were just heading out to mass. Suddenly, some girls surrounded me. ‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you like? What do you listen to?’ I was flabbergasted. For the first time, people my own age were asking about me. I went with them to mass. Then on to supper in the dining hall. The groups welcomed the newcomers – including me. Once again, I grew shy. Before the meal, the entire hall burst into song in Highlander style (that’s how I remember it): 

Bless us, Lord, from heaven high above.

Hey! Let this earth not lack its daily bread.

Let there be bread, let there be taters too.

Hey! And love for Your dear Mother, pure and true.

They placed me in a dorm – in a room with four girls. We chatted for six hours that night. They were the ones who taught me the rules of Laski. Rule number one: nobody was going to do anything for you. The time you had to be most alert was during dining-hall duty. You had to cut bread, ham, and cheese yourself, lay out the dishes, brew tea for a group of thirteen, and carry it out. If you couldn’t make it, you found someone to cover for you. Monday bathroom duty was something else entirely. That’s when you had to get hold of the nun who kept the cleaning chemicals. Then you’d scrub the floors and sinks.

‘Be careful, though. The bathroom has two rooms.’

‘How will I know which cleaning product is which?’

‘Just like that. By the shape of the bottle.’

I would serve my own food. If I plated too much, others ate less. The same went for sweets. Each group had their share. No one liked it if one person gobbled up all the others’ sweets. You had to make sure it was enough for everybody.

I learned that not all newcomers could cope with that level of responsibility. Some went back home. But I adjusted quickly. It didn’t feel like military discipline to me. Before lunch, there were lessons. There was also education after that – education in how to live independently. A nun showed me how to press trousers. First, I’d have to run the iron down one leg, then the other; I turned the trousers over and did the same again. I had orientation and mobility classes, too. We’d walk around the school grounds. Or go into Warsaw with a guide, where we learned how to get on and off buses. As soon as I heard the growl of engines, my stomach would knot. None of them had audio announcements inside. How was I supposed to know which number had pulled up? I could have gambled, like some blind people did. They’d get on and quickly ask the other passengers which line it was. But that wasn’t for me. Too much stress. The same went for walking the street with a cane. My head would fill with nothing but doubts. Was the road really this narrow? Maybe I should have turned left earlier? Wait – last week there was a loose paving slab here, and today it’s gone. After three thoughts of this kind, I’d lose track of where I was.

Before I left for Laski, I was given a mobile phone for my birthday. I called my family every three days. I didn’t feel the need for more than that. I told them I’d settled in with the girls from my room. None of them mocked my passion. If I put on a CD with bird sounds, they’d be curious to know which bird was singing this time. The standard of education was the same as at my primary school. As for English, the sisters arranged individual lessons for me.

‘I’ve been watching you for some time. You’ve grown,’ one of them said. Perhaps, it was because I felt needed. I was no longer afraid of depending on someone. I no longer thought of myself as a problem. I learned how to ask for help. I was less and less surprised when someone liked me. My future in Laski was more troubling. After middle school, what awaited me here was either a vocational school for massage or a knitting studio, where I would make scarves and sweaters. Before the end of the year, I announced, ‘I’m going back.’

*

Have you ever heard nature disappearing? After I came back from Laski, I went out onto our terrace. I wanted to record the yells of my bird neighbours. I strained my ears. Then again. There was none of the skylark’s tiu-tiu-tiu. No linnets with their recurrent twit-twit. Perhaps some veet-veet from the barn swallows? Only silence. ‘The birds are gone,’ my mother sighed. ‘The meadows, too.’ Yep, someone might still stand up for a forest. For wetlands, too. But a meadow? It’s just barren land. Better to replace it with a playground or a car park – or rolls of turf, fresh saplings, foundations of new homes. It’s exactly how they destroyed my area. That was when I made myself a promise. When I grew up, I would record Where the Skylarks Once Sang. An album with the seventy birds I lost. I’d end it with a minute of silence.

*

Some ornithologists argue over which of Poland’s nightingales sings more beautifully. The thrush nightingale? Or the rufous? Professor Jan Sokołowski appreciated both virtuosos in his book Birds of the Polish Lands: the former for its “good instrument”; the latter for its “greater talent and better schooling.” Dr Andrzej Kruszewicz – an ornithologist and director of the Warsaw Zoo – is more generous to the thrush nightingale in his book. I have my favourite, too. Wait, I’ll turn on the computer. And the speakers – just a moment. I can’t use the computer without them. When I open the folder, the synthesiser reads its name aloud. It’s quicker in English. Too quick? I’ve set it to high speed, that’s why.

Right, here it is – the rufous nightingale recording. Do you notice how it spills out a hurried cascade of sounds as it sings? And now my favourite – the thrush nightingale. I captured it by the Biebrza river. It syllabifies more slowly than the other one. It leaves longer pauses. And at the end it even shows off with a grating little sequence. Here’s something to remember when you’re recording. Melodies of the same species can change over the years. Birds learn from one another. They pass sounds on. That’s why a nightingale singing today in Białowieża doesn’t sound like its forefathers They have dialects. The thrush nightingale sounds one way in Poland, and another way in Russia. Wait, I’ll play you recordings from both. How do I tell them apart? By the phrases they use. You didn’t catch that?

*

At home, my brother sometimes got on my nerves. Especially with the mess he left behind. ‘Three years in Laski and you’d learn some order!’ I’d snap.

After middle school, I chose High School No. 5 in Gdańsk. A humanities class of thirty-four. I didn’t push myself towards the bio-chem track. After all, I wouldn’t have been able to work as an ornithologist or a zoologist. I’d need not just ears, but eyes too. Animals had to be observed.

It was my grandmother who’d walk me to the school bus. She helped me get on, then I travelled on my own, there and back. In class, I was treated the same as everyone. Which was good. The teachers didn’t know braille. They frequently forgot to explain what they were writing on the board. I didn’t have a single textbook in braille. I put ordinary books into a scanner. First, it identified the letters, then it created a text file that could be loaded into a speech synthesiser. The only pity was the scanner would skip bits of text – because of the pictures, which broke it up. I no longer wrote on a brailler. I’d replaced it with an electronic notebook. In lessons, I took in as much as I could hear. If I didn’t know how to note down a factorial, I wrote it out in words. For more complicated things, I asked my deskmates. But that was rare.

‘Don’t you feel the need to communicate?’ a friend once asked, surprised. I did, but what was I supposed to talk about? I wasn’t interested in my girlfriends’ discussions about makeup and clothes. I was the no-makeup type; my mother picked out clothes for me. It even irked her that I was so indifferent to them. During breaks, I didn’t have many chances to talk to anyone. Most people roamed the corridors. I was afraid. The school was small, but very crowded. Backpacks all over on the floor. On top of that, no braille signs anywhere. I wouldn’t have managed even with a cane. I preferred to stay put outside the classroom. I used to call myself “an exotic specimen.”

Most of the pupils and teachers had never encountered a blind person before. But at least they remembered my name. I didn’t take offence when they’d toss out a “See you!” as they were leaving. I replied with the same. I’d even tell my mother that I’d seen this or that person at school. Come on now, I wasn’t going to say I’d heard them.

‘Do you wanna hear a joke about a blind mushroom picker?’ a classmate once said. I think she’d forgotten herself. ‘So she’s walking through the forest, and she can’t see, so she’s just stuffing everything she finds in her mouth. She’s very happy with the first mushroom: “Oh, it’s a porcini!” Next, she gets a chanterelle. Then, a bay bolete. In the end, she picks a turd. She tastes it and gets all happy: “Good thing I didn’t step in it!”’ No, I wasn’t offended.

I sat my final school exams in braille. In a separate room, with a separate committee. I cared the most about English – I was planning to study it. In the advanced oral exam, I didn’t describe the pictures. Instead, I listened to a recording. On the basis of that, I had to talk about the harmful effects of smoking. Easy enough. But it wasn’t so easy in the written exam. I’d always taken English in through my ears, not my eyes. Sometimes I mixed up which words had double letters and which didn’t. I lost points because of that. I got eighty-four per cent in Advanced English. I thought it wasn’t a disaster. But it still wasn’t enough for English Studies at university. My name didn't feature on the list of accepted students.

*

The grey nightingale and the golden oriole sound most beautiful. But my heart belongs to parrots. Cockatiels, especially. I bought my first one – Beaky – when I was in high school. I adopted the later ones. Why parrots? No, they don’t just peck at seeds. They’re very social and form lasting bonds. Most of them pair up for life. If you sell one, you make both miserable. Out of longing, they’ll start screaming for each other – or fall silent. Cockatiels often treat their caretakers the same way. I remember a male who once bonded with me. Before that, he’d had no contact with other birds. He would sing whenever he saw me. He wanted so badly to be stroked. He didn’t stop whistling even when other cockatiels joined him.

‘I had no idea parrots were so complex,’ my mother commented once. I’d been interested in them since middle school. It was when I came across a YouTube video with South American music. The quality was awful, but you could hear the parrots chattering gently in the background. Fascinating. I started reading about the birds of the Amazon. I learned that jungle rivers draw hundreds of parrots. The birds crowd onto the cliffs around them and peck at the sodium-rich clay. What struck me most was the moment they took flight. As if, all at once, a storm broke out, waves crashing, and a strong wind swept through. After hearing it, I grabbed my phone. I dialled my cousin.

‘I’ll go to Peru! I’ll record the parrots!’

‘You know that’s far, right?’

‘I know. I’m saving from today. I’ll get there before I’m retired.’

My cousin burst out laughing. I hung up. Teenagers really do have some wild ideas.

*

You messed up. You could’ve read all the materials one more time. You should have copied them out. But no, you decided you’d done enough. Such were my thoughts when the admissions results were announced. I understood I might not come first. But third on the waiting list? Clearly, I just wasn’t cut out for it. Then, a few days later, I got message: ‘Welcome to the English Studies programme at the University of Gdańsk!’ The three people ahead of me had dropped out.

By default, I was enrolled in the teacher-training track. How was I, a blind person, supposed to teach others? I panicked. In the end, I landed in the translation group. I trained and started getting my first freelance jobs. In my third year, I picked up a part-time position at a translation agency. I was saving up for my first professional microphone. I translated legal documents and user manuals for all kinds of devices. Nature books? Don’t be silly. Primary school had taught me one thing: birds were no way to make a living. Then, a fellow student finished me off: ‘After my master’s, I’m doing a PhD.’ I praised the idea. Intelligent people would always manage, wherever they were, I thought. As for me, I was destined to spend the rest of my life translating manuals.

I usually got around campus with the help of a guide dog. Despite my doubts, I decided on one after my first year. Luka was a Labrador. I took care of her, played with her – she was especially fond of tug-of-war – but our collaboration, given my relationship with dogs, was based on intellect rather than affection. Even when I walked with Luka, I still had to keep my bearings. Sound helped with that. A lecture hall sounded different from a corridor. When I entered a room, the echo gave a clue as to how large it was. How did I know how many turns separated me from the English literature history classroom? Muscle memory. Just as you can enter a door code without stopping to think.

Everything that mattered in my life would begin with sound. In my second year, I heard the show Poland’s Got Talent on TV. The contestants were singing “Katyusha” in Russian. It drew me in. I didn’t know the language, but I understood bits. I started digging around online and discovered more songs. Russian folklore caught my interest – especially white singing. Then, there was the bayan, an accordion-esque instrument. At first, I kept it a secret. In my family, Russians were the ones of the partitions and of the Katyń massacre. My grandfather, a shipyard worker, had once shouted, ‘Down with communism!’ But one day, it slipped out: I started humming, ‘Ah, ty step shirokaya…’. So I was done for. No point waiting. I told my loved ones that after my master’s, I was starting Russian Studies. ‘What? You do know how we Poles get along with that nation?’ they protested. There was another problem. I didn’t know the Russian alphabet.

*

Look out of the window – a blackbird! Startled, clearly. How can I tell? By the explosive, abrupt cascade that softens a little at the end. I can tell apart around three hundred European birds. Not just by their song, but also by the sounds they make in flight, sometimes even by the noises of their chicks. It’s easiest in the forest, home to birds with stable repertoires. Like robins, chaffinches, song thrushes or blackcaps. Sounds get more complicated near water, where birds from the shorebird order live. It’s rocket science. It's not so easy to tell a greenshank from a marsh sandpiper. They make simple sounds, so the differences between them aren’t as striking as they are with songbirds. What’s more, shorebirds modulate their signals. Sometimes they call softly, sometimes loudly. One moment, their voice takes on a gentle tone; a few seconds later, it bursts with emotion. These subtleties are significant. Just as between people. After all, “I like you” can be said in more ways than one.

There are things, though, that I can’t explain. Animals don’t commit suicide, do they? And yet I once read a book on bioacoustics by a Russian professor of ornithology, Vladimir Morozov. He writes about someone slipping a duck’s egg into a storks’ nest. When the birds realised, the female took off, folded her wings, and smashed herself into the ground. There was also the German ethologist Vitus Bernward Dröscher, who, in his book The Survival Principle, describes a pair of song thrushes from his own garden. Their peace was disrupted by another male. He serenaded in a way that made the female leave her old partner and move in with him. Seemingly nothing unusual – thrushes change partners every year. But the abandoned bird couldn’t stop singing. Eventually he grew hoarse and died. Probably from stress, since no injuries were found. And supposedly animals have no feelings.

*

I didn’t wait until my viva. In the final year of my master’s, I enrolled in Russian Studies. I felt at home there. At last, I was learning what I actually wanted to learn. Long before the admissions process, I’d placed an order with a library in Warsaw: three volumes of Russian for the blind. Except my scanner couldn’t read the braille dots. The electronic notebook made things worse, too – it didn’t support Cyrillic. I dug my heels in. I was so determined that I borrowed a different notebook from the university. Over the summer, I copied all the books into it manually. Word for word. At least I didn’t have any trouble with spelling afterwards! I was placed in a beginners’ group, but I already knew a thing or two. The lecturer even exempted me from the practical language exam. By my second year, I was already in the advanced group. In the meantime, I received my master’s in English Studies. And when it came to writing my master’s thesis for Russian Studies, I chose the title: “Fairy Tales in the Context of Traditional Values in Russian Folk Culture.”

‘How many of them did you analyse?’

‘One hundred and twenty.’

‘We’ve never had anyone know their work that well. Perhaps you’d consider expanding it into a PhD?’ I heard at my viva.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I blurted out. I mean, they shocked me. At home, I told my mother they must’ve not been feeling well that day. A few days later, I was even planning to tactfully turn my supervisor down. But she beat me to it. She called two days after the viva. Told me to hurry. Said that if I submitted the paperwork that very day, they might still put me on the list.

And put me on the list they did. I even did well on the interview. During my first class in academic teaching, we heard: ‘You are the intellectual elite. As researchers, you have a duty to seek the truth.’ I’d already found mine. We would’ve all been better off if they’d just kicked me out.

*

In 2016, I learned about Rainforest Expeditions – a research and ecotourism company based in Peru. They were filming macaws and leading jungle expeditions in the Madre de Dios region, in the Tambopata National Reserve, by the clay cliffs along the river of the same name. Exactly the place I’d dreamed of. Around that time, the company was crowdfunding a documentary about macaw research. ‘Maybe you could start a fundraiser of your own?’ they encouraged me. I contacted them first. They promised to look after me on site. My brother, too; I wouldn’t have managed without him. But the fear… I was afraid of how people would react to my fundraiser. There were kids needing money for cancer treatment. And here I was with my whim. Parrots.

At the beginning of April 2017, I suddenly felt unwell. Chest pain, a spike in blood pressure, a pulse of 140. I thought it was a heart attack. But then, the next day, there were zero symptoms. As if I’d woken up with a different head. Now or never, I decided. It was time to start crowdfunding.

Online comments? Plenty of positive ones. But there were also some like, “Blind lady feeding off people,” “Raising money for a holiday,” “Probably unemployed.” I was employed; I just didn’t mention it in the description. I couldn’t put anything aside from the translation agency job. Over five years, I had saved 5,000 zlotys for a microphone. To make myself credible, I recorded videos. I showcased my recording equipment, my material, even the parrots. I reached out to every birdwatcher whose recordings I’d listened to. I sent them a link to the fundraiser. ‘You don’t have to donate,’ I said. ‘Sharing is enough.’ That’s how I raised 10,800 zlotys. It’s a lot? It covered the flights. And there was still the Peruvian company to compensate. I told them about the fundraiser – for their information. I didn’t want any discounts. But they wrote back a few days later: ‘We had a meeting. We’ll take care of you and your brother. Free of charge.’ They didn’t give a reason.

I also heard from the owner of a Slovak music label, LOM. He’d created a line of T-shirts with an image of a girl recording a bird. He came across my fundraiser by chance. ‘So you’re the girl from the T-shirt,’ he wrote once he saw my photo. He then transferred the entire proceeds from its sales to me: 500 dollars.

Tambopata is a protected area, monitored by the Ministry of the Environment. Before flying out, I had to send photos of my microphones to Peruvian officials and explain what I intended to do with them. After we arrived: another surprise. We still had another five hours by boat to the jungle base. On board were me, my brother Marek, representatives of Rainforest Expeditions, as well as a resort official.

During the journey, he decided to quiz me.

‘What’s that in the air?’

‘A macaw.’

‘But what kind?’

‘Red-and-green,’ I replied without hesitation. He nodded. It was a trick question. Peru is home to three species of large macaws (there are small ones, too): the red-and-green, the scarlet, and the blue-and-yellow. To an untrained ear, they sound the same. But me being me, I’d bought twenty CDs about Amazonian birds before leaving. I’d memorised the sounds and some fun facts about seventy of them. That’s how I knew that the red-and-green macaw was the least hoarse of the three, with the least pronounced R sound.

There was something the guides hadn’t thought about. My world was made of sound, not sight. They warned me not to put the microphone outside the camp, otherwise the downpour would sweep it away. And they wanted to make recording easier for me, so they removed the wall on the forest side of the room where we slept. That way, I wouldn’t have to go outside. All I had to do was set the microphone by the railing, and that was it. So I set it there.

The first to speak was a spectacled owl. Hloo-hloo-hloo-hloo! Its hooting sounded like someone swinging a stick around, fading on the final syllable. Grrru-grrru, another owl answered, a crested one. It was shaping up to be beautiful material. I fell asleep and listened back in the morning. The loudest sounds turned out to be Marek and his snoring. There were me and my grunting, too. I’d caught a cold. Luckily, I had a whole week for jungle recordings.

During one of the treks, we stumbled upon a small herd of white-lipped peccaries. Like wild boars, but smaller than ours. They’re not aggressive, though I wouldn’t advise moving around them. They happened to be grazing – chomping away. What caught my attention was the clacking of their tusks. Like wood snapping in a fireplace. Carefully, I pulled out the microphone. And then, all of a sudden: Wooo-oo! Wooo-aaaah! A red howler gurgled overhead. I would never have believed a monkey could make such sounds. The roars resembled the cries of the orcs in The Lord of the Rings: low, booming, and drawn-out. Virtually atonal – so without any kind of harmony. It’s one of the loudest animals in the world. Its voice cuts through kilometres of jungle. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance to record it up close. I froze, but because of the cold, I felt a cough coming on. I covered my mouth. I held it in, held it in, and almost won. Then it slipped out like nobody’s business! Tears shot from my eyes. The howler, however, seemed unfazed. 

Today, I know that nine days is too little for a rainforest. Two of them I spent on a boat, travelling to and from the base. Before the trip, I’d worried that the jungle might overwhelm me with its noise. I didn’t need to. It turned out to be quite uncomplicated sonically. Yes, there were plenty of whistles, rustlings, hoots, croaks and ribbits. But they were simple sounds. The melodies of most of the birds there were limited to just a few notes. They were no match for our blackcap or garden warbler, which sing whole, intricate verses. But that was down to the nature of the rainforest. The tree leaves there have a different structure. Complex sequences of sound simply wouldn’t carry well.

There was just one thing that puzzled me about the jungle. By the clay cliffs, I revelled in the screeching of the macaws. I also listened to the excitement of the people around me – about how their plumage was so green, so red, sometimes tinged with orange. If I could see those colours, would I still be as captivated?

*

I felt as though I was living a double life: between birds and my PhD. One of the lecturers found out. She’d read articles about me written by journalists in Peru. I’d been telling them all about my hopes of returning to the jungle to study macaws. The lecturer passed this on to my supervisor, who soon got in touch. She told me there was no reason to limit myself to fables. Given my love of birds, she suggested bringing the two topics together – a thesis on the symbolism of birdsong in children’s literature, from Britain, Russia, Spain and Poland. I knew all those languages. I would analyse, then, how we interpret birdsong – the meanings we attach to it. Once upon a time, people believed that birds spoke to us. I have to admit, I was moved. Primary school had taught me that hardly anyone cared about the sounds of nature. Or about the people who recorded them. At the same time, I was apprehensive: there were barely any sources on the symbolism.

I browsed through them all. I ended up with a 300-page thesis with 525 items in the bibliography. I discovered that some cultures heard the line, “Spinning yarn, winding twine, off we go to plouuuugh,” in the barn swallow’s song. Others assigned kicking to the skylark. As it flew into the air, it was said to command: “Kick, sir, kick, for I have a stick.” When it dropped lower: “Don’t kick, sir, don’t kick, for I’ve dropped my stick.” And pójdźka – the little owl? I heard it for the first time on a cassette when I was thirteen. Even then, I had no doubt where its name came from. In Polish, pójdź means go. “Go, go!” the little owl called with an upward lilt. In folk culture, it was seen as a harbinger of death. Because people heard, “Go down the hole by the church hall,” in its hoots. I had a revelation during a chapter on the sound qualities of children’s poetry. I was analysing lullabies. Almost all included the phrase “luli, luli.” Those words didn’t come out of nowhere. Go on – say the letter L. You can hear its gentleness, can’t you? Just like the woodlark’s song. Its is voice delicate, like a flute. It’s so pleasant to us because it’s full of these L sounds.

The PhD took me six years. I asked for two extensions. When I finally submitted it, the reviews didn’t contain a single note. I defended my title in November 2023.

*

For over thirty years, I thought: You have nothing in particular to offer the world. It seems the world had other ideas, though. I became an English voice-over artist. I began teaching at the Foreign Languages Center of the University of Gdańsk. In Australia, I released three albums of my field recordings. In Slovakia as well. In Poland, two. It was never about self-development. I simply wanted to share my recordings. I had the idea of getting them out to hospices, care homes, children’s hospitals, mental health institutions and cancer foundations. Perhaps the sound of nature could help offer emotional support to people receiving care? I’d like to get it started; I’m just not sure how to organise it on a larger scale. 

The BBC recorded a radio feature in which I gave a journalist and a cinematographer friend a tour of Białowieża and its sounds. In 2023, the station named me as one of a hundred most influential women in the world – right alongside Michelle Obama. Ironic, isn’t it? Influential, but not exactly independent. That’s why I’ve made plans for the future. Unless I become severely incapacitated and can no longer cope, I’ll most likely return to the Society for the Welfare of the Blind – this time to Żułów, to a residential home for visually impaired women. I should meet some friends from middle school. I’ll die among them. Calm, and at peace. After all, I, Izabela Dłużyk, have received – and achieved – far more in life than I ever expected. 

The name of the school friend has been changed.