The Birds On My Grandmother’s Mango Farm

Songs, calls, destructive taps.

Photo by Frank Eiffert on Unsplash

When I was a little girl, I didn’t pay much attention to the birds on my grandmother’s mango farm. She could sit on her porch and watch them flit back and forth for hours. She told me their names, which I promptly forgot.

There was one bird that always made her mad, because it had a sad song. I remember hearing it around sunset. Two sad bursts, a song that turned low at the tail end. My grandma would say: “Can’t you sing something nice?” And it would reply with the same sad drawl.

Now, I can understand her seemingly ridiculous demand, for a bird to sing a song completely against its nature. At the time, she was recently divorced. She had moved back to her home country of Costa Rica to live on a property she had purchased with her husband, a property that was supposed to thrive. There was an end to that dream, and I imagine she just wanted to hear something sweet, something beautiful, and not a terrifying melancholy song at sunset.

Around sunset, different flying animals would come out — Squeaking bats that hid in the walls during the day; large moths that hid in the curtains until they were found dead on the floor. My grandma loves birds but detests bats. I remember her chasing them out of her home with a broom. I remember the colony she found when her roof was reshingled.

The first bird I learned to identify was a woodpecker. I’d later come to learn that it was called, specifically, a Lineated Woodpecker. Their red crowns and white stripes made me think of rock stars. They tap, tap, tapped on the palm trees and created mysterious holes.

My grandma joked that they always had a headache.

The second bird I recognized by sound was the Oropéndolas de Montezuma. Every time I heard its signature crackle, I had to run outside and find it. The Montezuma bird’s call begins with a sound like static from an old TV or a radio…it’s an oddly mechanical sound that will bring you back to a Radio Shack in the 90s.

This is only the first part of its call. Then, it creates a beautiful yet confusing series of sweet bursts that seem to come from multiple directions at once. They can be found near in the mango trees near my dad’s house —I imagine because the mangos in those trees are softer, squishier, and easier to pierce.

I love my grandmother’s farm. It is its own refuge, its own safe universe. However, I only have to go up the road to the local soccer field to hear different taps and squeaks and songs. This small town is filled with theories over what happened during my grandmother’s divorce — Even now, all these years later.

Customers of the local watering hole usually tell me the gossip like they’re doing me a favor. “Oh, do you know so-and-so? Well she seems to know your family. And she said this.” They want a reaction I will never give them, a song I refuse to sing.

I’ve heard it all: My grandpa didn’t appreciate my grandma; my grandma took his land from him; my grandpa was a liar; my grandma should have forgiven him; my grandpa was the brains behind everything; my grandma was foolish to give up a life in the USA.

Sometimes I feel a bit like my grandma: “Can’t you sing something nice?” But instead of making ridiculous demands, I go home to confront my own bats and moths.

In the morning, there will be more beautiful tunes—toucans; woodpeckers; mot-mots; parakeets; grackles; thrushes; wrens; tanagers; flycatchers; guans.

Songs of a new day, a new life, an old farm.

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