Birds of a feather
A heartbreaking insight into a man’s personal history
For more than two decades, one of Brian Brett’s closest animal companions was an African grey parrot he named Tuco. He was named “after the monstrous yet amusing Latino bandit” following his first encounter with Brett and his wife’s cat, in which the parrot cleverly ended up the victor, the cat “plunging out the back door, not to be seen for several hours, and only then slinking nervously into the bedroom.”
So significant was the relationship between man and bird — and what it represented — that Tuco serves as both the namesake and the catalyst for Brett’s enthralling new memoir. Tuco is the third volume in the Salt Spring Island writer and farmer’s sprawling examination of his place in the natural world. It follows on the heels of Brett’s award-winning memoir Trauma Farm, which explored his life as a farmer and custodian of the land on which he lived.
This, time, Brett uses his relationship with “his” bird (Brett scoffs at the idea of ownership of his compan- ion) as a trigger for not only a chronicle of his experiences with birds through his life (as hunter, observer and “owner”) but also an overview of the world of birds. From flying dinosaurs to Thanksgiving turkeys, falconry to barbaric present-day hunting and smuggling practices, it’s an account that weaves together strands of biology, history, sociology, economics and countless other traditions to create an eclectic portrait, at once scholarly and personal, detached and deeply emotional.
At the core of Tuco, however, is an often heartbreaking insight into Brett’s own history, and his identification with the “Others” of the natural world, of which birds are just one example. Born with Kallman syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the body’s hormonal production, Brett faced his early life in “the chemical inferno” of “my androgyny,” a childhood and adolescence of torment and bullying.
“The children could smell the Other in me, the way a parasitic cowbird chick will peck to death its fellow nestlings or push them out of the nest,” he writes
Tucois, at its heart, an account of survival, of the life of the Other, whether in its human or avian form. It’s a beautiful book, rich in both information and emotion, anchored in Brett’s rich, accessible prose and his humble, plain-spoken strength. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.