The Bird Man

The Bird Man

The Man

“This is why the Irish squeeze into the pubs for a pint,” he’d say, pointing to the sky.

The weather is horrible in Ireland. The punishing rain comes and goes, and it arrives and departs at whim, carried along with the charcoal clouds. Dark gray sheets mark the sky from one horizon to another while brief interludes of light force their way down, baking the surface. It's definitely a departure from California's perpetual sunshine. This gloom of course, seems to have no effect on James McElroy -- he’s spent half his life in it.

James McElroy himself was the reason why I chose Ireland for my 07’ Summer Abroad Program destination. He has an affably caustic disposition and a wonderful harsh sarcasm that polarizes groups of people in the same way Moses parts the Red Sea. To put it more bluntly, people must produce an opinion about him whether they like him or not. And he is not a man you overlook as you cross paths with him. Aside from his large, portly frame, McElroy has tussled stringy hair, some wayward, some dropping over his forehead. He dresses rather plainly: a simple button-down shirt and a worn-out pair of jeans. His fingernails are long and varied in length: perhaps that’s why he never points with his hands, but rather with his eyes…

Thus, I am hard pressed to believe how a man like this ended up here Davis, much less, how he fits in. The UC system always seems to have its fair share of eccentric teachers, but McElroy seems different still. He even has three first names. Professionally he goes by James, but his friends go him Jim. On paper, it’s Seamus. I called him “Macky.” Other students gave him the monikers “The Santa Claus Man,” “Kingpin,” and “Evil Eyes.” There undoubtedly many more. The students on my summer program agreed to dub him “The Bird Man.”

In order to better understand his place at Davis, one would have to look up his past. McElroy earned his B.A. at Trinity University, Dublin in 1977. He taught at the Irish College of Journalism at the National University of Ireland, and then, with another Irish recession looming he decided to go to New York. He taught at Manhattan College, Marymount College, and Manhattanville while continuing his research on Irish Literature, ultimately earning his PhD in Ireland at University College Dublin. McElroy then journeyed to UC Davis where he currently teaches an assortment of literature and composition courses.

Although the classes he teaches here all relates to his life’s research, his fascination with us young Californians seems to give him endless amusement and an air of youthfulness amidst the familiarity of his homeland and academic nature of this program. He’s a spectator, just like we students. The funny thing about him is that one never quite know when he’s watching, scrutinizing, and what he is making of it. McElroy’s acute sense of his surroundings reflects the nature of his education and upbringing -- which centers on Irish Literature and Ireland’s environment. This all accumulates in the recent Ireland: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, where he serves as the editor.

The Birds of Ireland

The summer program required us students to bring a book of Western European birds as well as a sturdy pair of binoculars. This of course, was made at McElroy’s request before the program started, for it would have been odd if this requirement was part of the University’s mandate. While many of us left those “essentials” in at our hotel rooms or even had bothered to get them in the first place, McElroy was always found with a hardbound copy of Birds of Ireland by his side, almost as if it were a Bible. He had no use for binoculars, for he had an uncanny ability to spot a bird several hundred meters away and identify it quickly and accurately. All he needed was a glance.

McElroy’s eyes were always something to behold. They are almost yellow, as if they were once hazel or even green before they dulled. The other details about him pale in comparison to the brilliance of them -- the way they waver side to side as he speaks to you, as he trains them on you after you ask him a question. Maybe he’s seen too much. Though the eyes look dusty and faded, their movements remain sharp and focused. They saw things that the rest of us were oblivious to.

“It’s a shag!” he’d point out. We’d turn to see a black speck gliding across the turbulent sky. I had only known “shag” to have another meaning, and that was because I had watched Austin Powers one too many times.

The rest of us were painfully slow at this identifying the birds. We’d strain our eyes through our binoculars while playing with the focus, flip through our bird books, and finally mutter out the name of a bird that was completely unrelated to it. What the hell is it? We’d look to him and he would motion with his head, with his eyes, towards the target. “How can you tell? You know, how do you know it’s a shag?” My classmate asks. “There are hundreds of seabirds out here.” Apparently, McElroy has been an avid bird watcher since he was a youth, and there is actually a science to it. McElroy responds, “First off, you have to look at its flight patterns. See how they swoop down into to the water like a bomber? How they dive into the water? Next, if you look carefully at its plumage, you can tell that this particular species is only seasonal here. It’s got gray markings alongside the belly.” McElroy’s instruction for us here only scratches the surface of true bird-watching.

Some of the students called him “The Bird Man” because they saw his hobby as pointless nonsense driven by some unknown fetish. The other students did try however, to open their minds to it. As we tried to follow his instruction, the seabirds would soar down the coast, slipping into the eternal horizon. They flew out of sight, never to return. We didn’t have a shot at identifying many birds. We just had to take his word for it.

The Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales of Belfast

Weather that was beyond reckoning confined everyone indoors. We had a lot of downtime -- plenty of opportunity to ponder the musings of long dead authors and to reflect on the majesty of being in a culturally-rich and historically-relevant country by watching television stations that played American shows from another decade. For those students who grew sick of the sickening weather, they would brave the elements and schedule their own field trips. The first of many was Belfast.

As a young man growing up in the then-conflict-torn Belfast, the capital of North Ireland, McElroy, like many, relied on welfare due to a crippling recession, and just about everybody was trying to avoid the frigid outdoor temperament. “Everybody was on welfare -- your neighbors, your relatives, your friends. Nobody had a job,” he recalled. “We’d get in line to pick up our checks at the welfare office and then head straight to the nearest pub to cash it in. After a couple of drinks we’d all be broke again. That was life.”

McElroy has an abundance of anecdotes like this. It’s as if being somewhere familiar sets off sparks in his memory. The cogs in his head start spinning and the words just seem to flow out. It’s just his part of his charm as a natural born storyteller. His voice would always be calm and nonchalant, yet the undercurrent of his tone alludes to so many emotions contained, tagged, and meticulously filed into the vault of his being. If anyone wanted to hear more of these stories, one rarely had to seek them out. McElroy would often wait until you were within earshot. Most of the time, he would choose a single victim to dispense his tales to, but if there happened to be a flock of students nearby, they all would have to hear out his insight.

On one optional trip during my summer program, I took a bus to McElroy’s past – the city of Belfast, which is situated by Ireland's northern coastline. Ireland is split into two parts: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, hence, the two capitals. The reasons for their partition are political as much as religious. Following several centuries of oppression imposed by the British, Southern Ireland eventually gained some sort of independence and founded the Republic of Ireland (predominately Catholic). Northern Ireland, which remains very much pro-Britain (and predominantly Protestant), engaged in several decades of bloody revolt, terrorism, and strife with the South in what is now known as The Troubles, which started in the late 1960’s and lasted until April 1998.

McElroy himself did not accompany us to Belfast. Perhaps it was a personal choice. “For tourists like yourselves, it’s okay. They don’t mind outsiders. Just don’t act like a tourist waving your camera around.” Maybe for those who grew up there, a sense of danger still lingered. Knowing all the history however, made it eerily exciting going there. Barbed wire and formidable red brick walls outline the city. In the fringes of the city are graffiti and bullet pocked walls and windows. Video cameras are set up (very 1984-esque) at intervals to monitor the uneasy peace. There is also steel wall that divides the city in two, the Protestant side and the Catholic side. It's been there for over 35 years and has outlasted even the Berlin Wall.

McElroy lived here during The Troubles. Growing up without any real money, or having any prospects of flourishing in his home country, there was little to look forward to or hope for. Life went on unabated, however. “The Irish are different when they deal with hardship. We have the Almighty as a scapegoat,” McElroy said. “We would say, ‘I hate God, it’s his fault.’ Then we’d have another pint. Life goes on. Of course if I was American and was dealing with the same issues to no avail, I’d probably say, ‘I’m such a loser!’”. Despite his situation, McElroy continued to do what he loved. In addition to his literature, he discovered bird watching then. He would trek down a long road with his binoculars into a mountain path alone, where he’d spend an afternoon looking for the fleeting colors of a bird’s plumage, a hint of life in the every day reality of gray.

In addition to those dreary circumstances growing up, things were considerably worse due to his religious affiliation. His parents owned a grocery store in Belfast, and as his family was one of the few Catholics in that area at the time, they were the target of many acts of terror by Protestants, who firebombed the store, and administered death threats. One time, his mother was taken from their home and dragged out into the streets, where other Catholics were being rounded up. But as fate would have it, she was spared. McElroy himself had his fair share of danger. “Sometimes, on the way home from school, there would be a bus bombing or something of the sort. All the roads would be blocked and locked down. I’d have to walk the long way home,” he said. “I’d get home very late in the evening and when I stepped through the door, my mother would say ‘Oh the boy is still alive.’ Then, we’d start dinner.”

Although The Troubles are now over and peace has been finally established between the feuding sides, those involved still bear deep scars that even time may not heal. “I met a woman in a café at Belfast once,” McElroy recalled. “We sat down together and had a lovely conversation. I found out that she had also left Belfast as a youth, and that she originally lived on an area not too far where I was from.” The woman, as he found out, had immigrated to the United States at an early age, where she lived in Berkeley for nearly four decades. She returned to Belfast, after The Troubles, to begin anew. McElroy continued, “It got to a point where she asked me the question. The question over here basically determines whether you are Catholic or Protestant. Except -- the question is poised in a very indirect way. She asked me what street I lived on, and I told her. She promptly collected her belongings, stood up, and left the café.” Apparently, she had figured out that the street he lived on was part of a Catholic community. She was raised as a Protestant. That was the last he ever saw of her. “She was a charming woman,” McElroy said.

McElroy accepts these hard facts as a part of his life. He is not bitter or angry when he thinks about those years in Belfast. Interestingly enough, a good deal of McElroy’s humor comes from what many would agree was a “stressful childhood”. A side effect of this however is a decidedly darker sense of humor that not everyone may appreciate or understand. This sense of mortal irony was pervasive not through just McElroy himself, but even through the literature that we studied. One famous poem by Seamus Heaney, a renowned Irish writer, called “The Early Purges,” which concerns a farm child watching the euthanizing of a litter of kittens, as they would serve no purpose on the farm and would only burden the already struggling family with resources they did not have to spare.

“Everyone [Americans] over there seems so damned sentimental,” McElroy said, pondering the poem during a class discussion. “Over here, if you spent so much time agonizing yourself over a few stupid animals, it would probably spell the difference between life and death. You have to switch your view to a more efficient, economical standpoint. If you did that to animals in America, you’d probably be arrested”. Despite this, McElroy had a different opinion on birds. “Birds were always a symbol of freedom to the Irish, especially within the literature” said McElroy. “Birds could come and go as they pleased, and they possessed the trait of freewill, mankind’s own choice in the face of destiny, something many of the Irish seek deeply within their souls.” To me, birds are the pests that defecate on my car.

McElroy once said, “If you were never born with vision, how could you understand what vision is?” He realized that a singular viewpoint is the root of many differences and misunderstandings. While he finds American culture ridiculous at times, he respects that it is a unique form of interpreting the same things. “There are no absolutes, just different ways of looking at it,” McElroy said. “Take a look at these bird books for example. Why is the picture of the male bird always in front of the female birds? It has the dominant patriarchal influence. It is subtle things like this that we never look into and question, the things that we accept for fact as ‘normal.’”

Life Goes On

McElroy eventually left Belfast in pursuit for his passion in literature. The rest of it is history – How he came to the United States and taught at all those colleges and universities. McElroy always tried to return to his homeland however. Unfortunately, there was little for him there during his education, especially in the 1980’s, as wave after wave of recession hit Ireland. “It was a place literally without hope,” McElroy said. “All the young people were leaving, hoping to find their way elsewhere.” However, a recent boom in software and technology has hit Ireland at the turn of the millennium, and the country has seen unprecedented growth in the past few years. During my visit there in the summer of 2007, there were ethnicities of all types milling about in the cities, products of globalization (ie McDonalds, Hollywood cinema, tourist traps) sprouting out everywhere, and a definite sense of opportunity.

McElroy’s book, Ireland: A Traveler's Literary Companion, which was released in November, voices many of his opinions with a compilation of his own work and other Irish authors. It speaks of his homeland, drawing out the hidden truths of the people while mitigating the stereotypes and misconceptions through the stories contained within. It is unclear what McElroy intends to do now, but one thing is certain. “The Irish culture, until very recently, has largely been an oral tradition,” McElroy said. “Aside from the Book of Kells (One of the only surviving Irish literary artifacts I had the chance to view at Trinity University, Dublin), there is very little record of the Irish people by the Irish people. The victors, the conquerors, and the winners [The British] are the ones that write history. It’s always been that way throughout history. Just look at the Romans.” I guess McElroy just wants to preserve what he feels is part of his bloodline, to give all those who had no say throughout Ireland’s tumultuous history a voice. We were here. We lived here, and we will continue living on.

We had found a beach to stop at during our trip around the Dingle Peninsula, located on the southwest end of Ireland. I stayed back at the entrance of the beach with Professor McElroy and another student while the others clamored about on the rocks jutting out the water. “Just look at all those half-wits,” McElroy chuckled, “Wandering around like it’s the first time they’ve ever been to a bloody beach!” His eyes laughed too. I just sat there, staring out at the unrelenting waves pounding the jagged coast as McElroy approached me. After a few more jokes, he dropped this bit of Zen on me:

“Epiphanies are about finding the extraordinary out of the ordinary, the mundane,” he said. He switched his view from his students to a pair of birds struggling against fierce winds, while trying to fly out towards the churning sea.