The Girl with the Bird Tattoos

The Girl with the Bird Tattoos

A profile of  North Park artist, musician and conservationist Normandie Wilson

By Ellie M. Barnes

Does it take a village to raise a bird? One would think not, they live and fly in the wild and can go anywhere. The reality is that vital habitat that birds need to hunt and feed, nest and raise their young is sometimes hard to come by, hard to reach and difficult for them to sustain themselves in, especially in areas of urban and suburban development. For every backyard bird that is lucky to come upon a family that will provide the space and environment it needs to raise their fledglings and promulgate its genus, many endangered species that need specialized habitat are part of the hundreds faced with extinction. It can take many human voices to promote their cause at hearings over land use issues, and it takes a special type of human to raise their voice in support of a home for a bird.
Sporting a jaunty cap, 28-year-old artist, musician and conservationist Normandie Wilson of North Park has joined her voice to the Audubon chorus. Armed with five uniquely original bird tattoos on her upper right arm, and a determination to make a difference, a better voice could hardly be found. During Normandie’s first Audubon meeting in early 2010, this tiny young woman was asked by Jim Peugh, longtime chairman of the Conservation Committee, if she would speak on the record the next day in Coronado, at the Naval hearings concerning the increase in training activities along the Silver Strand.
This area is one of the few protected habitats left on the Southern California coast that can support the nesting sites vital to the survival of the endangered least tern and the snowy plover, two species of birds that, along with many other animal species, live in that habitat. Already impacted by encroachment by humans, 90% of the snowy plover’s habitat has been destroyed, endangering their survival. The least tern numbers are declining, and no one really knows why.
When she went to the hearing, she was surprised to see so many residents of Coronado and the Silver Strand who were concerned about the effects of the increase in naval training on their lifestyles. Many of them were very angry about the noise and other factors. “When I told my grandmother about the hearings, she said to find out who the Commander was, and tell him that my cousin was in the Navy.” At the next hearing, she did just that, seeking out Captain Yancy Lindsey, and speaking to him directly.
He pointed out to her that the Navy maintained many habitat conservation areas, including San Clemente Island, and that the entire Silver Strand would be developed if not for the Navy’s presence. She told him that there was a lot of truth to what he was saying, but she reminded him that the main way to help endangered species survive is to make every effort to protect the conserved habitat areas where they can nest and raise their young, undisturbed.
Balancing the needs of security, with the nests of birds on beach is a large, interesting task. No matter which way you go, there is flak. Why are the birds important? Who is this for? Lindsey told her that he sometimes stayed up at night, thinking about it, and thought about the future he was leaving for his kids.
Normandie had concerns that people would look at her youth and think that she would chain herself to a tree to prove her point. She instead uses gentler tactics. “We have a responsibility to watch our rhetoric,” she says, “and the hearing was good practice for me. How we present the information is as vital as what we are saying. Many young people don’t know how to get involved; they want to help, but have a hard time focusing. There are so many problems in the world that you can get hung up on what to do and where to start.
“Why should people care about conservation? Here is why. You should care about this: people are always saving we should save the Earth, but it is really not the Earth that needs to be saved. We’re going to have to change, as we are really the ones at risk.
“I was raised in West Virginia, and my grandmother was very involved with birding. She had a big window in her kitchen where we could look out at them. I used to love television shows like ‘Captain Planet,’ a show about a family with five kids who were heroes of the environment.”
Fern Gully, which “Avatar” was based on, was another one of her favorites. “Once my folks came back from a trip to San Diego with a video of the San Diego Zoo. I watched it over and over, fascinated by the exotic animals.”

Drawing Birds
Normandie played the piano for the school choir, learned the trumpet and other instruments and spent time drawing and painting animals. “My teachers wanted me to draw humans, but I only wanted to draw birds and other animals.” She graduated from Oberlin College, lived in New York for a while, and then moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in accounting at the famed McCabe’s Guitar Store in Santa Monica. She joined a band in San Diego, Red Pony Clock, traveling there a few times a month for gigs.
She eventually moved to San Diego, and wanted to do something here that concerned the environment. “I went to an Audubon Conservation Committee meeting and liked what I saw there. They combine habitat conservation efforts, education and support about wildlife and wildlife issues.” She began teaching art and environmental education, for Audubon, to sixth grade classes, taking field trips to the Tijuana Slough and other conservation areas. “The biggest battles now are not with things we can tie ourselves to,” she syas. “Concepts are not so cut and dried. Tying myself to a tree is not the most effective means. Audubon is a place to get your realistic voice together, surrounded by friends and allies.”
She got back together with her band and made a record. “One of the band members told me that I did not sing very well and was not respectful. I left that band and went through a period when I felt out of touch with my own power. I thought to myself, what sings? A canary.” She designed a beautiful watercolor rendition of the yellow canary and got her first tattoo. The canary is central in the grouping of five birds on her arm. “Canaries sing beautifully and I thought that maybe it would help my singing.”
The next tattoo she got was the Indigo Bunting, a native to West Virginia, where she was born and raised. “I saw a lot of them when I was growing up.” The next bird was the Summer Tanager, a brilliant red bird. “For the color,” she said. She included two critically endangered birds so that she could talk about them: the Cerulean Paradise Flycatcher, found only on one island in Indonesia, and the Cherry-throated Tanager, one of the rarest and most critically endangered birds in the world.
“There are very few pictures of this striking bird, I looked at a photo of a specimen. There may not even be a recording of him.” She designed each brilliantly colored bird and each tattoo is an original work of art, beautifully rendered and looking like a perfectly articulated painting, not just a spectral, blotchy, stylized tattooed depiction.
The Cherry-throated Tanager was first described towards the end of the 19th century, in South America from a single specimen that was shot by a well- known naturalist. The specimen was left at the Berlin Museum, where it survived bombings during World War II. It was not seen again in the wild until a sighting in 1941. More than 40 years passed, during which it was considered extinct, before it was sighted again in 1998. It resides in only one small region of Brazil.
The dusky blue and grey Cerulean Paradise Flycatcher was feared extinct until recently, and qualifies as critically endangered because of its tiny range and population. They are considered to have undergone a major and continuing decline owing to extensive habitat loss.
The Cerulean Paradise on Normandie’s arm strikes a proud pose, its feathers slightly puffed as it gathers its voice to sing. The Summer Tanager is an entirely red, North American bird, striking another bright note on her arm. The quizzical set of its head and bright eyes meet the viewer a moment before it takes flight. This Tanager lives in southern forests and eats bees and wasps and their larvae. It can catch an insect in flight, and then scrape it against a branch to kill it and remove the stinger before consuming it. Before the long flight to winter in Central and South America, it puts on large amounts of fat. Its song is a grouping of slurred whistled notes with short pauses. Some say it sounds as if it is saying “peanut butter.”
The Indigo Bunting is a brilliant, dark blue bird of fields and roadsides, preferring abandoned land to urban or intensely farmed areas. Normandie’s Indigo is close to her heart, a bird familiar from her childhood.They migrate at night, using the stars for guidance. It learns its orientation to the night sky by observing the stars as a young bird. Humans love it for its constant song of musical warbling notes. They learn their songs in social interactions with other buntings, changing their local dialects generationally, like whales.

Birds on the Arm
All of the birds on Normandie’s arm are passerine birds, the name coming from the Latin,word for sparrows, “passerinus,” meaning to sing, and denoting all other birds of that type. Those small, simple sparrows are true songbirds, coming from an ancient order of birds that is over 60 million years old, with an estimated 6,000 species spread across the world. Larks, tanagers, buntings, waxwings, starlings, pigeons and finches are all passerine birds. As long as humans have been around, they have been serenaded by their distinctive and beautiful songs, which are enabled by the syrinx, a specialized vocal organ located at the branch of the lungs, which allows them to produce two different sounds at once.
Each bird we now see is part of the heroic journey of its kind through thousands of years, similar to the human odyssey. Birds are important figures in the art and mythology of every human culture. Biblical psalms refer to the marvelous singing of birds countless times and artists have depicted birds through the centuries in countless ways. They have been shown as symbols from heaven, and as messengers, like Noah’s dove, navigating her way back to his ship across the deep waters, carrying mankind’s hope in her tiny beak.
For thousands of years, humans have watched them nesting, laying their distinctive colored eggs, applying a high level of parental care of their featherless and blind babies, and capturing insects that would normally inhale our crops. But it is only relatively recently that human activities have so profoundly affected the passerine’s ability to live.
Normandie, as an artist, has made a sizeable commitment to the ancient showing of birds. “I painted an acrylic, on board, of snowy plovers that is now at Audubon. I painted it before I knew about the plight of the snowy plover. I decided, then, that I wanted to paint every bird before I die. There are over 10,000 species of birds. I know that is a tall order, but I think that I can do it. At one point, the task began to overwhelm me, but a good friend inspired me to keep on going, that the task was worth while.”
What would Normandie do to encourage people to help the environment? “Even small things, like growing a garden, is something anyone can do to help,” she says. “Every single day we are faced with thousands of choices, many of these affect the environment. We get pressure every day to think that those choices don’t matter, but they do. No one should feel guilty, and there are a million things that one can do: buy local, buy organic, e-mail and call people when an environmental issue comes up. Be persistent. Be polite. It all starts with you. If you are not happy with the ways things are, change yourself.”
Birds seem free, but there are a lot of changing elements to their survival. Humans go places because they can, or because they want to make money on some resource, or get away from annoying people or politics. Wildlife is bound to the earth in a way we are not. They must have their home, or they die. Now, without our help, will they make it?
For Normandie, “One of the things that defined, for me, what I wanted to do, was something said by naturalist John Cody: If you are concerned about the earth, take care of the tiniest gnat, then everything that depends on that gnat will be able to take care of itself. ”
We often roll our eyes, or sigh, at the sight of tattooed young people, especially the ones with tattoos modeled after tribes that have tattooed themselves for centuries for ritual, religious or tribal identification. What a fake, we think, looking at an obvious Southern California city person. But Normandie has declared that she is now one of the tribe of birds, and is proving her place in that esteemed tribe.
One of Normandie’s creations is the black cotton bag she carries with her, emblazoned with a bird of her own design, stenciled in purples and pale lilac. Underneath the passerine, in elegant script, is the phrase, “Every Single Bird.”