Eight Perfect Birds
read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Last week I saw eight perfect birds perched together in a tree in Northern Colombia. They were prothonotary warblers, little songbirds that breed in hardwood swamps in the Eastern United States and in the southwest corner of Ontario. It took me two years birding in New York to find my first prothonotary warbler, and when I finally saw one perched on a long branch above a pond, it was a moment of such sublimity that I found myself forgetting to breathe. Male prothonotary warblers are an exquisite, perfect lemon-yellow. They have black eyes and, during breeding season, a black bill. Their wings are the soft blue-gray of a Maltese cat. Prothonotary warblers are very pretty, in the way that elephants are very large, or the sun is very hot.
This is all to say that seeing a prothonotary warbler is a rare delight. If I’m lucky, I might see two of them in a year of birding in Brooklyn. Seeing eight of them together in one tree was almost too much to believe. I kept scanning back and forth with my binoculars, confirming and reconfirming reality, laughing out loud. I watched the birds for a few minutes as they hopped amongst the leafy branches.
And then I did what I’ve done thousands of times before, with warblers and sparrows and ducks and hawks and puffins. I took out my phone, and I tapped a + button. Eight times. I folded and collapsed those perfect lemon drop birds until neither their wonder nor mine remained, until they fit into a single row of data: S272711833, Prothonotary Warbler, Protonotaria citrea, 33686, 8, CO-LAG, ,L52692560,”Ruta Nacional 90, La Guajira, CO (11.277, -73.122)”,11.2771374,-73.1219055,2025-09-11, 05:51 AM,eBird – Traveling Count,78,1,2.879,,2
From left: Every Bird: Iceland by Jer Thorp; Song sparrow, photo by Jer Thorp.
When I was in high school, I worked in a pet store in a suburban shopping mall. I fed snakes and bathed ferrets, dust-bathed chinchillas, and farmed mealworms. I hand-fed baby macaws with syringes and unpacked Styrofoam crates filled with glittering tropical fish. As an animal-obsessed kid, it was a dream job.
read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Above: Spreads from “Eight Perfect Birds” from perhaps Issue 2, featuring part of the eBird dataset, as well as visualizations by Jer Thorp and his students.
Jer Thorp is an artist, writer, and teacher living in New York City. His data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including Times Square, MoMA, the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and the National Seoul Museum, as well as in various major publications. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. He is adjunct professor in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and is co-founder of The Office for Creative Research. jerthorp.me
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