BirdNote; Spark Bird: Tig Notaro and the Dinosaurs

BirdNote®

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

Tig Notaro is known for her acting, writing, and especially her deadpan comedy. Less well known is her love for birds. As a kid, she thought birds were cool, but her interest was rekindled by something unlikely back in 1993.

Tig Notaro: It was when I watched the movie Jurassic Park…

[MUSIC: Jurassic Park theme swells]

Tig Notaro: ...and just noticing how dinosaurs seem to move so similarly to birds, and I just started getting really interested.

[MUSIC: Crumpet by Blue Dot Sessions]

My mother came to visit me soon after I saw the movie. She was very into animals. And I was talking about this and about my interest in birds, and after telling her, she bought me a bird feeder.

[Song Sparrow ML222034]

Tig Notaro: I enjoyed any bird who’s swinging by to nibble on some bird seed. And I found myself reacting to them in the way that my mother used to react when she would see a Blue Jay, or cardinal. I remember she would yell to me, and I started to feel that when I would see them.

[Northern Cardinal ML107279]

Mark Bramhill: And Tig isn’t the only one in her family interested in birds. She remembers talking to her young son, Max...

Tig Notaro: He was three at the time, and we weren't talking about birds. He, he just got up off the couch and he said — completely unrelated to anything — he said, “It can be tricky... to touch a bird.” And I just thought that was the greatest sentence I'd ever heard in my life. And I thought it was such an astute observation. And I also thought, okay, clearly there's been a lot of attempts on his part to touch... birds. So I guess it runs in the family a bit.

Mark Bramhill: These days, Tig has bird feeders outside pretty much every window of her house, so she and her kids can always look out and see those modern-day dinosaurs.

Tig Notaro: And I hope that, as my mother was a great role model to me for loving animals, including birds, that I am that to my children. I mean, Max seems to have an interest in touching them.

Mark Bramhill: To hear more from Tig, you can listen to her delightful advice podcast Don’t Ask Tig in your favorite podcast app. For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

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Senior Producer: John Kessler

Production Manager: Allison Wilson

Producer: Mark Bramhill

Associate Producer: Ellen Blackstone

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Song Sparrow recorded by Randolph Little. Northern Cardinal recorded by Wil Hershberger.

BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.

© 2021 BirdNote April 2021 Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# sparkbird-08-2021-04-20 sparkbird-08