This is bird note.

Acclaimed ornithologist and writer Jay Drew Lanham's obsession with birds began when he was a kid,

wanting to join them in the skies.

Wanting to have that experience of sort of untetheredness,

being unbound from my two little feet,

not just being able to run, but being able to loose those bounds and to fly.

I spent a lot of time with cardboard wings.

I spent a lot of time with umbrellas trying to float like Mary Poppins.

It was always trying to defeat gravity.

You feel like, oh my God, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen.

But gravity always won. After each unsuccessful attempt, Drew thought through what went wrong, iterating on his designs.

Maybe the wings weren't big enough.

If I was lucky, there was some huge box like you know an

appliance box man after you finish playing in that after it's a cave then you can

cut it apart and you have these huge wings that you can then strap to your arms and I would decide what's

going to work is if I can get some wind under my wings so I need to climb higher and if

there was a convenient stack of hay bales or maybe the

roof of the house, I'm going to jump off and I'm going to fly. Thankfully for me the only thing

that ever got broken was a collarbone and bruised ego.

Drew eventually gave up on trying to fly, but he never stopped loving birds.

For Bird Note, I'm Mark Bramhill. You're going to.