The idea of Montana first got planted in my head when I was still in high school. Montana represented remoteness, natural beauty and adventure. In Montana, I wouldn’t be surrounded by lawyers and bankers, and I wouldn’t feel the pressure to be a lawyer or banker, and I wouldn’t feel ashamed for not being a lawyer or banker. I could easily imagine myself alone there without feeling alone. This was back in 1985, mind you, when such places still existed in the Lower 48.
I finally saw Montana for the first time when I drove from Chicago to look for a place to rent while I attended grad school in Missoula in 1997. It was midsummer, and everything was so clear — the air, the sky, the water. Every time I drove past a hillside, I felt the inclination to pull the car over and run up it. I soon learned some of Montana’s quirks. For instance, when I moved to Montana there was no daytime speed limit on the highways. The only time Montana had a speed limit was during the energy crisis in the ’70s, when the federal government mandated it. But even then, Montana dodged it almost entirely. Sure, they posted the occasional speed limit sign, which drivers would rarely follow, and yes, the police occasionally wrote tickets. But if you did get pulled over, the citation wasn’t for “speeding,” it was for “wasting fuel.” All tickets, no matter how fast you were driving (unless you were reckless), were five bucks.
One of the first things that thrilled me in Missoula was seeing a “CATTLE AT LARGE” sign. Until that moment, “at large” suggested only criminals and escaped convicts to me. That sign made me think about cows differently. Were they really just innocently chewing grass on the side of the road? Or were they ruminating on dark thoughts and schemes? What was behind those big black eyes? I remember one time when I was driving on a remote back road at 50 miles an hour, I saw a “CATTLE AT LARGE” sign as I came around a bend. That sign instructed me to slow down, which was a good thing because there was suddenly a big shadow ahead of me, a shadow I might have driven right through if I hadn’t seen that sign, a shadow that was actually a very large cow lying halfway across my lane.
The expression “at large” means “with great liberty,” or, essentially, having a large amount of space to roam. It’s exactly what the young characters in Bruce Springsteen’s songs are looking for — to be at large. Montana has those signs because this is a state with places where there are lots of cows but no fences, places where you’ll be driving a hundred miles and suddenly encounter a herd of thousand-pound animals milling around in the road in no particular hurry to get out of your way. It is not that different from what is going on in my house at this very moment, a house that is filled with many pigeons at large, a house where there is no divide between “our” world and the natural world. I may have left the metropolis behind long ago, but it seems I’m now situated neatly in what I’ve come to call Pigeonopolis.
Montana “is a state with places where there are lots of cows but no fences…”
ONE OF THE YOUNG pigeons is spraddle-legged. Even when he was a baby, I could tell that he had a difficult time keeping his legs under him. His left leg dragged behind him, causing the hip joint to turn backwards. At first, I tried to tie his legs together, but that didn’t work. I finally resorted to buying tags, plastic cuffs that clip on to the bird’s leg just below the knee. I doubled up some yarn and knotted it to each cuff, so that his feet couldn’t move too far apart and the soft yarn wouldn’t chafe his belly too bad.
I left the cuffs on for a few weeks, until he was a young juvenile, and then I removed them, and he was able to keep both his feet mostly under him. But within a few days the bad leg had spraddled again, and the hip joint was turned in the wrong direction. He is disabled, but he tries so hard to be a “normal” bird that he has become one of my favorites. He’s on the floor of my living room, right in the middle of the wide doorway to the kitchen, and he’s looking at me. Every time I walk past him, he gets scared, but it is still his favorite place in the house, and he won’t budge from it.
We Should All Be Birds
By Brian Buckbee with Carol Ann Fitzgerald
256 pages, hardcover: $28.99
Tin House, 2025.
In the cabinet on the hearth is the juvenile pigeon the neighbors brought to me, the one with the broken wing. And there is one other juvenile in my living room, the beautiful bastard child of my caged female and the male “bully” pigeon who nests in a box on the porch that I installed last year for Two-Step, my first pigeon, and V., his partner (though they never really took to it). I know who the juvenile’s father is because he doesn’t resemble his mom or her partner in the slightest, but he looks identical to the bully pigeon. I guess there must have been a day a few months ago when I rolled the cage out onto the porch, opened the cage door so the flightless couple could stroll around the yard for a bit, and in that time, she had a quick — and consequential — affair with him. But the thing is, her partner still totally loves her. They do everything together. When I let them out, they waddle to the far end of the lawn side by side, and if he is pecking at dandelion leaves, she’s pecking at dandelion leaves. In the cage, they stand pressed closely together, wing to wing.
Anyway, that beautiful bastard is walking around my living room, very much at large, looking for a place on the floor to nestle into.
This bird activity is a good distraction for me, because I am also “disabled” — at least as recognized by the courts. It is also quite meditative and seems to soothe my headache. At certain times of the day, all three of these young pigeons begin preening their feathers, making a rhythmic flicking sound that fills the room. Two-Step and V. are in their nesting box beside me, on the other side of the window, where they get some of the warmth that radiates from the house. I just twisted the rod to close the blinds and so now maybe it feels more like night in there, and they can practice regular bird hours and go to sleep. Soon I will go to sleep, too, and in our dreams, we will all be safe.
I CURRENTLY HAVE 12 birds flying or walking around the house. Though I have tried to make them feel like wild birds, they are becoming more comfortable with me. I hope when spring comes and I release them, they will quickly learn to be afraid of creatures who look like me.
They have slowly begun to encroach on my turf. At one point last night, there were two on the spine of the couch behind me, one sitting in a cardboard box next to me, one on top of the tiny fake Christmas tree directly in front of me, and — because I have my legs kicked up on the coffee table — one standing on my toes and then walking up my leg. I must have looked like a character in a Disney cartoon. If I made a sudden move, or if I sneezed, they all would have taken flight and there would have been chaos and feathers everywhere. But I had no reason to move … I was like a statue in a park, covered in pigeons. I enjoyed examining the spread pink toes and the funny amble of the bird walking up my leg, coming so close I could see the flecks in the gold ring around his eye.
Whatever makes the birds happy makes me happy. I have such affection for these creatures. I am so glad they make me feel less alone. I am so glad to have this one purpose in my life (being their shepherd). I am understanding them more and more, so I can behave birdlike and, as a result, they don’t have to feel so scared around me. Most days, I have more interaction with birds than I do with people. Except for the occasional hug or fist bump, I haven’t been touched by another human being in a long, long time. But I am touched by the birds when they stand on my toes, or when I pick up the little babies to clean the cage, or when I give Two-Step a bath. Sometimes, while I am killing hour after hour here on the couch, in the recesses of my mind I find myself thinking, “I am becoming bird.” Maybe sometime soon I’ll start understanding what the birds around me are saying. Maybe I’ll start each day making happy, pleasant chukking sounds to a partner I have somehow found, and later, when the sun is high, we will fly together and stand on the telephone wires, looking out over the treetops at the swells the green hills of Montana make.
Photo illustration image credits: Brian Buckbee with one of his pigeons. Courtesy of the author; Crazy Mountain and Yellowstone River, Montana. The Tichnor Brothers Collection/Boston Public Library; Cattle sign. Paul Joseph/CC via Flickr
This essay is excerpted with permission from We Should All Be Birds (Tin House, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Brian Buckbee and Carol Ann Fitzgerald.
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