Sheida Soleimani is thinking about buying a tugboat. “Imagine, I could have a studio on the water, but I could also run a hospital for seabirds at the same time,” she gushes, her thumb hovers mid-scroll above the Craigslist listing pulled up on her phone. We are standing in the intake room of Congress of the Birds, the bird clinic the Iranian-American artist and bird rehabilitator has run out of the basement of her Providence, Rhode Island home since 2018. While others might write off the tugboat as a daydream, for Sheida it is a continuation of a lifelong interest in creating multispecies infrastructures of care.
Sheida has always been drawn to birds. As the daughter of Iranian political refugees who relocated to Ohio, she recalls learning how to imitate bird calls before learning how to speak English. “I didn’t have many friends growing up and couldn’t practice English. As a compromise, my parents got me a David Attenborough ‘Bird Sounds of America’ tape to learn English, which taught me how to listen to birds as well. You would learn the word for robin, but also how they sound.” Sheida’s childhood was spent in the woods, practicing imitations of birdsong in an attempt to communicate with birds. Today, she is one of two licensed bird rehabilitators in Rhode Island. It’s something she learned at a young age from her mother, a former nurse, who after moving to the United States, translated her instinct for healing to wildlife, taking in injured birds and carefully nurturing them back to health.
At the clinic, Sheida introduces me to some of the clinic’s permanent residents. There’s Pluto, a bossy blue jay who has taken to imitating the chirpy electronic song the clinic’s LG appliances play when a wash cycle has finished. There’s also a coterie of curious mourning doves. Rounding out the regulars are Zola and Zia, a pair of ravens who arrived separately to the clinic, dangerously malnourished and sick, both bearing signs of having been kept as pets before their failed re-release into the wild. When I meet them in an aviary Sheida has built in the side yard of her house, they’re playful and healthy, picking at a massive deer bone—a gift from local hunters. “They speak Farsi,” laughs Sheida— the species is known for their ability to mimic human speech—“I can hear them chatting from my bedroom window in the morning.” These birds only represent a small minority of the avian population that moves through the Congress of the Birds, the clinic sees up to 2,000 birds a year. Depending on the severity of their injury, some birds stay for weeks, others for months.
When I visit, Sheida is in the midst of preparing for bird flu. A rising number in cases of bird flu across New England means she’s had to take extra safety precautions, both for her own safety and for that of the birds in her care. Before we step into the clinic, we dip the soles of our shoes in an aluminum tray filled with liquid disinfectant. This DIY foot bath, which prevents the virus from being tracked into the sterilized facility, is the first line of defense in the biosecurity measures that Sheida has implemented.
“It’s going to become more and more like a hospital,” she says of the clinic’s future, “If it’s a high-risk species, I don’t let anyone else handle it. I’m wearing full PPE and a hazmat suit, gloves, shoe covers and a face shield. When I leave, after usually having had to euthanize it because the bird is sick or has been hit by a car, all of my clothes have to go into the wash.”
Where the COVID-19 virus underscored a collective human interdependency, the bird flu demands that we confront our interspecies interdependency, a reminder that our planetary, ecological, and personal futures are intertwined.
As the virus continues to spread, Sheida has received an influx of videos from concerned citizens of birds displaying symptoms in the wild. In one video, a swan is shown swimming in circles, literally spiraling into quietus. In another, a hawk is seen craning its head upside down, unable to hold its head upright. In humans, bird flu symptoms run the familiar gamut of coughing, sore throat and fever. In birds, the symptoms can be neurological, causing birds to have seizures or suffer from deadly incoordination. Sheida warns that in the case that someone runs into a bird displaying these symptoms, they should get in contact with and wait for a professional, “It’s incredibly dangerous for people who are not trained to interact with an infected bird.”
For most, the spread of bird flu has been experienced through rising grocery prices. With a familiar swiftness, a virus has once again laid bare the precarity of our food system, rupturing the supply chains of eggs, dairy and meat produced in factory farms. Where the COVID-19 virus underscored a collective human interdependency, the bird flu demands that we confront our interspecies interdependency, a reminder that our planetary, ecological, and personal futures are intertwined with that of other species. At Congress of the Birds, Sheida and the clinic’s volunteers see further evidence of this unfurling entwinement everyday. Where climate change has reshaped how humans live, eat and think about the future, it has also drastically impacted bird populations. In the last several years, the clinic has seen an influx of patients due to shifting migratory patterns, birth deformities from pollution and a rise in prevalence of West Nile virus.
In spite of this, Sheida is hopeful that steps are being taken toward creating a future for interspecies solidarity. The clinic has just announced a 42-acre land donation, which will be used as a wildlife release site and bird hospital called the Land Center. Located a short drive away on undeveloped, wooded land, the new site will house multiple flight enclosures, transitionary spaces that allow birds to learn, or re-learn how to fly and feed themselves before re-entering the wild. With expanded resources and space, the Land Center will also create opportunities for students and community members to engage with wildlife up close through educational and art workshops.
When Sheida first started the clinic, she mostly shied away from incorporating her bird rehabilitation work in her artistic practice, “I felt that I really needed something that wasn’t art in my life, and thought it was a healthy separation.” In spite of this, birds soon began popping up across her artwork, immersive photographic tableauxs that weave together elements of sculpture, collage and found object. Her recent series Ghostwriter, a visual retelling of her familial history of political dissent, displacement and diasporic rupture, features striking portraits of her parents, one holding a guinea fowl and the other a rooster. “It became very obvious to me that [the art and the clinic] were feeding each other,” she explains, “And I began to think that I should just let it happen. It’s a new thing, but I’m allowing for more slippage between the two.”
It makes sense then, that Sheida’s artistic and bird rehabilitation practices are rooted in a similar sensibility. “I have the tendency to worldbuild a lot, I just don’t know when to stop,” she jokes, as her mind returns to the tugboat. We’ve moved upstairs to the dining room of her home, a sprawling Queen Anne, which in itself, feels like a different world—a kingdom ruled by a menagerie of animals that include a Great Dane, several cats and two parakeets who roam from room to room. A labyrinthine assortment of plants offer a lush contrast to the soggy pre-snowstorm chill outside. For Sheida, imagination goes beyond daydream, it’s a mechanism for survival. “Part of [this tendency to worldbuild] is not being able to be comfortable, or even feel like I have a home. I grew up with traumatized immigrant parents in post-9/11 Middle America, shit sucked. My dad’s motto is comfort is death. It’s mine too. But for me, building my own worlds comes from this sort of idea that you find in magical realist texts—that time isn’t linear, and breaking time is a political choice.”
This understanding of worldbuilding as a political act is also something that Sheida inherited from her mother. She gestures toward a sinewy tamarind tree by the window, “My mother planted that when I was born, she came with a lot of seeds that she saved from her father’s garden.” The seeds, which were a way of ensuring she would be able to carry a piece of a past world into her future, held multiple meanings for Sheida’s mother, a political dissident who had worked as a nurse at a guerilla field hospital. Amongst her patients were pregnant women, some of whom gave birth to stillborn babies. The Kurdish fighters would make her take the dead bodies and burn them. Unable to process this, Sheida’s mother took the bodies of the babies and buried them beneath the trees in her childhood garden. Seven trees, seven babies. The descendants of these trees grow in Sheida’s home today—sour orange, lemon and pomegranate amongst others. “It’s interesting, because when she was thinking about bringing the seeds she was like, ‘I’m leaving home, what does home mean for me?’ I grew up with these plants that she tended to, that her father tended to, and now I’m tending to. It’s like this lineage of worldbuilding.”
In our conversations, Sheida is matter-of-fact when speaking about trauma. The trait is a vestige of her upbringing. She tells me her father would recount the government’s torture and executions of their comrades in gristly, medical detail almost nightly around the family dinner table. Trips to Olive Garden found her mother doodling the dead babies she had to bury as a nurse on the paper tablecloth with crayons, a subconscious constantly processing. “Growing up, my dad would always say that dinner is where you talk about politics, because if you can’t talk about those things, you probably shouldn’t be breaking bread with those people,” she tells me. Her parents had run a Marxist newspaper in Iran out of the local hospital’s emergency room during after-hours. Forced to flee the country separately, Sheida’s mother was then apprehended by authorities and subsequently imprisoned for a year, where she experienced solitary confinement before escaping to Turkey.
It is perhaps this familiarity with cruelty, and the unflinching commitment to life in spite of it, that makes Sheida an effective healer. During our interview, Sheida’s friend and handyman Chris walks in carrying a cardboard box with airholes poked into it—a drop-off. With her Doolittle-ian reputation, Sheida is constantly receiving wounded and sick animals on her front porch. The patient is an injured pigeon. She gets right to work, performing a series of tests that will help her diagnose the source of the bird’s ailment. “So when you test to see if an animal is paralyzed, you test for what’s called deep pain, and you find this spot on the foot and pinch it to see if it has the ability to react,” she explains while cradling the bird in her palm. Sheida is precise and methodical, pointing out all the different signs medical practitioners look for to identify the source of a bird’s pain. She tells me this pigeon’s paralysis is being caused by a severe back injury and that the bird won’t make it through the night.
There is a tendency to romanticize the nonhuman other, it’s something that Sheida sees all the time at the clinic— birds who have come into her care too late whose symptoms of illness or pain have been misinterpreted by humans as a bid for interspecies connection or a sign from a spiritual realm. She pushes back against this inclination, a truly interspecies future can not be founded simply on anthropocentric modes of relation. Instead, it is perhaps pain, or the ability to recognize another’s suffering (and one’s agency to help alleviate it), that might serve a more productive starting point. Across her time rehabilitating birds, Sheida shares one of the most consistent lessons she’s learned, “It’s not about listening to them, because that would mean that I would understand what they’re saying. I think it’s about learning to value and to respect distance, to not be invasive, to watch and learn from afar, to learn about the other in a way that’s not fear-based.”
