This website exists to share a mystery. There is nothing for sale and there’s nothing to donate to. I’m sharing in hopes that you will be able to see what I see. I’m trying to give you what I call BirdSight.

In March 2020, while on a hunt for ancient rock art in a boulder field, I noticed what I thought was a bird petroglyph. And then I found another and another. Different birds of every size and shape. Intricate birds wrapping around the corners of rocks, some in flight and others perched. Grooves and colors on the rocks created shapes that when I squinted in the right light, created mosaics of every bird I could imagine.

At first, I’d try to show my friends and family the birds I could see just by pointing and tracing the beaks, the eyes, the wings, and the shape of the bird’s head. Despite being a talker, I found it hard to explain and no one ever came away really seeing birds from me talking about it. I always explained about light and shadow but when I said “trace the shadows” I lost them. I explained fractals and how these birds arranged themselves in a pattern that was rough and self-similar and clearly mathematical. As soon as you say “math” people’s eyes glaze over. I tried showing people what I was saying by drawing on blank paper. I’d draw and talk about how a bird’s beak could be another bird’s wing, how one bird’s eyebrow could be another bird’s toe, etc. Looking back on my early attempts to share, I’m not sure why I thought anyone could make sense of what I’m saying.

I don’t know why it took me so long to start tracing the birds I saw with a marker but after a year or so of frustration, that’s what I did. I finally realized I could show people the birds instead of talking about them. With a simple marker, I could unleash lifelike birds as part of complex strings of other birds. With a marker, I finally could get other people to see the birds and how I built them out of light and shadow, smooth and rough, ridges and grooves.

I share this pattern with anyone and everyone. I hope this website helps me share more broadly. By watching the videos and looking at the photos, maybe it encourages you to go out into your own world and look at it by squinting through one eye. If you relax and keep your eye still, if you notice the world as light and dark instead of just a bunch of objects, you’ll find this pattern and the birds hiding in the light around you. It’s everywhere.

If you try to find the birds around you, thank you so much. It means a lot that other curious people will take a chance on discovering the world is far more complicated and mysterious than we know. To me it looks like birds. Birds all the way down.

Melanie