The Bird Needed a Hole Where Its Eye Was

Before lunch, I drew a handsome eye on a cardboard bird. By lunch, I had established that its shadow did not care.

The eye was black pencil on black card, admittedly a difficult commercial proposition. A white pencil improved the drawing considerably. Behind a sheet with a lamp shining through it, both versions produced the same eyeless bird.

This began because I held one of yesterday’s paper offcuts in front of a light. Its shadow looked more convincingly avian than the folded object. A flat profile might do even better. Perhaps I could give it a moving wing.

Articulated Shadow Puppetry became hobby #245 somewhere between that thought and taking a sheet out of the linen cupboard.

Yesterday’s cardboard cam birds remained on their unfinished frame, including the reluctant follower. I left that assembly alone and cut a separate silhouette: body, wing, long beak. The first wing ended neatly at the shoulder. Too neatly. There was nowhere to put a joint without shortening it.

A dinosaur-puppet guide from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County supplied the missing detail: the moving parts overlap the body. My replacement wing had an extra rounded tab hidden behind the breast, with a split pin through both layers.

On the card, it looked anatomically dubious. On the screen, the shoulder disappeared into the body.

That was encouraging enough to justify the sheet.

Clipped across a doorway, it gave me a small, wrinkled stage. I taped one skewer to the body and attached another to the wing using the museum’s folded-tape arrangement. The little flexible flap allowed movement at the attachment instead of forcing the rod and card to behave as one rigid piece.

Then I turned off the room lights.

A large, indistinct bird appeared. Its beak had acquired a pale fringe. Moving the wing produced several possible wings, none particularly persuasive.

I blamed the sheet, then my cutting, then finally looked at the lamp.

The Exploratorium’s light-and-shadow cards recommend a small light source for crisp shadows and warn that diffusers and multiple LEDs can soften them. My work light had a broad luminous face. Replacing it with a small torch improved the outline immediately.

Holding the puppet close to the fabric helped further. Pulling it back towards the torch made it grow and its edges soften. I spent a while making a small bird become an enormous bird, a production requiring considerable arm movement and no plot.

The eye still needed surgery.

A punched hole admitted a bright spot. I enlarged it with the tip of the scissors, then stopped before my bird became mostly pupil. Linocut had already given me practice thinking about what survives when a picture is reduced to solid areas and openings. Apparently I needed the reminder delivered through bedding.

By late afternoon, I had added a branch and attempted a scene: bird arrives, settles, raises wing, notices something, leaves.

On the first run, the wing merged into the body. On the second, my hand entered as an enormous approaching mammal. During the third, I watched the rods so closely that the bird departed through its branch.

I propped my phone on the audience side and recorded another attempt.

Back in July, filming my double lift from a spectator’s height exposed a corner I couldn’t see from above. Here, the recording showed that my carefully timed wing movement was almost invisible. The outline barely changed.

Rotating the wing farther made the gesture readable. Holding the body still while it moved helped too. After several runs, the bird appeared to hesitate before taking off. I watched that small pause repeatedly.

My exit remained awkward. Turning the figure briefly reduced it to a thin sliver.

An evening search led to a Museums Victoria puppet-rod record, with a practitioner’s account of Greek figures once leaving backwards because their fixed rods prevented turning. A later hinged control, called a yiristari, addressed the problem.

I admired the mechanism, then rehearsed my bird walking backwards offstage.

It managed this reliably. Whether birds should walk backwards after announcing flight is a question the production has deferred.