Gretchen Riparia: Saluton! This is Gretchen Riparia. Today is May 17, 2071 and I’m talking with Isabel Plummett as part of an oral history of the New York Commune. We’re in a cozy little glade deep in the trails through Greater Prospect Park, seated on some cushions in a sort of abstract gazebo.

My full name in Banks-designate is Sol-Earther Gretchen Therian-Fluffkind Riparia Liberated Scranton. I’m an earlyMidLifex femme-femmeseeker, expansive-ulterior. I live in the Luna Park Commune on Coney Island. My obsessions include the history of digital folk art, immersives, and video games.

I organized this interview after my involvement in another history project, the Zplace VoxelAug Graffiti Preservation Collective, informally known as Jet Set Radio Now. We’ve been using some truck-mounted tunneling spectrographs and a neutrino flash to get a nano cross-section of walls throughout the city, effectively peeling back the paint covering all the layers of graffiti on a surface. We’ve been integrating this data into the volumetric pixel augmented-reality collaboration layer, Zplace. Which is to say you can now walk through the graffiti history of a place we’ve scanned, time-traveling in augmented space. There was one repeated motif we’ve uncovered throughout the city—a bird rising from the ruins of machines. Stencil art, throw ups, and bigger pieces—murals, even. We’ve cataloged variations on the machine-vanquishing bird in every borough, starting in ’45 and repeated in huge numbers until the rev in ’52. Less-visible after that, but we still see new pieces today. Well, I’ll let you tell the rest.

Hello, Isabel!

Isabel Plummett: Hi, Gretchen! Thanks for finding your way out here.

Riparia: My pleasure. Could you introduce yourself and maybe say something about the place we’re in?

Plummett: Sure! My name is Isabel November Plummett and I’m a nomadic resident circuiting the city, studying mutualism in urban crows. I guess I do a lot of what ornithologists and bird rehabbers used to do. I’m sixty-one and a trans lesbian. Most people know me for my pre-revolutionary work with hawks and the LaGuardia operation. And Gavilana. Sam the Hawk.

Gretchen and I have been—well, my phone has been doing an elaborate handshake of social discovery protocols with Gretchen’s phone—and so I guess this is technically a date. We’re on a date! Right?

Riparia: Affirmative!

Plummett: We’re in a part of the Bath Beach Tentacle of Greater Prospect Park, called Melethril. It’s an Elven pleasure district where the forest turns to marsh and this is one of the cabanas. It does look like a gazebo kind of half undressed itself, though. There’s usually a ton of Cedar Waxwings here. There’s one.

Riparia: Peak. Hair slays.

Plummett: Yeah. You know birds?

Riparia: Not really. Unless it’s also a pokémon. I’ve always tried to keep a feeder of some sort, though. Even if it’s just a pine cone in peanut butter.

Plummett: It’s great to see non-birders doing that. Thank you.

Riparia: Oh! [Laughs.] It’s my pleasure. But I’ll ask the questions here. [Laughs.] When did your love of birds begin?

Plummett: This is so fecing dorky but it was in the Girl Scouts. I was literally on a nature hike with my troop and there was this idiotic disney princess moment. We were being very quiet, avoiding bird plow—oh, that’s birder slang for, like, moving so as not to disturb with sound. And it’s really sun-dappled and green and beautiful, and then forty goldfinches land all around us in this mid-height canopy, and we freeze. They’re so pretty! And talkative! All of us were in this intense naturalist mode, whispering and sharing glances, taking selfies. It was like sharing a secret at a slumber party, exciting and sacrosanct. Then a goldie lands on my shoulder! My sisters stare for a while as the birds trade song and then the whole flock left as soon as they got there. Something unlocked during that moment in birdworld and, for a lot of them, they saw me as a girl for the first time. Either I’d been blessed by nature herself, or they knew that a boy just wouldn’t be crying and smiling. Who knows what they were thinking? They treated me better, at least.

Riparia: Would you like to talk about your transition?

Plummett: Yeah, I would. Thanks. So, I was born in Louisiana and grew up in New Orleans. When I was twelve, I came out to my parents. It was Christmas weekend. They were great enough to take my feelings seriously. Explored what those feelings mean, how I thought of myself, and what brought joy. We talked a lot, you know. Hugged a lot. It was a moment that brought us closer. That wasn’t a super common reaction of parents at the time. There was a trans healthcare ban there, so my parents got estrogen over the internet for me. It was the twenties. Things got worse. Bathroom bans. Teachers not allowed to say your name. Violence. My parents moved heaven and earth to escape and we ended up in Maryland.

That was really fire of them. I lucked out there. I got the correct puberty, as they say. That was transition—more or less how all the other kids did it. I got my surgeries in a gap year, and then I was at cornell.

Riparia: Wow, imagine the wrong puberty. I think I was in one of the first school grades where gender autonomy counselling was standardized. Wait, what was high school like? I mean, I know what high school was—they didn’t get rid of grades until a few years after I graduated—but the culture was totally nerfed from the high school experience television and Life is Strange prepared me for. You were in the shit. What was that like?

Plummett: It sucked. I mean, not in an exceptional way. School shooting drills. Drama. Bad teachers. Fascist incel boys.

Riparia: Incel?

Plummett: What a blessing, not to know! I’m not going to tell you. Promise me you won’t look it up.

Riparia: [Laughs.] Okay, I promise.

Plummett: Good. Honestly, I was sort of vain in high school. I was obsessed with passing. Most of my friends were preppy wannabe tiktok influencers. Gorgeous young women filled to the brim with insecurities. The state of being a teen captured by the body dysmorphia industry. It sucks!

Riparia: What changed in college?

Plummett: I got fucked good enough to snap out of it. I was in this ‘cule with a bunch of women with bug names: Hornet. Mariposa. Luna. My bug era. Yeah, I dunno. Desire is a weird thing, right? The things you dislike about your own physicality can be incandescently sexy when seen in other people and I think you can fuck in a way that heals if you’re paying enough attention. That was a tenet of the Ramble assemblies, when we took the Park.

Riparia: You were part of the Summer Occupations? My parents took me there for an afternoon when I was five or six. You were, what, thirty-three or so? It was like a festival! I remember a lot of music and singing and protest chants. I think we watched Fern Gully on the Sheep Meadow.

Plummett: Nah, yeah—it was lit. That was a really good time. I’ll tell ya all about it.

This was ‘42 or ’43. ’43. There were all these power outages in the city at the time. This was the tail end of crypto and the Chonky Internet and the datacenters running all of this were taking up all the electricity, outpacing the capacity of the grid even after we started building renewables again. Their fix was to split the grid into priority customers and everyone else. And so anyway, one summer it got bad enough they just start scheduling outages—so power’s out from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. all summer—and everyone else is just going to have to make do in the heat.

Everyone is outside every night. The government declared war on Iran a few years earlier and was bringing back the draft. We were pissed! And pissed about the power, too. The cops tried a curfew for a few days but we weren’t having it. Lots of street battles with cops. Diffusion tactics were taking hold and the cops weren’t adapting well yet, so for a while, you could just hold territory, and we held the Park.

The borders were pretty porous for a while. Cops would move in, get swarmed, and egress. There were just so many people showing up. This was before I got there. I visited a few times myself and decided to join the occupation about a month after things kicked off. There were about four thousand of us there full time when I started living there. Maybe half of us were there on an elective basis, doing side-quests because we were out of work anyway or just took a long vacation from it all. The rest were otherwise unhoused or precarious and stayed because we were one of the few places not kicking them out overnight. A lot of folks you only saw at night, coming back from a job or gig work. Some people were just camping wherever in tents but we worked really hard to consolidate housing in the transverse roads—back then, there were roads cutting through the park so you didn’t have to drive your car thirty blocks to get around the park. Some forklift-certified occupiers had set up these really substantial barricades made of flipped cars and stolen aggregate and all kinds of fec to shut the roads down. Then they built these huge tarp pavilions over the roads, which were sunk below grade so they didn’t spoil the scenery. That gave us tons of room for dorms and protest kitchens and all kinds of infrastructure. We fed a lot of people during the day. There were probably twenty thousand there for dinner—more if the movie on the Sheep Meadow was a banger. Mutual aid hubs were on each corner of the Park. The occupation didn’t really change how the people living in Manhattan used the park, so this is all on top of the regular visitors. Yeah, the Occupied Park was still a park!

Riparia: Oh, yeah! I remember those big tents! They remind me of the Assembly tents.

Plummett: That was just where we lived. We did all the assemblies on the Bethesda Terrace. There were like thirty kids there from an architecture school who were developing a whole construction ecosystem of tensegrity structures. You’ve probably seen the one in Lewis Reservoir, right? The octopus? All the tentacles and stuff are held in tension with cables so it flexes a little in the wind or when sunlight warms it. That was them. All these fluorescent tarps were suspended over the transverse roads and it was really nice and cozy in there under the sun! We had hammocks and big soft nets you could sleep in like a Great Ape. Fully accessible. That was important to us. The Occupied Park would be for everyone. I never knew how they sourced all the materials. Not my department. Fec, they built a lot. People loved their stuff. Really thoughtful architecture centered on the disabled and pre-disabled. It went a long way to show that cops were basically just messing with a street fair.

Showing up a month late to an occupation was like visiting another country. Culture differentiates really quickly in a crucible like that. When I got there, probably two-thirds of the people were there to hold territory, fight cops, agitate against the war and the draft, and develop the politics of the autonomous zone. The rest of us were sex foresters. The Ramble had been a cruising area since Central Park was built in the eighteen hundreds, so we were just formalizing some of these practices, in a sense. It was an interesting dynamic. The “political” militants didn’t want to have to deal with the conflict of a bunch of young people fucking each other in close quarters, so the rule the assembly adopted was to take it to the Ramble. The sex foresters—pleasure militants, whatever—we needed the safety they provided. Space to cook. Insulation from the erotophobic extremists trying to control the narrative of the occupation and showing up to wreck.

Riparia: Was this the first sex forest around?

Plummett: Sex forests were new then but not obscure. Just a simple framework for thinking about land use beyond the capitalist enclosure, imagining the continuum of needs everyone has and how this can fit into the ecology of the place. We were still figuring out what care infrastructure we actually needed versus what was hyped to us by the market. I do remember that by the end of the occupation, it was more like two-thirds sex foresters.

Riparia: There was enough for an ornithologist to do there?

Plummett: Oh, there was always tons to do. We did a nest survey, and hung sashes so the lovers wouldn’t disturb birds that were going to be territorial and stressed. That was the big goal early in the season. There were blights tearing through native trees so you could always help the arborists graft, and dig, and water things. There was a group of biologists and chemists who set to work making the Lake swimmable, with this big algae bioreactor they assembled in the boat house. They set up a laundry space, too. We took over the whole hydrology of the area—you have to when housing thousands—so there was plumbing or ditch-digging or dredging you could always help with. Or you could pull duty in the kitchens, or the coat checks—that’s like a public locker system we had. I loved doing that. Really easy to meet everyone and flirt.

Riparia: That sounds a lot like a commune!

Plummett: Bet. People were getting used to occupying stuff. There was a lot of turnover. People usually only spent a few weeks there, drifting in and out. There were so many jobs we printed out little zines or details in shared logbooks to explain what you could do and how to get involved. That’s what I mostly did. We had all these ornithologists so we just did tours and hangs with all the birders who showed up to the Ramble during the day to watch a kettle of broad-wing hawks, or listen to the insect song of a grasshopper sparrow—ya know [trills/buzzes]—then we’d recruit them to help be “pleasure lifeguards” at night. We had a bunch of Dyke March folks doing security, and lots more trying to establish this geography we mapped out. Fec was named like a candyland for perverts: Fornicators’ Folly. Gangbang Grotto—that was the cave. We dug out the cave! Circlusion Cove. Gooners’ Glade. You get the idea.

Riparia: Sounds fun!

Plummett: The areas functioned like a sort of “what are you up for?” signal. Kind of like what our phones did for us, match desires and kinks and negotiate all that stuff that was suffocated in shame and expectations. We used to be so bashful!

We put on programming, too. Amorous quests and contests of sexual skill, pageants, parades, satires—anything we could imagine to try and make the people uncomfortable with all these taboos we were shedding laugh, or think, or—even better—join in. Reclaim the Peoples’ Eros. The birders were enthusiastic joiners. We taught people to respect the new nest perimeters with an event called Breeding Grounds and both the perverts and the birders would be bickering at the assembly over who came up with the name. [Laughs.] We made so many bird costumes!

You could wake up, eat breakfast with fifty of your friends, see a dozen birds being really great birds, go listen to someone talking about Marx, or a musician hopping on mic in the amphitheater until you got bored or horny or both—then pick someone up in the Amorous Anteroom and go fuck in a cute little copse after dark. It was peak. A few of us, you could tell they were ready to stay long term. Make it a real commune.

Riparia: That wasn’t you?

Plummett: Yeah, nah. It was still a festival, not a commune. The means of survival are outside the park, mostly, which was operating at the limits of its capacity to care for all of us. I have too big of a princess streak anyway to rough it like that. I was seeing this girl at the time who had an apartment right off the park. Tavi and I met in the T4T Treehouse in the middle of summer. That was this big helical web of cargo nets you could climb a few stories into the air above the trees, and fuck. It was nice to feel the ripples of activity elsewhere on the structure. Those tensegrity kids were off the chain. Oh fec, I remember now, I think they just redeployed their Burning Man projects to the O.P., had them waiting in storage units all ready to go. Anyway, Tavi—Octavia—Reed had this apartment there and they were on the priority grid. We slept at her place half the time, spoiled as fuck in AC and silk sheets, and half at the O.P., getting belled awake wherever we collapsed, finding our clothes, and dragging ourselves out of the Ramble into the dorms.

Riparia: Was Octavia wealthy?

Plummett: [Laughs.] She was a billionaire for a little while.

Riparia: What? There weren’t many trans billionaires!

Plummett: For sure, boo, hiss, et cetera. Well, on paper she was at least. Tavi was a falconer. I was too. Got started with that at cornell and did it whenever my living situation would allow. But Tavi knew a broader range of trainable birds. She was amazing, I learned a lot from her. Anyway—get this—a year or two before we met, she had trained a raven to retrieve a certain kind of crypto wallet from an e-waste picker yard in the Bay Area. She figured these get dropped, lost—someone dies and a relative doesn’t know what this gadget is and recycles it—and in the Valley there would have been tons of old crypto dorks. She would go out there with a baggie of mealworms and an umbrella and some forcefem school fic she’d never shut up about every day with a reference wallet—we called them “thumb drives” [laughs]—and accumulate a pile of objects that slowly looked more and more like it, until one day it was the thing itself. Tavi applied some known vulnerability to this model, cracked well after it was obsolete, and it had 10,000 bitcoins on it—or whatever—and so she was a motherfuckin’ billionaire. And the bird did all the labor! Makes ya think.

Riparia: [Laughs.] That’s fucking wild!

Plummett: Bet. It was really, really hard to convert into cash, was the thing. She only managed it a few times. Enough to get deposits and insurance in place to rent the apartment, but not fund it long-term. She had the doorman giving her high fives. Anyway, she couldn’t get cash with crypto but she could get drugs pretty easily. She was buying powdered Estrogen by the pound and sending it to friends all over the country. Compounding was routine by then, go team T. And recreational drugs. Gave everything away.

Riparia: How’d she lose her fortune?

Plummett: Uh, I don’t know the nerd fec of it, but the reappearance of the wallet was big news to crypto dorks, and a crypto exchange that Tavi tried to get cash out of basically set a trap and stole it. Crypto had been waiting for old wallets to re-emerge since forever, like there was a prophecy. Tavi wasn’t an expert in this stuff and probably could have done withdrawals smarter. She didn’t care. I was in the room when that happened. Billions stolen and she sort of sighed and shrugged and went back to playing Bell Beast II or whatever. I was really upset and she had to calm me down. She kept saying “Money’s not real.”

It’s hard to describe that feeling, now. Losing money. It wasn’t even my money, but wealth was comfort and security. All of that is social now, but back then, it was these stressful moments checking your account balance, remembering when rent was due, emotional reactions to car repairs. I was a middle-class kid and never really experienced insecurity until LARS hit, but even with a steady paycheck, you’re still thinking in terms of scarcity and fear.

Riparia: Wow. Amazing game, by the way. Did you and Octavia stay together after the occupation ended?

Plummett: Yeah. We did everything together after that.

Riparia: Were you there at the end?

Plummett: Yep. The cops bulldozed the transverses one day during fall. We had warning, and plans for how to relocate people and rebuild, but we didn’t have the numbers. The power came back on full time. The weather was uncooperative, and it just became hard to hold those streets. Cars were rolling on the transverses again and most of us kind of drifted away. But we knew that a multi-season or permanent occupation was unlikely anyhow. That wasn’t our criteria for success.

They still do a lot of things the same way in the Ramble, though. I heard there was an unbroken record of pleasure lifeguard work in the logbooks we kept, so the occupation sort of never ended.

Riparia: Did you keep in touch with anyone other than Octavia from that time?

Plummett: Oh, sure. Tons. A bunch of students who had been in other occupations met there and eventually katamari’d into something big enough to steal back the space program! Uh, a katamari is a—

Riparia: No, I know. “It’s not your fault, but ours for believing in you.”

Plummett: [Laughs.] Just testing you.

Riparia: Oh, remind me to tell you about my trip to Pacha.

Plummett: Bet. Space cutie. But yeah, I saw a lot of those people in the street protests. Six of us—me, Tavi, Owen, Harmony, Charli, and Belle-Ami—were a cadre. We developed anti-drone falconry tactics.

Riparia: Fec yeah! Tell me about the Drone War and Gavilana.

Plummett: Wow, where to start. Tavi had a place near Goose Pond, Pennsylvania, near her folks. She was smart with her first big crypto withdrawal, paid for the house legally in the clear, taxes paid. We started our own little commune there.

Owen and Harmony were behavioral specialists and had backgrounds in trying to recreate or reimagine the socially-learned parts of bird species created in efforts at “de-extinction.” For socially-nurtured species, knowledge and behavior is passed down in an unbroken line of parenting and social support, so a resurrected species really isn’t the same organism lost to science. They tried to mitigate that loss and give a viable social education in various ways: brood parasitism and other surrogate parents, harmless simulations of danger, puppets, costumes. Cool stuff. Anyway, they were total novices at falconry. So Belle and Tavi and I were training them, and training our own juvie redtails, and building out the enclosures and getting all the licenses in order. Belle had a big network of falconry friends who helped vet our training and tactics. Charli knew drones. She did the viral racing drone VRs of the occupation everyone watched, almost single-handedly countering the media narrative that we were a buncha violent rapists or whatever. Made it look like a disney world commercial. She was red team.

Riparia: The opposition?

Plummett: Yep, she had been in L.A. when maeglin’s new dronetech successfully slowed down the decentralized riot tactics that were winning against cops in the early forties. She documented the tactics they were deploying and researched what she could to learn about their drone operations. She brought that stuff to the Occupation assemblies and begged anyone who’d listen to help develop tactics against it. Charli was aiming at the computer and comms talents there, but it was Tavi who started asking questions about drone size and composition.

Riparia: Tell me more about maeglin.

Plummett: Maeglin was a wide-area surveillance platform, which means they’d have drones loitering above a city, recording and tracking individuals nonstop. The cops could rewind the telemetry from the platform, tracking anyone who, say, shows up to a protest, using this geotracking and ground-level public surveillance and doorbell cameras to identify individuals. They were giving cops whatever legal cover they needed to shut down street protests. I forget the law’s name, but there was this really aggressive policy of “rout drafting” where they’d declare an anti-war protest illegal and then anyone draft-eligible caught in the wide-area surveillance dragnet got snatched and fast-tracked to basic training. Trying to make good on the promise that resisting would be worse for you than capitulation, but really they just ended up with pissed conscripts and dead officers. Even if you weren’t eligible, they’d charge you. Fighting it was expensive. I got one once. They send you the same multiple-hour video file they’d play at your trial if you chose to go to court, AI-assembled from hundreds of cameras and microphone snippets, LIDAR dot profiles, automatic shoe print readers, et cetera. Fighting it was only possible with real money. Most people just went bankrupt or did time. My parents paid for mine. Cops could bait and escalate any conflict they wished, and automate the legal oppression. It was meant to have a chilling effect on public protest and L.A. experienced that first-hand during the pilot program. There were a lot fewer people in the streets. It was bad. We had to open up the skies again.

Riparia: Gavilana.

Plummett: Sam. Yep. We got our juvies trained up over the next year. Teaching a hawk to foul a drone is a lot like teaching one to hunt other birds. You’re effectively controlling their hunger and directing their aggression to types of prey you can effectively model on a lure. Charli had a whole automated drone lure routine worked out like it was the Danger Room from X-Men but, ya know, for redtails. Each one had a live mouse in there in a little plastic blister like a World War II gunner. This process was not easy on the mice. That’s just something you get used to when working with raptors.

Riparia: What did the drones look like back then?

Plummett: Radial rotorcraft for the most part. A few fixed wings. About the size of a large housecat. They worked as a swarm, redeploying from charging stations on precinct roofs or maeglin semi trucks parked in their lots. Charli explained there had already been an arms race of sorts when drones were used as missiles—kinetic kill vehicles or bomb delivery—from conflicts in Ukraine and Kashmir and a handful of political assassinations. The burst-EM countermeasure, and counter-countermeasure, and so-on modules were highly controlled to the point where you needed custom sensor and comm systems in your own drone to even approach a hardened drone like the ones from maeglin without it glitching out and falling from the sky. So we couldn’t just deploy our own swarms. But they weren’t physically hardened. They were flying well above crowds and the reach of a hefty rock or soup for someone’s family. They were mad vulnerable to a bird flying up and deploying a snag, though!

Riparia: Snag? That’s like something to tangle it up?

Plummett: Yeah! We found a fancy metamaterial, like a koosh ball but with kevlar hair. Well, we didn’t find it, lots of people were working on the problem. It was folks in Palestine who had limited success using simple slings to fire these things at drones when they were low enough. Get the koosh a whisper away from a drone’s rotors and most of them will get snarled to a halt. There’s an embrittlement gradient on that stuff so it detaches from the bundle really easily. We attached them to the jesses—that’s like a little tether loop we tie around the hawks’ feet—and they just had to graze a drone and it’d fall out of the air. It worked astonishingly well.

Riparia: When was the first protest you brought your birds to?

Plummett: About a year and a half after we occupied the Park, Tavi and I drove cross country with our birds. It took us a week to get there. We met up with Charli’s friends, who scouted the location of a drone truck and spotted its deployments so we could test things out. We were in these beekeeping outfits—this flat grey Faraday mesh that hid us from the drones—and our hearts were pounding on this street corner and our spotter piped up and I loosed Sam and watched as a drone fell into the middle of the intersection. I whistled and Sam was back on the glove eating her treat. The system automatically dispatched another drone to fill the hole in the network. Sam jumped off the glove and got that one too. She got five drones before she got too sated with mouse brains to hunt. Tavi got another three before we felt too exposed. Our spotter bagged the drones in faraday mesh and we bounced. Started driving home that night.

Same night, NYC issued a press release that they had inked a deal with maeglin. We had hardware for Charli and her buddies to pick apart and we were operational. Maeglin had their semis here in the city two months later. I think it was an immigration facility in the Bronx where we started, but it took a while for people to figure out what we were doing. Some guy thought I was an undercover and nearly hit me before Sam attacked him. Eventually, some of the kids at these rallies—well, young teens, I mean—watch us, fascinated. We’re milling on the periphery in beekeeper suits with hawks on our arm and they start asking questions. And we’re honest with them—I mean, why not—and they start cheering when the drones drop. Pretty soon, everyone’s cheering the birds on and fetching us the drones, keeping them from falling on anyone, assisting us in tactics, and protecting us from police attempts to snatch us.

Riparia: Gavilana!

Plummett: Gavilana! Death from Above! Wings of Fury! [Laughs.]

Riparia: Who called Sam that? “Gavilana?”

Plummett: Oh, I dunno. The crowds. They had a name and fancams and memes of the riot bird before we even published our first BIRD TACTICS zine. Half the videos are of Tavi’s bird, uh, Piercy, I think—or Owen’s. “Gavilana” is a Sparrowhawk but also means “ingrown toenail”—they’re trailing this weird snag filament, remember. The only reason Samantha became Gavilana was because they got my bird.

Riparia: The photo in New Teen Vogue.

Plummett: Yeah.

Riparia: If this is difficult we can move on.

Plummett: Thanks, I’m good. Uh, well one chaotic day, the cops have a helicopter flying relatively low, and Sam was avoiding it, flying behind the kettle, all the police lines. I’m whistling to recall Sam and this fucking cop gets lucky with a baton swipe. Stomps her dead and rips off her wing and presents it to the crowd.

My memory isn’t good here.

The crowd surged and beat that cop to death. I hope. I don’t know. They brought me Sam in two pieces, wrapped in scarves. They were really gentle with her, I remember clearly.

These are Sam’s jesses.

Riparia: That’s a beautiful bracelet. I’m sorry about Sam. From what I’ve seen in the historical graf, everyone loved her.

Plummett: I’ve lost birds before, mostly to other birds. Great Horned Owls. You just make sure your bird isn’t suffering, collect their jesses, and leave the owl to their meal. But this was the first one I lost due to cruelty and malice. The state.

Riparia: How did others take it? The tributes were wall to wall, literally. A shattered hawk rising in glory above the ruin of machines. One of these was Banksy’s last, or so we think. You saw a lot of those, right? What else did people do?

Plummett: Tavi sent me to Goose Pond to get me off the streets for a while. I was filled with a lot of anger and honestly I would have done something really stupid and got my friends in trouble. Tavi represented us at a remembrance rally. She took a lot of pictures and showed me later, folks with posters and face paint and puppets. I should have been there.

I’ve seen the murals and graffiti tags. There’s a shrine, I mean, candles and gifts and stuff, in Elmhurst. Someone from those days let me know about it when I was doing trauma therapy a few years ago. I asked around the commune there and they said it’s been there since ’48.

Riparia: That was our dating as well, from our imaging and artist ethnography work. It’s been touched up several times with a few small additions around the edges. Only half the bird species were there originally. Was visiting there helpful?

Plummett: Yeah, it was. For a year or two after Sam’s murder the graf was really annoying, actually. It would send me spiraling. I kept thinking that people loved Sam and any “riot animal” because they had this idea that the animal was choosing sides, and this represented some grace granted to our side from the natural world. That was sort of fascist logic—taking appeals to nature seriously—and offensive to me as an ornithologist too.

Later, I recognized it as my own feelings of guilt. I was feeling guilty and projecting on people who were supportive. I defaced a bunch of the graf before I started checking myself. You find that, too?

Riparia: Another mystery solved. We speculated that it might have been fascists. Maybe most of it was. If you feel like it, and remember where you were likely to have done it, you could annotate our maps.

Plummett: Yeah, I’d like to help.

Riparia: Please continue. You were dealing with guilt over the events of Sam’s murder?

Plummett: Yeah, nah. Some bastard just got lucky. Maybe that was inevitable. I didn’t like that Gavilana’s supporters thought she had a choice. I was the one who baited the bird with a snare trap, and manned it, and got its weight down to up its aggression, and trained it to hate flying machines. It’s—Sam. Samantha. Samantha didn’t choose these things or understand them the way we do. I put her into dangerous situations, over and over, for good reasons. Sam enjoyed the work, though. When folks would approach us on the street or offer me drone wreckage, she’d preen and lean into scritches. Mad respect for my ace pilot. maeglin-slayer.

But our training was not normal falconry and if the birds felt like slipping the geotag off with their jesses and fucking off into the great blue, they’d probably suck as hunters and die. We captured them as juvies, but we didn’t give them parallel experience as birds who will be released some day and need to fend for themselves. Too many meals from hand or lure. Maybe we thought we’d retire them after a few seasons. Maybe we thought they would definitely die doing the dangerous thing we were coercing them to do and just never said that out loud because movements were on the line.

So that sucks, living with that. Taking something away from their adolescence, like the resurrected Moa and Lyall's Wrens that have social problems and aggression. We did it differently in the LaGuardia operation. That was the first conversation we had after Tavi laid out her plan. I was still really angry and managed to push that down into some cold-ass operator cosplay. But we weren’t doing unrestricted bird warfare. We established a lot of red lines: How many times would we spook the colony before it unacceptably affected their ability to overwinter? How many hawk casualties before we abort? Whether we would continue trying if it didn’t result in a strike. And we had to have parallel training for release. Money reserved for vets. We love birds. How many of your favorite things are you willing to feed into a wood chipper to change something in the world?

Riparia: Fec. I’m so sorry, Isabel. Please continue this line of thought if you need to, but I feel like we may have skipped a cinematic. Could you back up a little? Tavi came up with the plan? Who did she bring it to?

Plummett: Nah yeah, no problem. In ’47 we weren’t out on the street as much. We were hosting falconers from all over. I mean all over. Folks from the Levant and Gulf states went really hard for the tactics. They worked out everything we could have told them before we got the zines translated, but a few came anyway. I think they just wanted to meet us. International Falconry Front. [Laughs.]

This sweet baby trans from the UAE, Jinan, was from a commune breeding Saker Falcons and living nomadically. Her parents had spent their lives trying to save this species when it was down to a few thousands breeding pairs. Almost every bird they found was already banded as property of some royal or billionaire and kept as a status symbol, so they were effectively poaching to rebuild the species. They got lucky when their operation’s secrecy and mobility let them avoid infections from the Avian flu of ’36 when it crossed species. They did a few distasteful sales when a single juvie Saker could fetch eight figures, but poured all that money back into seeding new communities of breeders. The people were determined to take falconry back from the kings. By the mid-forties Sakers had something like fifty thousand breeding pairs.

Jinan’s got this cadre doing bird tactics with Sakers in the Emirates during the mass labor actions of gig and domestic workers. They’re embedded with the delivery riders, everyone with a cargo scooter the perfect size to tuck a hooded Saker in. They could wash their surveillance trail with numbers in all the underground highways, or by swapping bikes and phones with someone delivering an order showing up to perform your alibi in person for someone’s doorbell camera.

Sakers are a little smaller than redtails, but faster by a lot. Jinan has them running loops around the same kind of commercial drones as maeglin. She’s taken down bigger prey. Get this—one day Knight, her Saker, is flying way above Dubai, loitering above a drone launch, waiting for a replacement to snag, when she takes off even higher. Jinan can’t even see her falcon at this point. Her support crew has their binos and scopes out and they finally see it just as it deploys a snag on a Predator drone’s propeller. A Predator is big! An actual aircraft; needs a runway and everything. The bird was back on Jinan’s glove in a few seconds and they’re all watching as this for-real airplane is stumbling and dipping as the snag ratchets tighter on the bearings of this propeller and a drone operator somewhere fights to keep this thing level. Eventually, the prop stops entirely and the Predator falls out of the sky. When Jinan was staying with us, they were still working on getting their other Sakers to try the same thing.

Cute kid. I visited her a few years ago when she was gestating. I got to meet Knight, too! What a bird. Where was I? Right—Tavi and bigger prey.

The cops were still trying to make wide-area surveillance counter-insurgency tactics work, which meant developing anti-bird countermeasures to go with the electronic countermeasures and another drone arms race. We were connected to a lot of other folks working on the same problems and became a test bed and knowledge base for innovations in Bird War. They start strobing lights. We gave ‘em Geordi LaForge VIZORs. They deploy a sticky cloud to glue feathers together, we start using nanocoatings on their feathers to supplement their preening. They start projecting weak RF to give the hawk a headache in its magnetoreceptors. We supplement direction finding with a small iron-magnetic compass working through haptics in its foot and acclimatize them to withstand a broader spectrum of EM radiation.

Tavi followed up on all the offers of help after Gavilana. She started thinking strategically, like, what could she do with this capability and that one. She grilled Charli about the state of drone countermeasures and known limitations. Also what kind of drone fleet we could marshall ourselves, swarming control, networking. She kept asking me about this novel crow supercolony that had appeared in Brooklyn. She knew I grew up around a supercolony in Maryland and studied the formation of the supercolony and the New Jersey forest collapse in grad school. So she kept watching these videos with me of supercolony roosting and videos of crows and raptors interacting. Tavi had the obsession, but she thought through all the problems with us.

Riparia: Was Tavi your leader?

Plummett: Even though it was her place, and mostly her money we were operating on, she wasn’t giving orders. But she was the first one who believed we could do it. She calls an assembly of the cadre. It’s a little bigger now—Charli brought in Odo and Shev to help with dronetech and security. Owen’s kiddo, Étiennette, is a regular by this point—really loves taking care of the hawks. The joke was: if we got rolled by the Feds, and they got the whole social graph, we would say it was Eti’s idea. Harmony was helping a friend in the late stages of gestation elsewhere, but we looped her in later.

Tavi laid it out. We would use drones and hawks to spook the supercolony of crows in Brooklyn, cross Queens, and blanket the sky above LaGuardia airport. Airports and birds don’t mix. Most falconers back then spent some time working for airports when all the other jobs dried up, doing “bird abatement.” That’s keeping birds, usually geese, from crossing the volumes of airspace that planes are coming into or departing from. The jet engines back then, and rotorcraft, were really fragile and ten to fifteen kilos of bird meat could make the engine rip itself apart, especially at full power during takeoff.

Riparia: Why LaGuardia?

Plummett: Rikers Island got militarized in the thirties when the city finally had enough courage to shut it down. It used to be a civilian prison and they converted it for a bunch of things: military prison, weapons depot, logistics management. Lil’ army fort right in the middle of the city, the fuckers. Hurricane Barb had taken out Norfolk and other ports on the East coast in the summer of ’46 so they federalized LaGuardia and a bunch of docks and NYC was one of the bigger logistics hubs for the military by the end of the war, even before they occupied.

There were a lot of problems to be solved and folks were skeptical of Tavi’s plan but also thought it would be incredibly cool to pull off. A love letter to asymmetrical warfare. So kind of as a joke at first, ya know, “If we were to blah blah blah.” And after a week of that, people were convinced.

Falconers don’t want a bird to get too far away from them, within line of sight generally, so twelve klicks or so from the roost to the airport was our first problem. We thought of rapid relocation via mopeds, relays, but everything either left us tender to ID and capture or required too many people to be workable. Remember, we were planning to do this multiple times, if needed. The whole winter. Odo thought of hacking the haptic compasses to be able to accept synthetic inputs and an addition to the VIZOR to induce the magnetoreceptor disruption ourselves, so with training, the hawks could be roughly steered in a certain direction. That would let us operate on the scale we needed.

Second problem was communication. Above Brooklyn, we could operate drones in tandem with the hawks, but in the volume of air above Queens, centered on the axis of Runway Four, LaGuardia’s electronic countermeasures were bursting RF and EM interference to glitch, overload, and confuse any drones in the volume. Area denial EM, they called it. Charli said that we could have a halo of racing drones tracking each bird within a tiny proximity, just ten meters, where a high-power RF ping can cut through the inverse-square law. So a hawk could effectively “tow” this cloud of racing drones into area denial EM and multiply the effectiveness of abatement maneuvers on a large volume of birds. This made it a lot less likely that the crows could mob the hawk out of the area, too. Crows are plucky as fuck.

But we still couldn’t communicate with the compass over long range within the area denial. Well, at this point, it was a wearable LAN. Computer and compass tucked into the jesses; nanowire we carefully wove through their quills to the chrome VIZOR with a mylar antennae blister looking like a cockatoo’s crest. We thought maybe a lasercom module, but our drones would be strobing light to repel crows, and someone would get snatched by cops pointing a laser at an airport for fifteen minutes. It was Eti’s idea to use sound. We had been watching sheepdog videos for the sorts of things dogs could be trained to do and how we would sheepdog a huge flock of crows, and Eti pointed out that the herder just yells commands at the dog. Clockwise! Counter-clockwise! Gather in a clump! We only had to communicate a few bits of data, a new heading for the haptic compass and an identifier for which bird it was on. We had a portable suitcase LRAD—like a stereo speaker if it were a scoped rifle shooting sound—that someone had liberated. We could just pass the LRAD over the hawk’s flightpath, burping notes in a squarewave to a shielded audio chip on the jesses to update the heading.

Riparia: If you could direct birds and drones into the restricted airspace, couldn’t you just have the drones fly into the aircraft turbines? Why did you need the crows?

Plummett: We considered that. We couldn’t train a bird to dive into a jet engine, both because it’s infeasible and it was already a bummer doing the same thing at one remove. Even just breaching the airspace with a cloud of drones would have been embarrassing for the military. I helped convince everyone it wasn’t enough. A few hawks could just be shot out of the sky. A supercolony of crows is thousands upon thousands of birds. You can’t shoot them down. It looks apocalyptic, seeing them move as one flock, blanketing the sky. We wanted this to shock. We wanted the LaGuardia Air Command to live in fear of us. We wanted to humiliate them. For the people of Iran. For the people of the Levant. For Gavilana.

Riparia: Wow. Damn. How many people were you working with at this point?

Plummett: About three dozen. Half of that was doing drone production and electronics, a handful of people just doing security, a small operations crew, and the rest of us working with the birds. We had nine hawks, two alternates. Each hawk had a squadron of between fifteen and twenty racing drones orbiting in a protective posture of ophanim rings, biblically-accurate, strobing rainbows in every direction but their wing commander.

Riparia: [Laughs.] You flirt! Tell me about the day of. Oh, and what was your new hawk named?

Plummett: Barb, after the hurricane. She was a good bird. By the day of, after more than a year of prep, we were cold operators. This cute kid, Lubchansky, had us radio-trained and logged into a net. She was our sysop responsible for coordinating everyone, following the timetable, and synthesizing information. Her team had a high-altitude drone with vapor-penetrating IR we had tweaked with false-color to flare for feather iridescence looking over the whole operational area—Brooklyn and Queens, that is. So we had this really amazing view of the flock’s volume. She drilled on ATC sims obsessively at Goose Pond, said it was the closest analog for the op.

She has us all in place, calling the last positioning as the supercolony collectively decided to start settling into their roost. She triggered the warning, a simultaneous mass text to civil and military air authorities, ATC, media, and emergency services. It was a declaration of terms. It said that we are grounding flights at LaGuardia pending the end of American imperialism, consequences for the incineration of a million-plus Iranians, and would you kindly clear the skies within the next ten minutes or suffer a catastrophic bird strike? Most sincerely, Covert Talon.

Riparia: Holy fec. I see what you did there. What was the waiting like?

Plummett: Actually, we started immediately after that. Belle released our hawks South of the roost in Brooklyn with a few chase drones so we could keep track of them. Charli and her team, several teams actually, deployed the remainder of our drones. They would be rousing the roost while we confirmed our hawks were getting compass updates. Lubchansky confirmed this with the LRAD station, spread our hawks to the periphery of the crow volume, and then dispatched the chase drones to the hawks, strobes blazing and beginning to dig into the startled birds.

The hawks were really the stars at this point. Better than sheepdogs. There must be some genetic memory of harassing Passenger Pigeon flocks the same way, hunting on the edge of the flocking volume to pick off the slowest. They’d wheel and dig back into the flock when it got less defined. Most of the training was just to keep them focused on the compass half the time so they’d move with the mass of crows and not get distracted by a few peeling off—sort of the opposite of their hunting instinct. I glued so many feathers to my fingers helping fabricate crow drones that Barb was footing me any time I didn’t have my glove. [Laughs.]

Anyway, it works! Tavi and I were on a rooftop in Elmhurst for spotting and recovery. The sun just set and on the horizon, we saw our birds surrounded by globes of radiant light and a tight ribbon of crows moving as if with single purpose over us to LaGuardia. You could hear people just awestruck and surprised on the streets below. We didn’t anticipate so many people would start milling around to watch on the rooftops. [Laughs.] Tavi and I were so happy, we had to collect ourselves to send in a spotting report, doing our best not to squeal with delight. Owen let out a little “yeehaw!” from somewhere in Astoria and Eti next to them shouting “Let’s fucking go!” Lubchansky had to clear the net.

Riparia: Tell me about the crashes.

Plummett: They didn’t ground the planes. We were monitoring the civilian ATC and they grounded every civilian flight in the city’s airspace once they sighted the flock. In the investigations, we got to hear the LaGuardia tower ATC on military channels, and it was about what you’d expect from a hollowed-out officer corps: “fly through them, you faggot,” stuff like that.

This C-17 Globemaster took off right into the swarm of crows, all of the common sense in the world overridden because this dude got called gay. It was a tiny civilian runway for this huge jet, so it had these takeoff rockets going. They lost the engines to crow gore immediately after getting airborne, stalled, and the rockets pitched this thing into a forward somersault and smeared it across the end of the runway in a fireball.

This wing of Osprey—V-22 fixed-wing hybrid rotorcraft, not the bird—tried to land through the crows. Two of the three waved off and limped into splashdowns in the East River. The last continued to land on the tarmac, lost a rotor, and cartwheeled into a fuel tanker with another big fireball. But to be fair, that was a horrible aircraft and sometimes they just did that. Comrade Osprey killed a lot of officers. Anyway, the people on the roof cheered openly. Me and Tavi danced. Lubchansky already issued the abort. Fires, smoke, explosions were accounted for in our red lines and we didn’t need to keep the supercolony there. The airport was on fire and out of commission.

The abort meant that our hawks got directed to the recovery positions. Tavi and I got Karin and Barb on our gloves and saw the drones following them redirected to other recovery points. There were thanks and cheers on our way out, but everyone on the roof gave us space and made sure no one took photos, giving each other looks like “I didn’t see nothin’!” Then we left town.

Riparia: That’s really peak.

Plummett: Nah, yeah, it was great. We got to start hacking the birds the next morning. That’s acclimatizing them to the wild for release. So we shut everything down. We expected to sheepdog crows every day over that winter, but we got to take a vacation instead. We went to a lot of parties and punk shows that winter. The “Silent Nights” were an undeniable win for the city and we celebrated.

LARS hit a few months later. I lost Tavi and my parents really quickly . . . I don’t think I have the energy to go into that period of my life now.

Riparia: I’m sorry, Isabel. We’ve gone way over the time I asked for, anyway. Before we stop the interview, could you briefly tell me about what you’re doing these days?

Plummett: Sure. Thanks, Gretchen. I’ve been a “comet” for a half-dozen communes in the city, making the circuit every few months to check on projects and people and birds I’m nurturing. One project exploring mutualism is a tool library for crows and other birds to go with our feeders. We have libraries for all sorts of things we humans—and fluffkind!—share, so why not give birds tools and see how they use them?

Riparia: How do they use them?

Plummett: Well, mostly to destroy stuff we’ve built. [Laughs.] But that’s good. It’s another way they can express their needs and we can change the way we live with them. We all had to relearn destruction as a creative act. That’s what abolition is all about.

I’m also encouraging cooperative breeding among brood parasite hosts. There’s lots of birders working on this too, using decoys and little animatronic birds. The idea is to use dragonfly drones to ID and relocate brood parasite eggs—dropped off for another bird to raise—to a communal nest with lots of mixed flock parents and nearby forage and feeders. Gentle but persistent robot tentacles built into the nest keep the bigger birds from pushing the others out of the nest and generally keep peace. More baby birds get to be adult birds.

Riparia: That’s lovely. Thank you for talking with me, Isabel. Would you like to walk with me through the marshes?

Plummett: Delighted! Tell me about Pacha.