What If New York Just Loves a Fancy, Complicated Bird?

Amid AI doomerism, looming anxiety about the midterm elections, economic pressure from rising prices, and frustration with the votes on Dancing With the Stars, one story has really cut through the news-cycle morass this week: Kelly Clarkson’s failed attempt to buy a mechanical bird at an artisanal Brooklyn home-goods and knicknacks store called Art of Play. The arc of this feud is now well known to all and will no doubt be shaped into the epic poetry our descendants recite in front of bonfires long after our civilization collapses. Clarkson wanted to buy the shop’s mascot, a bird automaton named Molly that was not intended for sale. When she was denied, she posted online about how rudely she’d been treated, which led to days of defensive back-and-forth responses between Clarkson and the shop’s owners.

The brouhaha offers many avenues for discourse and cultural dissection. Was Clarkson right to post about her frustration? Is her annoyance relatable? Why put a price tag on an item not meant for sale? Who is the villain here: a powerful celebrity with an international following or a presumptuous store owner disregarding potential customers? But the cloud of conversation and ongoing attempts to identify the real villain of this story have failed to consider a much simpler, more culturally pervasive reason for why Kelly Clarkson–versus–Art of Play has captivated our imagination this week. What if it’s not about Clarkson, online harassment, or what counts as “relatable” at all? What if, deep down, this is yet another example in the long history of one of New York’s most enduring obsessions? What if this is really about how New York cannot get enough stories about fancy, complicated birds? 

Think back to late 2018, when the city became absorbed by a new, enigmatic, painfully stylish celebrity: a mandarin duck that had taken up residence in the pond at Central Park. The duck — a.k.a. Mandarin Patinkin, a.k.a. the Hot Duck — swam to prominence that autumn and became the first contemporary icon in the ongoing New York mania for crowning new “It” birds. There was fawning coverage in international news outlets, and Bette Midler even wrote an entire mandarin duck picture book. But Hot Duck was also a complex figure. Birders complained that it was not actually ornithologically interesting and that its celebrity distracted from real birding issues. With celebrity comes the burden of representation, and Hot Duck, like every good “It” bird, was not immune.

Although Hot Duck has not been seen since 2019, its rise to fame was just one notable example in the history of New York bird celebrities. In 2023, a cut in the protective netting around an enclosure in the Central Park Zoo allowed a Eurasian eagle-owl to escape into the park. Flaco the owl became a celebrity Central Park resident, with breathless news coverage of Flaco’s impressive self-preservation skills and, eventually, mournful obituaries when Flaco died after flying into a building. (Like many celebrity deaths, the circumstances of Flaco’s passing have now been called into question after its necropsy suggested ingestion of lethal substances.) NYC “It” birds existed before internet virality, too. Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who lived in Central Park beginning in 1991, was the inspiration for multiple documentaries, children’s books, and a puppet on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Multiple wild turkeys have had their time in the limelight, including one named Astoria that still lives in the Battery. There was Barry, a barred owl who was killed by a Central Park Conservancy van in 2021, and there was Rocky, a very confused saw-whet owl that somehow ended up nesting inside the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in 2020 and had to be rescued and relocated.

Taken altogether, it’s not surprising that the Kelly Clarkson–Art of Play story has become enormous news. Everyone loves a messy story about celebrities who sometimes have to exist in the real world, but nothing ignites cross-borough attention quite like the crowning of a new “It” bird. And Molly, Art of Play’s mascot, is easily the hottest, fanciest bird since Hot Duck. She twitches her tail and cocks her head on command, and she can whistle a plausible imitation of a real goldfinch’s call. She’s handmade and entirely without computer chips or other electronic parts, making her an uncannily appropriate bird of the moment. AI stans can appreciate that her fakeness makes her somehow better than the real thing, and Luddites can celebrate her as a creation of old-school engineering, with no batteries, chintzy plastics, or impersonal 3D-printed molds. Even better, Molly is the exact right amount of Instagram accessible while still being kept at a classy remove. Her whistle is short and easy to clip for online discourse, but like all the other New York “It” birds, she’s not available for just anyone to have whenever they want. The whole point of the Kelly Clarkson story is that Molly is not for sale. She is too cool for that. She’s aloof. She’s unattainable.

The discourse may spin on, but the real lesson of Molly the bird is straightforward: There’s nothing more New York than a story about a bird. It is how the city sees itself, especially when a bird-related incident allows New York to examine deep lines of cultural tension, like the multi-week news story about racial divides spurred on by an incident of bird-watching harassment. New York is defined by “It” birds; there are no more recognizable figures of New York life than Sesame Street’s Big Bird and the ever-present, ever-endearing New York pigeon, so notable that a 16-foot pigeon statue once loomed over the city streets. At the end of the day, this is a bird city. Molly’s just the newest one chirping in it.