SO SOCAL: The Best...The Beautiful...And The Bizarre : A Very Rare Bird, Indeed

The Steller’s sea eagle has exhausted its patience. Spreading its snow-white shoulders, it alights from a log and begins a magnificent, muscular ascent that might send it hurtling back home over the Pacific, if not for the leather restraints held by its handler at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“It’s gorgeous,” bird-watcher Joseph Brooks enthuses through the viewfinder of his camera. His blue gray eyes narrow; a smile stretches the width of his trimmed white goatee. “You see its beak? It’s almost as big as a man’s hand.”

Brooks last made the acquaintance of this species two years ago in Hokkaido. “I traveled to the north island of Japan specifically to see this bird,” he explains. It was mid-November, when the eagles migrate across the ice floes from their summer roost in Siberia. This morning, Brooks is calculating the dimensions of the Steller’s feet. His actual-size sketch eventually will join his oeuvre in the L.A. Zoo’s aviary--paintings of the sacred ibis, Malaysian peacock pheasant, scaly-naped pigeon and others.

Far from the aviary, Joseph Brooks creates habitats just as exotic. Make-Up, his club at the El Rey Theater, nurtures glam-rockers and would-be Bowies; his Coven 13 happening lures pale goths as nocturnal as owls. And his venerable Sin-a-Matic at Club 7969 has proven a more stable environment than its fetishists and S&M; patrons would be expected to tolerate.

Bird-watching antedates his start as an impresario. “When I was a kid in New York City,” he recalls, “the Museum of Natural History changed my life.” He took bird walks through Central Park, collected insects as a member of the New York Junior Entomological Society. Alas, ornithology “never seemed a possibility,” he says, and after an art degree and some teaching at a Native American school, he began following the bands he cared about--Adam and the Ants, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Ramones--as indefatigably as bird-watchers stalk birds.

Brooks describes his separation from the birds of his youth as part of a more profound estrangement. “There’s a huge chunk of time when I kind of lost it--a 10-year space where I forgot about the things that really made me happy.” He would watch the Discovery Channel and “wish that that was my life.”

His awakening was just as painful. “A lot of my friends were dying,” he recalls. “You’re holding their hand and they’d say, ‘Don’t waste your life,’ and that’s the last thing they tell you.” He began crisscrossing the planet to find birds, many of them in ecosystems also on the verge of dying. At 14,000 feet in Ecuador, he spotted the Andean condor; he sought out the green magpie in Malaysia and Ross’ touraco in Uganda. He led local bird-watching tours for children. He remade his L.A. garden into an explosion of native Southland plants that attract native insects and the native birds (56 species so far) that eat them.

Five times, on separate trips to Central America, he’s been foiled by the rufous-vented ground cuckoo. “They’re professional army ant followers,” Brooks says. “The ants move in these huge carpets, and the cuckoos follow at the edge. They’re not interested in eating the ants, but rather the insects and amphibians fleeing the swarm.” Its elusiveness only adds to its cachet. “It has a mythical quality, like a phoenix.”

Reconnecting with the natural world has brought a kind of holistic calm to the creator of Coven 13 and Sin-a-Matic. “I completely appreciate my life every day,” Brooks says. “I used to worry about being cool, and was careful not to have feelings, or show gratitude. Now I enjoy taking time to look at the butterfly or the bird or the orchid. For me, going to the forest is going to church.”