My adventures watching, photographing, studying, and writing about birds
Early Sunday morning,
we sat on the seawall
watching a laughing gull
eat a fish. There wasn’t
much happening, just the
gulf falling and rising
with the sea’s slow breathing
between hurricanes,
porpoises jumping over
waves, pelicans floating
above the shore and that
gull working on his fish
while glancing upward at
a sky filled with thieves.
There’s a swagger in the way the cattle egret walks across the fields of this fenced frontier, wingtips looped into his belt buckle. He won’t talk much at first, but if you get him going he’ll spin stories like country songs—beer drinkin’, cloaca kickin’ and trains beyond the horizon. He’ll tell of blue northers ripping down the plains and the time he lit a fire under a mule that hadn’t moved in two days. He waits while you imagine what a burning mule would smell like and then tells how the mule just moved over a couple feet from the fire and stayed put another two days before movin’ on. Usually, though, he just stares out past the longhorns, dreaming lonely dreams from another time. Maybe he even writes a song or two about the rough and tumble old birds of the past. In the evening, after a long day picking bugs off the backs of settled cows, he sends demos to Nashville and Austin hoping he’ll make it big someday.
glowing orange
the cattle egrets fly off
into the sunset
Were dandelions tall as
trees
would we follow the
meadowlark
into such a yellow
forest
where flowers tower
overhead
and the only thing we
hear
is the clamorous buzz of
bees?
—
This morning while I was outside with my students observing nature so we could write haiku, we saw a meadowlark land near some dandelions and walk into what could only be described as a forest since most of the stems rose well above the bird’s head. I listed it as one of my observations.
Later, looking over my list, I wanted to write a poem that was basically just a sentence and then play with different ways of breaking the lines. I tried several permutations but settled on something resembling “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, which I had just read in Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook.
Two other versions:
Were dandelions tall as trees
would we follow the meadowlark
into such a yellow forest
where flowers tower overhead
and the only thing we hear
is the clamorous buzz of bees?
—
Were dandelions tall as trees, would we follow the meadowlark into such a yellow forest where flowers tower overhead and the only thing we hear is the clamorous buzz of bees?
I ask the egret what makes him great. He smiles his bird smile and tells me of forbidden passion and how he loved and lost a snowy egret once. Held great roosts on the other side of the pond, invited all the shorebirds, hoping—just hoping—she’d maybe wade up his shore. At night he stood one-legged in a tree, ignoring the herons all around, while he studied the faint light reflected in the rippling water across the pond—I stop him there, tell him it sounds like he’s cribbing this story from Fitzgerald. Yes, he says, returning to the present, it’s true, it’s true, but there is no copyright for the heart, and besides… she was so beautiful and it was spring and the stars were bright and we were fledglings in the days of love.
egret reflections
ripple the still pond
echoes fade
The grackles opened
Like gates in the trees
Shadow birds, eyes glistening
You could almost imagine
These noisy shades
Abandoning tangible birds,
Parking lots and steel dumpsters
In their odyssey through
Suburban woods,
Clacking and creaking
Like machines or clocks
Ticking away the last
Hoarse seconds of winter.
Since finishing my small year, I’ve enjoyed going back to not counting birds quite so much. I’m still participating in Project FeederWatch and I did the Great Backyard Bird Count the weekend before last, but it’s good to just enjoy the birds for what they are instead of as checks on a list.
Still, I do like participating in these citizen science projects and so I’m list blogging, which seems hardly worthy of the Kreativ Blogger Award kindly bestowed on my by Angie at woman, ask the question.
For the GBBC, I counted along the pond trail after work on Friday and then stuck with my backyard on Saturday and Sunday, which are my Project FeederWatch count days anyway. I didn’t do a GBBC count on Monday.
This year’s count yielded no surprises. I haven’t seen anything new in the neighborhood or in my yard this year, and I haven’t seen any American Goldfinches. Maybe the Lesser Goldfinches have claimed the yard, but last year I regularly saw both species.
And here are the counts. The numbers in parentheses indicate the greatest number of individuals seen at one time…
GBBC Day 1 (2.12.10): Pond Trail:
GBBC Day 2 (2.13.10): Backyard:
GBBC Day 3 (2.14.10): Backyard:
Project FeederWatch – Month 3 (a running total):
Be sure to check out the latest edition of I and the Bird (#119) hosted at Somewhere in NJ, which includes my poem “Hummingbird Heading Out to Sea.”
Does the hummingbird know
the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico
when land is lost from sight?
Oil rigs and shrimping boats—
fast-blurred memories, random ghosts afloat
where sky and sea seem one.
Is there any inkling
of monsters below that other ceiling
birds can scarce imagine?
Tiny feathered jewel,
leagues from any flower’s nectar fuel,
how do you know the way?
Above those trackless seas,
in doldrum times of windless apogee,
one heart of pebble’s size
pounds alone against the gulf,
pounds alone against the world.
—
One of the most amazing bird migrations is that of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. On its southbound journey from eastern North America to its wintering grounds in Central and South America, it flies up to 500 miles nonstop over the Gulf of Mexico.
Update: This post was included in I and the Bird #119 hosted at Somewhere in NJ.