Everyone knows a sparrow; common as dirt. Dirt-coloured too, every earthen shade: granite to iron oxide to the deepest, velvet dark, streaking to slate in a sand-edged tail.
Here, you are a welcome bit of warmth in winterland — a meadow blurred with snow, stalks of spent summer glowing gold in the white light.
Brought front and centre, the striped head and the seed-like beak reveal another wonder: an infinitesimal exhalation etching itself on the frigid air.
O holy ghost, ever invisible to the naked, yearning eye; O Life, O Art:
This is your testament.
II
Winter again: snow and faded goldenrod, shades of pewter, save for your fuzzy summer peach.
The day is cold: You sport a junco puffer vest and muffler; frost furs your balaclava-beak.
Dear little one, keep living.
III
— the sun, the day — The eastern bluebird sings a picture without words. I am entranced by the perfection of its feet, insectizoid in their jointure.
We think of you as creatures of the air but are you, really? Your regal side-eye pins me to your place. Twig and lichen are your grasp, Sky no more than backdrop blue, Tree mere hazy branching. In indigo-and-russet robe you pose, nature and capture made perfect frame: one radiant scion of that race, which, once and long ago, reigned, lordly, over all the earth.
And how about also a bird that wanted to be a frog?
That’s ridiculous.
Why?
Why would a bird want to be a frog? It can fly, and it has all the space of the skies, and a frog just …
Has a swamp? A swamp is everything a frog needs: water for breathing and breeding, land and logs for calling and mating, bugs above for food and mud below for hibernation…
But it’s so dark and gloppy. The sky is wide and bright and—
Yesterday, I heard the queerest bird song — like a vireo’s but not. I had to go outside and investigate. I tracked the sound to the area of its source and looked up, as vireos sing from the treetops; not that I expected to actually see it, since they are so well camouflaged. I’ve only seen one once, in early spring before the leaves had come out.
Bridal Wreath Spirea
While I was searching, I realized the sound was coming from ear level. “Are you in the bush?” I asked. (Yes, I talk to Nature.) The bird song stopped. I whistled and it answered; in the whistling was something very familiar — a prickly, rustly burble. I reached into the bush a metre or two away (a lovely, blooming spirea) and shook one branch. The song went silent. I concluded that my hunch was probably right: there was a starling in there, secretly trying out a vireo song!
It’s easy to dislike starlings. They form huge flocks and can do a lot of damage to a crop in a short time. They’re highly adaptive to urban life, too, and can often be seen arrayed on wires, murmuring, whistling and dropping lots of waste as they socialize. Most significantly, starlings are an introduced species that competes against and displaces native North American species. The first starlings were brought to North America and released by a fool who thought it would be nice to bring over all the birds mentioned in works by Shakespeare.
“Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.”
Henry IV Part 1, Act 1 Scene iii
Nevertheless, starlings have pecked their way into my affections. They are amazing mimics. At different times I have heard a cat’s meow and a car horn coming from on high and, puzzled, looked up to see a solitary starling, shifting on a wire and looking pleased with itself. The most incredible performance I’ve witnessed was a starling sampling the songs of half a dozen other birds — the modus operandi of the Northern mockingbird. A mimic imitating another mimic: Wow!
I also can’t help but admire a flock of starlings in the air. Hundreds, even thousands, of individual birds behave as one, fluid entity, cavorting in the air the way certain schools of fish do in the ocean. It’s a wonder, to watch them paint their ever-changing shapes on the canvas of the sky.… Check out this National Geographic video and you’ll see.
P.S. Starlings aren’t particularly handsome but they are easy to identify. They’re a kind of dark no-colour with a little iridescence about the shoulders and their feathers have an untidy aspect. A flock will include many immature birds, which are speckled all over with “stars” of white — hence the name.
After the long winter and cold grey spring, and before the heat comes down to squash us all, there is a brief period when I feel as if I’ve been transported to another planet. It’s a fantastic place where the trees are pink, the grass is bright yellow and the air smells like flowers and is full of tiny flying creatures and music.
On a hot and humid summer day, it’s painful to cover up, I know. The only length to which I’ve been willing to go (LOL) is capri-length, but think about it: doesn’t that expose the very part of my skin most likely to experience a brush-by encounter with something green and ouchy?
I had cause to admonish myself on this point recently, when my husband took the narrow, very unofficial trail in back of our house down to Little Rouge Creek, just to see how Nature was coming along—in shorts. An hour later he returned, his legs now become neon signs of bushwhacking danger. The welts calmed down after a while but we guess he is allergic to whatever “rough-edged grass” (his description) he walked through. You just never know, do you?
Next time your sensory organs are assaulted by the lingering evidence of a skunk’s most caustic emission, recite this mantra inwardly: “burnt bacon and coffee grounds, burnt bacon and coffee grounds.” After a while, the urge to gag will pass away.
Yesterday I spent about four hours outside, walking through meadows and woods. How I love September—“September the Golden” is how I think of this month, with the goldenrod in full bloom, early-turning foliage all yellow amongst the green and the maples not yet taking over with their eye-catching red. The new school year begins and people get a gleam in their eye: the engine of intention switches from idle to drive; that first brisk breeze of autumn comes in at the window and whispers, “Now.” I should say, however, that on this particular day that breeze was still afar off and the air was d—-d hot and still and, frankly, if it hadn’t been for my duties I would have been at home and resting comfortably inside. Nature rewarded me for seeing to my duties, however, with her wonderful and mysterious nourishment, as is her way…but I digress.
Thanks to Jim Yaki, whom I have never met but whose
blog contains some good photos of poison ivy and
not-poison-ivy in various environments.
One of the early-turning plants, is, most thankfully, poison ivy. Avoidance of poison ivy is a persuasive reason to stay on-path in a woodland park; in this park, the path through the meadows was mowed or maintained to about 2 m wide, so safe for dog and man. Poison ivy loves to lurk in meadows, shaded and disguised by grasses and shrubs and, increasingly, by dog-strangling vine, which (in a painful case of out of the frying pan, into the fire) may be out-competing even this. Anyway, in September, poison ivy becomes much easier to spot, the leaves first becoming mottled with yellow and even the widest leaves down-drooping from the stem or bending from each side of the central vein in that characteristic way; then, in a little while, turning red as a rash.
With the purpose of instruction, my trail mentor led our little group off-path, along a one-leg-wide defile; I spotted the ivy first, and then my mentor showed me a neat little trick: instead of trying to avoid the plant that had stretched across the path, she stepped right on it. She went on doing this until we were out of danger. This solves the problem of where to put your foot if stepping over an ivy plant, since, in a case like this, until you’ve emerged from the ivy patch stepping over or past one plant means putting your foot in another; or it makes you so unbalanced you’re at risk of swaying or tumbling into another plant inadvertently. I’m happy to report that my bare ankles got home unscathed (though I really should rinse off the soles of my shoes).
