BIRDING

Most of the time when a person suffers from pulled muscles or a back out of alignment — the signs of aging — she’s inevitably given a tube of balm along with a treatment by a physical therapist or a chiropractor, perhaps a massage specialist. The tube is a receptacle of magic bullets reputed to stem the tide of pain and aging.

Yesterday, after four or five days of treatments, including the tube of balm, for an unrelenting attack to my back and leg, I went out on the front porch and applied my personal brand of balm: watching birds splashing in a freshly-filled bird bath under the towering hemlock in my yard. Hidden away in the understory were several species that flew in for a bath and directed my attention away from ailments — nuthatches, tufted titmice, a Carolina wren, and, finally, the premier birds of my notice: both male and female cardinals. Absent from the line-up were my favorite crow friends who’ve made only sporadic appearances on the Mountain this year.

The smaller perch birds stayed busy pushing each other out of the bath while the cardinals looked on in disdain and never entered the water, but they managed to make themselves heard by their “cheer, cheer” voices from a thicket near the drive. As I watched, the cardinals would swoop out of their lair and land near the bird bath but avoided disturbing the perch birds, just as the perch birds avoided these aggressive red beauties that are confident of their territory near a tangle of blackberry bushes.

I’ve written many poems about birds — crows, cardinals, sparrows, and hawks. The hawk was a powerful figure clinging to a telephone wire on my drive to work in Lafayette, Louisiana every day for years. It hovered over the sugarcane fields, waiting for a chance to swoop down on field mice. The hawk also appeared as the totem for a character in Martin Finds His Totem, my young adult book about a boy traiteur in Cajun country. On my daily drive, the mornings that the hawk wasn’t clinging to the wire, I often felt a bit anxious, as if the day lacked a solidness I couldn’t explain.

I’m not the type of bird watcher who has a bird list, so I guess I wouldn’t be bold enough to declare myself an official bird watcher, but I’m an appreciative watcher. Birds are spiritual symbols for me — symbols of comfort, peace, freedom, and joy, especially when the body has failed to behave as it should — or maybe shouldn’t — at age 81. If I’d written a poem instead of this blog today, it would’ve been entitled “Bird Balm.”

Here’s one of my very early, descriptive bird poems that I finally published in The Holy Present and Farda. It’s entitled “Unfinished Song”:

“Twisted fingers of trees,

filagrees of ruin,

taunt the false spring.

Robins and grackles

rally for season to commence

and sparrows twit further on,

perfect intervals before the resurrection.

They mock wire-sitting blackbirds

besting a wind that trembles
like memory rustling in stunted cane.

Farther in the woods

the sun streams through

labyrinths of branches.

Vultures circle wax myrtle.

Starlings arrange themselves in waiting,

faking the downstroke,

chorus witness to a new beginning.

Sometime before dark, near water,

hawks glide overhead, sent off course

to circumvent an anxious season —

the unfinished lark.”

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

A NEW RESIDENT

Our resident wren's new home

We now have a resident wren, one that has made its home in a hanging pot containing a strawberry plant on our back porch. It’s either a Carolina Wren or a House Wren, but it darts away so swiftly that I’m unable to examine it closely. However, I know it’s a wren, and this identification of the small bird comes not from my copy of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds, but from my memory of the picture of a wren in an old linen-paged book about birds my mother bought for me during pre-school years. It’s true that I could only identify cardinals, robins, blue jays, wrens, and crows after looking through this beautiful children’s book, but looking at it inspired me to deeper study of the bird kingdom. The book was eventually stolen from our van at a Motel 6 in Albuquerque, New Mexico when we were taking a load of books to my grandchildren in California back in the 80’s, but the pictures are etched in my memory. My mother loved birds and bought me my first set of binoculars, and I’ve passed on the hobby of bird watching to my youngest daughter Elizabeth who keeps binoculars and a field guide to birds on a table in her den.

After a light rain last week, I discovered potting soil scattered on the back porch and thought a deer had been foraging for the strawberries in the hanging pot, but the following morning, I saw a small, compact wren bringing a leaf to the pot and knew that it was settling in with us. She eyed me while she buried the leaf in the pot and finished her task before flying away for more nest lining. Although I’ve spied on the wren for several days, I haven’t heard the gurgling or bubbling song that wrens make during breeding season. Some sources report that the song is loud and insistent and that it’s difficult for one to believe that such a small bird can project such volume.

My friend Vickie, the consummate bird identifier, wants to take down the pot to study the nest, but I’m reluctant to disturb my short-winged friend. I think that it forages for nest material (and insects) beneath the tall hemlock in the yard as I’ve seen it moving through the tree’s lower branches during early morning.

Wordsworth wrote a lengthy poem praising the wren, but I prefer the Japanese poems about flora and fauna. Issa, one of the most renowned poets writing in the Japanese haiku tradition, penned these lines about our undaunted bird friend who’s building a home on our porch:

    “fighting the mountain wind
     on foot…
     a wren.”

I can easily envision my small friend climbing up the mountains near Sewanee, fighting the fierce winds that frequently blow through, to reach the Cumberland Plateau…and, ultimately, my back porch.

Issa, whose name means Cup-of-Tea, wrote haiku during the 19^th century and used Buddhist ideas about grace, compassion, and, in the case of our house wren, “joyful celebration of the ordinary,” wandering the Japanese countryside, composing haiku about such ordinary subjects as birds battling the elements.