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Fifty-Seven Indigo Buntings

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , on June 1, 2011| 1 Comment »

It’s just shy of 5 a.m., and I’m standing in the far corner of the Wal-Mart parking lot.  The leaves are still dripping from an all-night shower.  In exactly two minutes Nancy and Jean will pull in to meet me, we’ll check our gear and get into my car, then drive half an hour to our first designated stop.  For the next five or six hours we will be official volunteer employees of the US Geologic Service (Patuxent Wildlife Research Facility), joining about 3,000 others in US and Canada to complete the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey.

This is my seventeenth consecutive year counting Route 63027, “Copeland.”  There are fifty stops a half-mile apart, starting in Yadkin County on Old Rockford Road and ending all they way into Wilkes County.  At each stop I identify every bird I can hear or see within three minutes – Nancy is my timer and scribe, Jean counts cars and records “excess noise,” but only one person is permitted to count.  Nancy and Jean aren’t even allowed to point. From late May to the end of June, individuals and teams in all fifty states and Canada are counting along similar pre-mapped routes.  This “citizen scientist” data has allowed groups like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to identify continent-wide trends in wild bird populations, such as the major crash in the House Finch population about fifteen years ago (eventually discovered to be due to an epizootic of chlamydia).

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Our first stop is a gravel drive just past Double Creek.  It’s misty, still dark, and the frogs are way louder than the birds this morning.  (I’m no expert on frog calls, but I hear tree frogs, leopard frogs (I think), a bullfrog, and an American Toad.)  A Northern Cardinal across the road is so persistent it’s hard to concentrate, but there’s an Eastern Phoebe near the creek, a Pine Warbler, and now, yes, across the field, the first one starts singing – Indigo Bunting.

Every year, as I transmit the data to the USGS, I keep my own personal tally of the number of species and number of individuals.  On a sunny day on any stretch of North Carolina piedmont roadside, an Indigo will be singing.  Constantly.  They like to perch on a wire or dead limb where they can be seen, and they are tirelessly vocal – so easy to count.  Every year Indigo Bunting is the number one most numerous individual, even when there are flocks of twenty Cedar Waxwings or thirty European Starlings.  This year, though, it is overcast right up to our forty-fifth stop, and I just don’t feel like I’m hearing many Indigos. Oh, we’ve seen quite a few, and some are singing, but I’m afraid this will be the first year they don’t “win.”

Why do I love these tiny dark cavaliers?  I remember the first one I ever saw, on Fodderstack Trail off the Blue Ridge Parkway, singing, of course, in the tip top of a dead tree.  And when the sun struck him OW! the iridescence and electricity of that little body.  When I drive down any country road in the summer with my windows down, I find myself muttering every minute or so: “Indigo . . . Indigo . . . Indigo.”  They thrive at forest’s edge, and since we’ve sliced up so much woodland into scattered chunks it just leaves more prime bunting habitat.  So how about this cool counting day when birds that usually steal away in the heat are active right up until our finish?  Will they overtake my Indigos?  Total up the hash marks on the tally sheet.  Here it comes: Chipping Sparrows – 35; American Robins – 46; and (the envelope, please) . . . Indigo Buntings – 57.

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Bird Watching
John Ciardi

Every time we put crumbs out and sunflower
seeds something comes.  Most often sparrows.
Frequently a jay.  Now and then a junco or
a cardinal.  And once – immediately and never
again, but as commonly as any miracle while it
is happening, and then instantly incredible for-
ever – the tiniest (was it?) yellow warbler
as nearly as I could thumb through the bird
book for it, or was it an escaped canary? or
simply the one impossible bright bird that is
always there during a miracle, and then never?

I, certainly, do not know all that comes to us
at times.  A bird is a bird as long as it is
there.  Then it is a miracle our crumbs and
sunflower seeds caught and let go.  Is there
a book to look through for the identity
of a miracle?  No bird that is there is
miracle enough.  Every bird that has been is
entirely one.  And if some miracles are rarer
than others, every incredible bird has crumbs
and seeds in common with every other.  Let there
be bread and seed in time: all else will follow.

.     .     .     .     .

[John Ciardi, 1916-1986, was the long-time poetry editor of Saturday Review and directed the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.  His book How Does a Poem Mean? was the first instruction I ever read on how to write and appreciate poetry, and for many years was a standard.  He was also a renowned etymologist; I remember him from his NPR program on word histories.  This poem is collected in Bright Wings, 2010 Columbia University Press, edited by Billy Collins.]

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USGS Breeding Bird Survey, Route 63027
May 28, 2011

Canada Goose   –   19
Green Heron   –   1
Black Vulture   –   2
Turkey Vulture   –   1
Red-shouldered Hawk   –   2
Red-tailed Hawk   –   1
Killdeer   –   3
Mourning Dove   –   37
Chimney Swift   –   29
Red-bellied Woodpecker   –   6
Downy Woodpecker   –   2
Yellow-shafted Flicker   –   1
Pileated Woodpecker   –   2
Eastern Wood Pewee   –   2
Eastern Phoebe   –   6
Great Crested Flycatcher   –   3
Eastern Kingbird   –   2
Red-eyed Vireo   –   8
Blue Jay   –   10
American Crow   –   35
Northern Rough-winged Swallow   –   2
Barn Swallow   –   15
Carolina Chickadee   –   5
Tufted Titmouse   –   17
White-breasted Nuthatch   –   2
Carolina Wren   –   24
House Wren   –   1
Eastern Bluebird   –   24
Wood Thrush   –   4
American Robin   –   46
Gray Catbird   –   6
Northern Mockingbird   –   21
Brown Thrasher   –   7
European Starling   –   29
Cedar Waxwing   –   13
Pine Warbler   –   6
Common Yellowthroat   –   10
Scarlet Tanager   –   1
Eastern Towhee   –   16
Chipping Sparrow   –   35
Field Sparrow   –   11
Song Sparrow   –   10
Northern Cardinal   –   33
Blue Grosbeak   –   2
Indigo Bunting   –   57
Red-winged Blackbird   –   2
Eastern Meadowlark   –   5
Common Grackle   –   39
Brown-headed Cowbird   –   7
House Finch   –   5
American Goldfinch   –   8
House Sparrow   –   7
White-throated Sparrow   –   2 (non-breeding)
53 species

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Home in What We Hope to Find

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on May 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ve made a whole lot of bird lists over the past twenty years. (Made a BIG one yesterday – see the post in a couple of days.)  I’ve got lists for my yard, my neighborhood, for Elkin and Surry County, for Pine Knoll Shores, for NC and a bunch of other states, and then of course the master list, the “life” list.  I’ve even gone on a couple of organized trips where a guide would point to the bird and tell you what it was — then you add it to another list.  And check it off in your database when you get home.

But among all those lists, among the thousands of data points, for some reason there are some individual birds I never forget.  My first Northern Parula – right here in my own backyard, but I waited almost an hour for it to show itself at the tip of the big white oak.  The Black-Throated Blue Warbler Mary Ellen and I spotted near Muskrat Creek Shelter on the AT, our last evening together on the trail.  The Common Yellowthroat Nancy and I stalked through briars so she could see her first one.  On and on.  I’m thankful for each creature’s tiny jewelled body.  I’m thankful they decided not to conceal themselves forever.

The birds I added to my list during organized trips are just not as memorable as the others (well, maybe the Harlequin Duck bobbing in the surf at the pier in Rodanthe . . .).  Am I saying that we treasure most those things we have to work for?  Good Puritan ethic! But that’s not exactly it; I guess I would rather say we treasure those things we discover for ourselves.  The branches are full of warblers – will I raise my eyes and look?

This is the closing section of my poem Leave and Come Home.  My journey as father is about to enter unmapped territory – the mountains and coves of grandfather.  Warblers are returning from their wintering grounds to make a new home.  How have they found their way?  How will Josh and I find ours?  Some vast unseen magnetism compels us.  Perhaps home has always been, although unnamed and so often unseen, that inner will to discover.  Maybe home is always that very thing we hope to find.


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Leave and Come Home
Backyard, Elkin, North Carolina

Which one is home: what I know and leave behind
or what I have yet to reach?
May 1st storms all day and night but this bright morning
frees the migrants from their cover – tree limbs fill
with warblers.  In an hour they’ll resume their passage north,
but for now they’re willing to reveal themselves
if we have the will to notice.

In a few days Josh will become a father. I watch
the corner of his mouth for a hint of one laconic smile . . .
there it is!  He follows a trail of a hundred steps to assemble
my grandson’s crib. Outside the back window
Cardinals jostle at the feeder and

among the poplar blossoms warblers ruffle droplets
from their wings, show off their woodland jewelry,
glean aphids from beech twigs.  In the spotlight
Black-Sided Blue preens in formal dress, then flies.
And does he dream of the feast of insects
at his Costa Rican winter grounds or of the nest
he’ll build at Clingman’s Dome?  Or is it simply
some vast unseen magnetism, cycle of sun and
circling stars that speak to him to reveal
his home?  Point to it, Mom.  Or leave
me to discover it myself – home may yet abide
in what we hope to find.

Tomorrow I will lean into that crib compelled
by stars and magnetism, leave for later the unnameable
complexity of color, shape, song, that unspoken
trail that twists between son and father:
into that soft pink ear, I’ll whisper Redbird.

.     .     .     .     .

[Leave and Come Home won the 2009 Poet Laureate Award of the NC Poetry Society.  In four sections, it reflects some fifty years of being a son and father to a son. Each section covers a different geography, the sighting of a different warbler, and a new phase in our relationship as a family.  I posted section 1 on 5/8, section 2 on 5/15, and 3 on 5/22.  This is the fourth and final section.]

 

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Voices of the Lost

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on May 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A couple of years ago my friend Mike and I went backpacking in the Slickrock Wilderness,  near Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.  On day one we reached our camp site in mid-afternoon, about half-way up the mountain along Little Santeetlah Creek.  With tent pitched and bear bags hung, I lay down in a patch of sun to listen to the chatter and riffle of cold crystal over moss-draped boulders, laughter over smoothworn gravel.

As I dozed, water voices sang to me.  Urgent conversations, reminding, cajoling, the words critical but somehow never clear.  I half-dreamed of the people that had walked these hills.  Native hunters stalking deer where the clamor masks the sound of their approach.  Homesteaders sledging river stones to turn to cornerstones beneath chestnut timbers.  Foresters marking the next stand they’ll cut, somehow never reaching the old growth poplar and hemlock at Joyce Kilmer.

So many voices lost in the creek’s murmurings, yet also brought to life in that mutter. Aren’t we as poets the keepers of lost voices?  We capture in a phrase a moment that would have been forgotten, an image that would fade.  If we can speak for those who have no words they will “bless us with their bones.”

This poem by Margaret Boothe Baddour, For the Lost Poets, speaks to all who would be keepers of lost voices.  Seeking a mountaintop, discovering a new high place, she revivifies those poets whose voices might have been overcome by the clamorous falling water of years.  Before we can say, “We are lost,” we find ourselves in a new place with new breath.  Be still, listen for meaning within the whisper, the murmur, the water, the earth.  Someone wants to speak to you.

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Star Chickweed

For the Lost Poets
           —            Wildacres, 2008

For every day they die among us,
those who knew it was never enough
but hoped to improve a little by living.
             –   W.H.Auden, “In Memory of Freud”

I.  They Whisper to Us
On this mountain top – so high not even birds
fly here and only small, complcated insects
amid the ox-eye daisies and wild yarrow
worry us with their rush-roar-whir –
we brieve for those poets whose rustling voices
the quiet, the strong, even the raucous ones
are lost.  No, not lost.  Only hushed.
They whisper from just over the next hill.

II.  We Are Lost
We lose our way, looking for Roan Mountain
where, folks say, the pale pink laurel grows.
At the crossroads, an old man stand
like a cigar store Indian.  His white mustache
and brogans, his worn overall speak hillbilly
but before we can say, “We are lost, he smiles
gap-toothed and points like a sign: “Turn left,”
he says.  “Three mile uphill to Roan Mountain.”

III.  They Leave Their Words
At the Continental Divide, we glimpse horses
but the cows up here, the cows so black and sleek
where sun shafts the greensward, the water so pure
at the place where it runs downhill to the east
where bugs whir in the clover!  A white moth
brushes our arms.  Like moths, those lost poets
touch, leave their words hanging, alive in the air.

IV.  We Breathe for Them
Flash of fire – a mountain man, wave of water –
an ocean lover, the stillness of stone,
the roar of wind, all those poet friends
whose wise, strong words provoked this world
have now become the earth and air.  They bless us
with their bones.  Now we must breathe for those
who, when they breathed their last, exhaled in verse.

.     .     .     .     .

from Scheherazade and other poems by Margaret Boothe Baddour, Saint Andrews College Press, 2009.

Margaret teaches Humanities, Creative Writing, and Drama at wayne Community College in Goldsboro, NC, where she holds the Bell Distinguished Chair in Teaching.  Among her many awards and honors is the NC Poet Laureate Prize of the NC Poetry Society.

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