Bird Song 2




Chickadee and Apples

 

Bird Song and Knowledge: Part 2. 



The colors of birds, like their songs
express the fragile intimacy of their relation to the world.
The song sparrows are colored ochre and red earth
 dusky as cordgrass and other grasses they nest in.
 Ptarmigans are a changing poem made of feathers--
 feathers mottled  into red Bunch grass
or designs that blend into snow.
The Meadowlark breast is a yellow sun rising
on the vast prairie covered with sunflowers,
and the Evening Grosbeak is the twilight aurora of Canada.
The Blue Jay wears the sky on its back---
dusky lilac or summer cerulean---,
and the Yellow Warbler wears
the color of sun saturated trees---
a breathing brilliant sunset yellow---
and the Wood Duck swam into the rainbow,
and the Macaw is a riotous flowering of color
in the jungles of spring---
feathers blossoming into
blue, green, red and yellow.
The landscapes of all the world are
 woven into birds as tapestries of flight---
oriental rugs or more accurately, Indonesian Ikats,
each feather vane, as each thread in an Ikat,
is dyed into a differing  pattern
from the next vane or thread
until the veil as the whole reveals the design.
Bird plumage expresses the inner meaning
of earth's vistas: Locales inscaped
and recreated as plumage
distilled into the poetry and design of bird feathers.

The feathered clothes birds wear mirrors the beauty of place
like water mirrors the sky.
The world’s spectrum of birds
in their plumages
distills rainbows of feathery jewels
so spectacular and diverse that no human raiment
or design will ever rival this marvel of variety
for color, shape, design and form.
If the earth has an artist or a poet
to express its multicolored beauty,
it would not be a god with a compass
or an human artist with a brush ,
but all the birds with their feathers,
painting with their own bodies
the glorious painted poem of desert flowers,
opal jungles, forest sunsets, moon seas,
aquamarine twilights, autumnal harmonies
golden prairies, and arctic passes
over the summits.
 

Some birds carry human vanity around
them like a ball and chain, or rather a
neckband or a leg band, trapping them on snags.
Henslow's, Baird's, Bachman's, Brewsters or Botteri's Sparrows
or Harris's Hawk, all badly named after someone's ego.
But other birds, fortunately, have not been saddled with human conceit
and are even more lovely than their names imply,
No human artist could ever have conceived
 the beauty of the Quetzal, Oriole or the
Flame Faced or Opal Rumped Tananger:
the Spangled Cotinga,
Sapphire, Peacock Coquette,  Ruby Throated
or Streaked Tuftedcheeked Hummingbirds----
the Sun Parrot, Orange Bellied Euphonia, Purple Honeycreeper
or the Sand Colored Nighthawk, all of the Americas.

In Africa there is a rainbow bird called the Purple Crested Turaco
and there is the
Yellow Bellied Sunbird and Redfaced Crimson Wing
In India The Gold Breasted Fluvetta and Fire Breasted Flower Pecker
the Wedgetailed Green Pigeon and the Fire Tailed Sunbird
From the European Blue Tit to the Bornean Blue Flycathcer
from Egrets, Pheasants, Eagles, the Finches, Trogans
 to the Lyrebirds, Peacocks, Wrens, Redbirds, Warbers and Herons,
the world's birds express the joy of life on earth.
The  greatest Art of Birds is the birds themselves;
they are magicians of light, sound, and color in flight.
 

 

 

But this ability of birds to express the beauties of earth
in their own bodies
excited the envy of humans
and ever willing to betray Nature's rights
humans stole Egret feathers, Terns, Turkeys, Hummingbirds
Acorn woodpeckers, and a thousand other kinds of feathers
for vain and passing fashions, women’s hats
Hawaiian cloaks for kings
And other pretences thieved from nature.

So one must ask, at last,
Why have humans failed the birds,
these most beautiful beings of a beautiful earth?
What have birds ever done to humans
that humans have punished and harmed them so?
Birds have done nothing to harm humans
and the Miner's Canary sounded decades ago
that the earth is in trouble
but who is listening to the birds?

I must admit it---
I studied religions for years
and at last come to the conclusion
that it is too outmoded, archaic, artificial ---
a beautiful and seductive mirage---
and on many things, false.
What good are dreams of the 'other world'
when this world is neither understood or cared for?
Religion has failed the birds
and nature generally.
Nature has no estates:
there is no ladder or chain of being
leading up to "Enlightenment",
no Karmic Round favoring human birth
The Crane is not the Emperor
and a humanized creator did not make
the seas and mountains as an advertisement
or symbol of "His" power.
The dove is not the "holy spirit"
pictured as a white bird in the paintings of El Greco
or thousands of other paintings
or part of a theological trinity.
I see nothing holy in a "spirit"
that claims dominion and a right to exterminate other species.
How ‘holy’ is a spirit that symbolizes itself with a Dove
and kills off millions of actual doves.

The Passenger Pigeon was a kind of Dove
forced into extinction by hunters
Pilgrims, Markets and Collectors
all who believed in the "holy spirit".
and claimed a "Christian" right to kill.

The Passenger Pigeon was thought by some
to be the finest of all pigeons.
There were perhaps a few billion of these birds
flying in huge flocks and nesting in great colonies
across eastern North America
shot out of the sky by the greed of hunters
and their habitats destroyed.
I have only seen one
a stuffed desiccating skin owned by the Seneca Indians,
Iroquois of New York State, a tribe that loved the bird
and mourns its passing.
It was a beautiful bird, long and elegant and colored with a dusky
twilight, like an abalone shell dawn.
Thoreau loved them and describes their sound as a "quivet"
Similar to the "creaking of trees" (sept. 12, 1854)
But their huge flocks are gone now
and no sound from them will ever be heard again.

Where can I hear the sound of the Eskimo Curlew
muffled by the tundra,
or a live Ivory Billed Woodpecker or Carolina Parakeet
calling through the Pines or Maples ?
And what was the sound of the Dodo
whose peaceable nature was abused by
the "discoverers" and self interested "explorers"
whose real interest was money
and who murdered off the great Moa and the Great Auk,
and silenced the Guadalupe Caracara.
Who, but a few, mourn the New Zealand Quail
or the White Winged Sandpiper?
Who listens to the absence of the Laughing Owls
or the lost Paradise Parrot?
Does anyone care that the sound of the Mamo, the Huia,
the Koa Finch, and the Cuban Red Macaw are silenced?
Extinct, listen to the sound of no sound ever again,
Extinct, through human fault alone,
Extinct
Albatross,
extinct Rails,
and
say goodbye to the Mariana Mallard and the Guam Broadbill,
goodbye forever to the Hawaiian  Hummingbirds
and still more thousands of species
headed for extinction,
and hardly a few tears for them,
as the orgy of greed goes on.
I long for the return  of the Spectacled Cormorant
and Pink Headed Duck
but no one will ever hear their voice again
or know if they have arrived.
They will never arrive.
There is nowhere to go, no one to listen
no further existence, nothing left, utter, complete absence
and no way to understand an emptiness this final.
Listen to this emptiness if you would understand bird sounds.

The biblical gods and the concept of human supremacy
have not taken care of the sparrows
and helped many species go extinct.
Even in Islam, as in other major religions
atrocities against and birds and nature abound.
The Persian poet Attar (12th century C.E.)
exploiting an ancient indigenous love of birds and animals
of Pre-Islamic Native cultures
re-made birds into Sufis
in his Conference of the Birds
and he killed off nearly a thousand birds
so that the middle eastern Hoopoe
and a mere 30 of the avian elite
reach the mystical bird he calls Simurgh.
And the Simurgh, it turns out
when they look in a mirror
is themselves, these 30 birds,
and they see that they themselves
are the Ultimate Truth after all.
Very clever,
but birds are not Sufis or symbols
and Attar’s allegory rings false.

Birds do not need transcendent mirrors
or gods to exalt their delusions of magnificence.
 

Chipping Sparrow and Pansy

Not only religion, but science too
has largely failed the birds.
As false as Attar’s fables,
in a different way, but similar,
is the art of Audubon
who murdered the birds he painted,
Most of bird science is built up on
the bloody wings of birds
tortured in gruesome experiments
vivisection, mixing the brain matter of
pigeons and chickens in a genetic soup.
Torturing out avian truths from live birds.
Scientists cut out the gonads of male birds
to see if they will sing to females
or they murdered all the birds in 40 acres to see
which birds would resettle the area.
Thousands and thousands of such experiments
prove nothing so much as the moral barrenness of the mind of science.
Disinterested knowledge, "pure" research is often is an excuse for cruelty
the ruthless, fascistic, power of knowledge without love.

The Pattern of Goldfinch feathers

 

Birds have been on earth for 150 million years
and humans in their modern form
have only been here 100,000 years
and the scientific study of birds
is little more than 200 years old
and therefore
it is humorous that ornithology
claims to "know" Birds!!
Making lists of birds is not to know them,
nor is measuring their brain casings.

Why has this growth in "knowledge" of birds
been accompanied by the extinction of so many species
by those of the society that claims to know them?
At what and at whose cost is this knowledge purchased?
What is a "knowledge" that kills what it studies?
Birds knew Ginkgo trees
in the ancient forest
100 million years before humans existed.
The knowledge contained in their beaks,
in the vanes of their feathers,
In their calls and migrations
embarrasses human arrogance
and should command our respect.
Theirs is a voice that gathered meaning and
the right to exist over millions of years.
Bird song is meaning before music,
Bird movements rhyme rhythms of pre-history
The elegant dances of Cranes or Herons,
or Ostrich mating dances on the Serengeti,
like surreal hallucinations from which ancient shamans
learned a hypnotic trade of health and hope.
 

Young Man Learning to Sing from the Birds

 

What arrogant ignorance shall claim prior right to birds?
50 Million of years before Magellan
Birds migrated longer distances than he,
And not a single one of them bragged about it
or called themselves great heroes
or left dead Native peoples or decimated ecologies
in their wake, as did the followers of Magellan.
What is it to "know" birds
If the society that sanctions this knowing
drives them to extinction?

The history of ornithology is partly the
story of an earth bound envy
jealous of avian liberty
binding the wings of the free---
collecting the rare,
putting the Birds of Paradise
in a museum box,
endlessly catalogued, cabinet drawers
of avian corpses or "study skins" as they call them.
The limp corpse of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker
preserved by the society that murdered the species.
Knowledge of the extinct bird’s corpse cherished
while nearly nothing was done to save the bird itself.
Zoos and museums, in their zeal to collect
have helped drive many species toward extinction.
What a sad flight of knowledge it is that
rises like a trapped phoenix
to be bloodied against the gilded cage of science.
What good is exalted knowledge
if it is born of cages and killing?
Masters of Inquiry keeping records to control
controlling to exploit, subjecting all Nature
to a self-serving Inquisition.
Someone one day must write the history
of the atrocities committed
in the name of the science of flight and birds.
This history would bring into question
much of what this science claims to know
and why it wishes to know it.
For years I have been longing
for a science born of love and sympathy.
Certainly this exists, fleetingly arising
here and there,
like the light of a candle
in the wide eyes of a curious child.

I have lost respect for the Socratic pose of ignorance
And the false humility of Science.
Where is the humility in a knowledge
whose motive is a biblical
"dominion over all that is on the earth".
Roman and Christian dominance,
recast as corporate science,
bent on world conquest,
bringing oppression of all nature
under the reign of the intellect---
The Reign of the Intellect---
the masters of Mind and Finance
subsume many under the selfish power
or an imaginary "One" or a few---
the few who stand to profit from categorizing all species
for the use and abuse by one species
and turning all nature
into a Roman colony of conquered species---
each with a Latin Name.
Humans are too truly ignorant of
what bird’s lives really are
to presume to be "Stewards".
It would be far better
to let the birds steward us.

I don’t know much about birds
except what my eyes have seen
through loving attention.
Honest looking is hard work
and means leaving what one thinks one knows, behind.
One must look at birds with ones ears
and hear them with ones eyes.

I have read many bird books
And find much that is false in them
And a few things that are true.
The bird books, written by experts
with tape recorders and dissection scalpels
Boil it all down to "selective adaptation"----
all bird behavior consisting of the need of "territory" and a mate.
Hmmm: very interesting.
But it tells me nothing whatever
About why or what the birds I know sing.
Dissecting a birds sryrinx or cutting apart its complex lungs,
with species having an average of nine air sacs
completely different than human and mammal lungs
and while this is interesting,
it will not teach one why or what birds sing or say.
 

Palm Warbler

The birds I have seen do not have "territory"---
Measured units of space conquered by a state or a military.
The birds of the "Louisiana Territory".
could have cared less that Napoleon
with all his delusions of grandeur
planted a ridiculous flag and
claimed this land as his own
and sold it to Jefferson,
"for a song"
who sent Lewis and Clark to
assess the spoils of the purchase.
The land bought "for a song"
has declined ever since
destroyed by cattle and mines and agribusiness
and the measure of the degradation
is precisely gauged by the holding of
bird song as cheap, free,
having little or no value
until at last, the human obsession with "territory"
has left places where "no birds sing", as Rachel Carson
protested in 1962..
Bird and their songs destroyed by the selfish claimants and
sellers of land that was not theirs to sell.
Ghost forests, ghost prairies,
ghosts of bird songs drifting over
desecrated landscapes
and nothing to show for the loss but a few rich people
living in unnecessary and extravagant decadence.

The value of bird song far exceeds all "territories",
administrated geographies
and negates the notion of human ownership.
I have seen Goldfinches nesting in a colony
of Blackbirds who were nesting next to Mallards
who were nesting below some Woodpeckers and Flickers
who themselves nested near Blue Grey Gnatcatchers and Orioles
and all of these were nesting in the midst
of a colony of Canada Geese, who themselves
nested near a Muskrat
who themselves shared an area with a doe and her fawns,
and a fox lived there too and a family of raccoons and many squirrels, frogs and
hundreds, thousands of other species of plants, fish
vertebrates and invertebrates.

The birds do not "defend territory",
private property or claim ownership.
These are all human projections on birds.
Yes, birds seek to protect their young
or the female on the nest,
who is vulnerable.
Yes, they sing about what is theirs.
But they do not have "territory"
they have life spaces, birthing places,
or rather, nesting spaces,
and only during certain times of year
and such spaces are quite fluid and often
shared by others of the same or different kinds.
They thus have communal spaces
or family areas, in which they love each other
and raise their young.
This is what my eyes have seen.
While the map is not the territory
the territory is not the actual place
where birds and mammals
share their intimate lives.
Territory is a human construction
a surveyors map of measured lands conquered,
a legal and linguistic trick,
a notion of land that serves lawyers and banks
and lays waste to the lives of birds.
The idea of private property grows out of the use
and abuse of land and animals
and its tyranny will end when the lives of animals
are understood and nature's rights are respected.
 

Chickadee and High Bush Cranberries

 

I don’t know much about birds
Except what their selves have taught me.
I won’t pose as ignorant
but nor will I pretend to a certain knowledge
since I am often mistaken.
My life has been an effort to understand
all that is still not clear to me,
and  it was full of reversals,
seeking and losing certainties,
passions loved or regretted,
mistakes made, and ecstasies and
sufferings experienced or enjoyed.
What knowledge there is of value
was only gained through love.
What little I am able to learn
I want to see with my own eyes
and feel in my slow-to-learn heart.
I am skeptical of all who claim authority.
I refuse the "Dominion" over nature
supposedly given to me by an old book.
Better to let nature dominate me,
better to listen to its direct language and
doubt the two-tongued speech of humans.
Even my own questionable speech is uncertain.
What little I know of birds comes from loving them.
They know more than I about life.

Coming close to death did not fill me with visions of heaven
but with love for small beings with feathers
that spend their lives in flight and song.
I have tried to live with birds as closely
and with as much respect as those people who I love.
I woke up one morning and realized
that if there is something worth living for
it is in the Song Sparrows song
whose meaning is more
than can be said in words.
Bird sounds are the song of life,
as fragile as feathers and as fine as bird bones
honed and hefted for exquisite flights
as delicate as leaves of light
balanced and taking to the air
from the edge of a waterfall.
The meaning of bird sounds
is a message of fragility,
the unaccountable fragility of being—
a fragility threatened by humans.
Bird song is the precious and tentative
sound of hope---
hope for both birds and humans
hoping against more loss and extinction
the hope of all that are small,
wavering and fluttering, in uncertainty,
singing on delicate wings.

 

A Small One Singing at Dawn
(House Sparrow)