May 9, 2000Cuckoo! Cuckoo!The birds are here!After a damp and chilly April, migratory songbirds have arrived in force, along with warmer weather from the south. The weekend bathed in an almost tropical ambiance. The humidity was high, the temperature over ninety, but rather than the torpor of Summer, the very air seemed alive, animated by bioprocesses. Consumed and then expelled by animals and plants alike. Heated by the sun from above, and from below by last year's leaf litter, finally making way; decaying in the face of the new season's hunger for organic sustenance. You could all but see growth and dispersion occurring before your eyes. Through this density of Spring flew countless birds, while near as many bird watchers followed them on foot. Actually, the term "bird watcher" has fallen into disrepute; another example of the Name problem that I've mentioned here, previously. We tend to chafe at any name imposed upon us, finding there a focus for the worst of our identity. "Bird watcher" seems to conjure up the image of a socially inept nerd, bereft of masculine values. The new word is "birder". Vigor has been added through concision. We eliminate the modifier, and simply turn the word bird into a verb: I bird the Park, and so I am a birder. Such changes seem to help at first, but soon they wane, for the identity itself has not altered. Perhaps we will be "birdists" next, but when people ask if I'm a bird watcher, I say "no, I'm just looking". Whatever you want to call it, looking at birds is good clean fun. It seems to fall somewhere between sport, hobby, and vocation. Certainly there is score keeping, for those so inclined. I'm up to twenty-four Warblers for this Spring, seventeen in one day. No great feat, compared to the experts, who will see closer to forty by the end of the month. To me, it's more about actually getting to know the bird, rather than checking it off on a list. There is a genuinely ecstatic thrill to a good sighting. Encompassed in the circle of the binocular field, the bird is yours; a transitory possession (birders don't say "I saw a Prothonotary Warbler", but rather, "I had one"). Having located a bird of interest, one tries to keep it in view. In and out of the foliage, following obscure suggestions of movement, (not the wind, no, not that sparrow,) as long as this bird is before my eyes, just so long am I truly alive. One's own existence is verified by another's. There is a certain reassurance in that the birds are known quantities, cataloged and named, with names they never do complain of. Not that we haven't changed their names from time to time, to fit the currencies of Science. The birds are more reliable, if less exact, than Science. Weather influences their progress, but each year they follow much the same sequence of arrival. The Park lies at the confluence of two major migration routes. A green landmark in an urbanized area, it is an attractive resting point on a journey that may span two continents. Upwards of two hundred species are seen in the Park over the course of a year, mostly during the Spring and Fall migration periods. A few will nest here, but most are just in transit, without consideration for the pleasure they afford their observers. Most highly prized are the Warblers: small, colorful birds, with over fifty different species, and a wide variety of plumages. Some are plentiful, others not so. With a little effort, one may be assured of seeing many beauties, but also there are rarities to keep your interest, and drive the future. Birding maintains a fine balance between reward and effort; the hope of the unusual fuels a deepening familiarity with what is common. So I've seen a lot of birds. I've seen Wilson's Warbler, commemorating Alexander Wilson, the famed naturalist and artist, who named many birds, and whose name is the same as mine, though I was not named after him. Two names the same, or one we share? I've gotten a bit confused trying to put names on blurs, or separate those Thrushes that "cannot be distinguished in the field". And I have hardly even begun to address the issue of song. Bird song is a delight, and there is no music more Traditional. As far as I know, the birds have been singing the same songs as long as they have sung. Except, of course, for those finches on the other islands... Anyway, among the birds I saw last Saturday was the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, which brings me to the point I meant to get at to begin with. The Cuckoo, and its song, are central to the oldest secular song preserved in the English language, which, fittingly, is an ode to Spring. The song is Sumer is Icumen in, and the bird is actually a European Cuckoo, but it's Traditional to identify traces of one's home in far off places, and the family is the same, so I'll take a cue from our colonial Cuckoo any day, even if its vocalization does differ from its clock-inhabiting counterpart. At least ours is not a parasite. The song, (the human song), is an early artifact of Middle English, the language that resulted from the imposition of Norman French onto Anglo Saxon, after the conquest of 1066. It's a language at once familiar and obscure. We seem to get the general sense of it, but keep running into indecipherable passages that collapse the whole edifice. One naturally assumes that sumer corresponds to summer, but the sense has changed. I prefer the translation that renders the line as "Spring has come in" , which agrees better with the imagery of the lyric. I won't get into the controversy over "verteth", which some have been reluctant to translate as "fart". Apparently the old manuscript did not have a lyric advisory label. Let me note instead that "bloweth med" does not refer to wind, or honey wine (or vomiting the same), but means "the meadow blooms". To blow is an old term for blossoming, which we don't hear much any more, but we often refer to things blowing up, with reference to explosions. We would do well to meditate on how the descriptive aptness of the term issues not from windy force, but from the slower power of a flower, and how that may be stronger, in the end. |
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