Singer

As I’ve grown farther (physically) from other people over these last months, I’ve grown closer to birds.

A bird song identification app, BirdNET, has been my portal to a world that had been vague and rather uninteresting. As I locked down though, spring barged in. Birds became active everywhere, I glimpsed them busily swooping from branch to branch, and heard them making song morning and night. And these weren’t just the common starlings and sparrows, nor were their songs the ordinary cheeps and caws.

Around my house, in the cemetery near my house where I walk, in the Blue Hills Reservation, the app revealed that more kinds of birds were there than I’d ever suspected. The intriguingly-named birds I’ve wondered at in the Audubon guidebooks–ovenbird, flycatcher–were actually in and among the trees and thickets of my vicinity.

I didn’t see them, of course, but on a walk suddenly I’d hear some few notes, then I’d wrestle out my phone, open the app, wait hoping for the bird to sing again, capture the song and send it for analysis: it is x, almost certain, would be the report. The recording screen presented the contours of the song visually so I was better able to appreciate what I was hearing. I felt like I was making a new friend.

Of course, this was eavesdropping. Birds sing for each other or themselves, but not for my kind. Yet how generous of them to let me know they are alive, well and living near me. I had not idea, none, that any of the following were here:

song sparrows, gold finches, kingbirds, catbirds, mockingbirds, warbling vireos, towhees, wood thrushes, orioles, tufted titmice, red-breasted grosbeaks, wood pee wees, Carolina wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers (okay, I knew before this was knock-knocking on our trees), common yellow throats, scarlet tanagers (As a boy I did a project on the Baltimore oriole and scarlet tanager mostly for the sake of their vivid colors which I had never seen except in books), great crested flycatchers, killdeer, and more.

These exotic birds are my neighbors…and I didn’t even know, and they are lively to boot. Oh birds, while we humans are hefting heavier and heavier items of news onto our shoulders each day, you showing up in your variety and with your exuberance remind me of what light-heartedness looks like. I so need that.

For instance, here’s my northern cardinal.

You and your partner have been hanging around all spring. In fact, I think I remember you from last year too. My late mother-in-law regarded you as a kind of totem of blessedness, and my wife does too.

And as I hear your songs, not identical but both definitely yours, and as I watch you up high on the wire and illuminated by the setting sun, I’m sure they are right.