Tag: barn swallows

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Journal Living Things Nature Walking

Little Old Men

Grey river Little Egret
Little Egret hunting in the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

 

Grey river Little Egret
Little Egret hunting in the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan, 2004

 

Whenever the Barn Swallows swoop past my head for the first time in the year I know that Spring has returned for sure. On my way along the river to the sports club yesterday the liquid chortling and twittering of this first harbinger of Spring spun out of the grey, rainy air like cotton candy, a taste of what was to come. The next moment the daredevil eye drop of its lean, indigo and rust body, wings cutting the air like scissors, flashed past my head and dove to within a finger’s breadth above the water’s surface. It banked and disappeared in the bend of the river.

All the along the river birds were preparing for the Spring Bash, everyone breaking off into pairs. The pairs of Green Winged Teals kicked the water in tiny sambas, the males complete in their Mardi Gras emerald green mask. A female Carrion Crow (similar to the American Common Crow, and smaller than the more numerous and Raven-like Jungle Crows) chuckled as she tenderly tended her new nest of twigs, in clear view among the bare branches of a Beech tree. A pair of Common Kingfishers, both flashing metallic turquoise, perched beyond sight of one another, but staying close to the tiny nest burrow in the mud embankment and keeping to their customary solitary habits in spite of pairing. White Wagtails square danced among the rocks while Spot Billed Ducks tangoed amidst the watery grasses. A Great Cormorant, dressed like a blackjack, flamencoed right through the crowd, unable to make quick turns. And in the champagne cloud of blossoming Cherry trees a contingent of White Eyes turned minuets, their wispy chirps giving voice to the Cherry trees’ ardor.

And off to the side, hunched like an old man, stood a Little Egret, his yellow feet in odd contrast to the swirling grey water and cold rocks. The wind stirred the billowy fronds of his coattails and, almost dejected, he pulled his long neck further into his shoulders and eyed the darker depths of the water for morsels. While everyone else danced, calling up sunshine that still didn’t have the strength to break the hold of Winter, the Egret remained a realist, looking at the present with still and uncompromising eyes. I crouched down along the bank of the river and tried to mimic his immovable spirit, but like all humans my mind wandered and took off with the dancers. Soon I was up and walking again, off to other, more pressing matters.

Categories
Journal Living Things Nature

Winged

Pressure Ice
Pressure ice upon the Charles River, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1989.
Pressure Ice
Pressure ice upon the Charles River, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1989.

This is the fifteenth installment of the ongoing Ecotone essay series. This week’s topic is Coming and Going. Please stop by and read the other essays or feel free to contribute your own words.

Downy feathers of snowflakes are falling like lost children from the sky this evening. It is the first snowfall this year. More than likely it is but a whim and the morning will find the earth as bare and dry as weeks gone by. But a lone Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus) sits alone upon a bare branch of the False Acacia outside my window, awaiting the passage of light, hunched into her puff of feathers, her tiny head bare to snowflakes. I sit still, so as not to alarm her, and watch. It seems the moments together are filled with counting, all the way until she flicks her wings and flits away. The branch is left quivering in her sudden absence. And I find myself poised on the edge of my chair, alone in the gathering darkness, the air aswirl with children laughing.

So it is with birds, they come and go. If any creature could embody the movement of wanderlust, or the great rotation of the seasons, it must be birds. It seems that in the Beginning of Time, when some Speaker of Identities was handing out instructions on form and content, birds chose the way of airiness and elegance. To not be grounded, but to solve problems by carving away the extraneous, instead of throwing on more clay. The result was a marriage with the wind and a vision of distances, the planet beneath acting as springboard.

Earthbound that I am, I venture from my dwelling in the last dusting of winter, swiveling my head in lookout for the songs that had left with the dying of last year’s leaves. The voices come back in twos, catching the tops of the trees as buds form, and still tinkling with merriment from the warmer climes, like lovers newly returned from a honeymoon. Three, four, five, the old familiar faces are back, some directly to the memories of a summer gone. For those birds who remained behind, the ones that always shout louder than the others and shoulder through the delicate crowds, the return of the travelers shakes down the house of winter silence, and for a time the air quavers with indignation.

It is the return of the Barn Swallows, though, that barks, for me, of Spring fully arrived. Like liquid thought they barrel down the streets in fierce pleasure of, and concentration upon, clutching past arrival. Close-up their world seems to take on the rush at the terrible edge of a jet plane’s wing. Step back and Swallows love the open air, their wings scything the invisible. Even their eyes seem formed to look into the hard light and further, into the future, where their eggs lie.

Though I can’t understand a word of their language, the fluting and burbling and chittering of Swallow song always seems to speak of adventures and far off fields. It seems to beckon to my heart, just like the bugling of migrating geese, laughing and urging me to get out of this chair and lift my arms…

The brief summer harbors their laughter, has me on my tiptoes after the spell, sniffing out the salt sea or the undiscovered meadow. I would go with them, my mind seems to say, and it is time to prepare my travel bag. But that is the mistake right there. Swallows… all birds actually… have long done away with baggage. Their minds have been gleaned from aestheticism, from a total devotion to the task of flight. True travelers, believing in the brief encounter with all their hearts.

And come the chilly days of autumn I am again left behind, my legs feeling as leaden as tree trunks. The days commute to slumber, losing colors, bearing old grievances.

But my heart does beat more slowly than a bird’s. If I have wing beats, they echo in my footsteps. I may take longer to cross mountains, but the keening is there, to be off. Off and singing.