Another is the streak of good weather. The Cod fishermen seem happy but I’ve heard that the fish are small so far this year and people are wondering why. The whales that were close to shore are no longer here and have moved back off the beach with the herring. Soon the sport salmon season will begin but of course with the virus in full swing the charter business is on hold. The big question is for how long? Still no blossoms, the crocuses I saw last week have disappeared, and still no daffodils but I suppose I should survey some other gardens pretty soon as things warm up.

The wood peckers are noisy back in the trees and the eagles are playing their broken flutes out on their perches overlooking the water, which make me think the herring are coming. A kingfisher has been working the tide flats each morning and there crows are dropping mussel shells on our lawn. Often they will drop them on the deck to break them open or they will feel secure enough to crack them open with their beaks, but now I think Dot has taken care of that.

“Hello, Audubon Magazine? You better scrap your cover for next month I have a photograph of a Dove!”

I love to look at birds and to listen to them, but I am not a birder. I guess I’m just not all that interested in knowing their names. I know, I know, this is an intellectual failing, particularly for a writer, because if I want to communicate to you the experience of sitting under a tree in the Anza Borrego Desert listening to the birds in the morning it helps a great deal if I can name the birds I’m listening to. That way you could look up a sound recording and more closely understand my experience, I suppose. Also the names themselves are often beautiful: phainapipola. Morning Dove. Mockingbird. I know I should learn all the names. I used to just ask my buddy Nels. I’m incredibly lazy. He would tell me and I’d generally forget. Now I ask Jan. It is wonderful to love smart and studious people.

Mathew Arnold, (to me a pretty forgettable famous poet, one of those guys who is more talked about than heard from but…) once wrote somewhere that “birds are beside us, but alone” which I have to admit is nicely put, and the thing I like about birds, and probably what everyone likes about birds: that they are emissaries from some mysterious place. The ancient greeks apparently thought because they could fly, and because they disappeared for months at a time that they consorted with the Gods. That birds knew the Gods secretes. They are so delicate, this is the first thing you notice as a child when you hold a dead one is that they are so light, you think that their life must have had substance, they must have weighed more when alive to tough out the bad weather and the winds. I know when I first held a dead bird, I knew there had to be a soul gone missing from that body.

They sing. I love that. Also they squawk and gurgle and glonk, and quack, and rattle and caw, and all kinds of odd noises. Melody and dissonance, freeform and percussion. Power Pop and Sun Ra. It seems magical delightful and funny. I’ve heard brown bears, grunt, and fart and bellow, and snap and moan, and they have all had the same effect…somewhat or completely scary. Birds and Humpback Whales have it going on as far as non human vocalization, though I have to say I haven’t been around a lot of the great apes.

Of course they fly. They fitter. They hop. They stoop. They soar, They swoop, and glide, and perch, hover, zig, and zag, land in water, swim deep, burrow underground, balance on twigs, sleep on cliffs, and travel the length of the earth, both ways, without maps, or outside help that we know of… which of course is pretty fucking cool.

I guess when I sit in the sun and I look at the gulls I’m just pretty impressed. I can recognize an arctic tern and I do appreciate their unbelievable achievement in the length of their yearly migration. But I can’t really tell it from some of the other terns. I know it’s not a gull, but that’s about it. I should know how to identify all the gulls but I’m not so sure that it’s important to the terns and gulls that my respect is specifically that important. I just don’t want to sully the moment of considering the incredible miracle both biological, but that soul building moment that I am having just at that moment when the white birds are wheeling overhead, for Arnold may be right that they… the birds… might be alone, but when I consider this creature somehow, I am not so alone. I have some connection to the ancient Gods, and the fact that they don’t exist makes that connection, for me, all that much better.

Early Spring, so cold,

I warm my hands in your shirt

while you bite my lip.

jhs

Here is a recording I made today in my office. I read from a beautiful book The Hill of Summer by J.A. Baker. It was one of my friend Nel’s favorite books, and I read it too him when he was sick. I read a selection of a sparrow hawk flying over a summer field. It is a magnificent passage and my reading doesn’t do it justice.. I get a little emotional towards the end, and Dot is barking out on the porch, but still, particularly if you haven’t read J.A. Baker, you should give it a listen.