DO YOU EVER GET JADED BY BEAUTY YOU SEE EVERY DAY? In the Louvre of your mind, do you walk listlessly past Mona Lisa’s winsome smile? In your inner Florence, do you yawn at David’s washboard stomach? On a pristine spring morning in Seattle, does snowy Rainier not merit an “Oh, look, the Mountain is out!”
I had approached that enervating ennui on my little island of perfection. Daily routines had dulled senses and blinded my eye. But a pleasant phone chat with my brother Doug reminded me of his practice whenever he visits. He starts every day with coffee out on my deck to hear the dawn chorus. His example inspired me this morning.
If you’re not my neighbor the Mad Birder or one of his fellow travelers, you might not know: “Dawn Chorus” is the bird-lover’s label for the cacophonous birdsong that erupts with the sun’s rise in these warming months. It comprises the collective theme songs of scores of early birds determined to get their worms.
A nice thing about my island is we have so many birds that the chorus continues well into mid-morning, meaning I could catch today’s performance even after getting my required eight hours.
With no neighbors at home — the Mad Birder and his lovely wife are off on a madcap fishing trip in Nevada — I wasn’t shy about wrapping up in my bathrobe and slippers as I headed out to the Adirondack chair. In my hands was a breakfast of avocado toast and fresh drip coffee. It was 44 degrees F. outside. I was glad I’d pulled on long johns and that the coffee was blazing hot. Behind me, the sun was just rising over my rocky knoll to light up the treetops around me.
Sure enough, the birdies were belting out songs like Julie Andrews romping an edelweiss-laden Alp.
One virtuoso song, full of joyful trilling and punctuated by rising and falling scales broadcast at perfect pitch, turned my head and prompted a smile from my toast-munched mouth.
I regret that I’m not skilled at identifying many birds by their song, though I am often curious. My eyes scanned the treetops, finally spying a light-colored bird high at the tiptop of a dead fir, 100 feet up where the rising April sun was just warming the chill air.
He was too distant to identify by sight, but I relished the song, imagining the view from high up, and almost feeling the golden glow on my face as I lifted my eyes to the cloudless azure sky. I was the only human hearing his song, but I didn’t own it; the thrill belonged to this island and these woods.
Who was this bird of lilting forest melody? I couldn’t resist. I rose from my deck chair and tiptoed quickly inside, as if the bird would somehow hear me from that dizzying height. I returned with my binoculars. But the singer was gone, like a golden dream barely remembered after waking.
The entertainment wasn’t over, however. Countless songbirds zoomed and swooped in seeming games of tag among the fir limbs and maple catkins. Minutes later the singing bird returned to its perch. My high-powered lenses showed a Purple Finch (my best effort at identification), his rose-tinted head colored scarlet by the klieg-light sun. Besides the birdsong, calm and silence filled my woods but for the faintest background static, almost subliminal, of a passenger jet writing a contrail in the blue heavens. Some 30,000 feet up, its ear-budded transcontinental travelers knew nothing of this morning’s sweet aria from 100 feet above the forest duff.
With the bountifully-lunged singer in sight, I crept back inside for my camera with its 600-millimeter zoom. As I returned to my chair, a nearby nuthatch honked in merriment, taunting that the finch had again taken wing.
I kept watch, struggling for a photo of my elusive Pavarotti of the forest crown. He alighted atop another tree, but was brimming with springtime energy, resting only long enough for me to grab my camera, raise it to my eye, and … focus on an empty branch. Finally, after many tries, I caught a photo.
Back atop the dead fir, another finch joined the first. Falling from the perch together they defied gravity, fluttering up, down and sideways like frenetic tiger swallowtails. The start of a hot date? Or two males in a chest-thumping challenge for territory? “Want me to scram? Who’s gonna make me? You and your mother?”
Their struggle against Earth’s pull reminded me of the classic aviator’s poem, “High Flight” (which, Wikipedia tells me, U.S. Air Force Academy students must memorize):
“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence…”
It was a good start to another day on this small island nobody’s heard of.
Cantwell's Reef 