Bird Scout

Feather Fact #8

My whole conception of what is beautiful has changed because I've come to love birds so much. I respond to landscapes that have birds in them, that are friendly to birds. A dismal swamp behind a rail yard now has a kind of beauty for me that a bird-free beach in the Mediterranean doesn't. Love changes your idea of beauty inevitably. When you love a person, you are not thinking in terms of magazine beauty or newscaster good looks. A deeper kind of beauty comes into play. That is very much what happens when you begin to pay attention to birds and you begin to love them.

For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of redwinged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a finally hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

"The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost