Wave Maker: A Spiritual Experience

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Friday, April 29, 2005

A Spiritual Experience

The ornithological world is atwitter this morning at the stunning news that an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, thought to be extinct, has been discovered in the Big Woods of Southern Arkansas.

Surely one can appreciate the boundless nature of the enthusiast who describes such an experience as "spiritual," "like finding Elvis." Everyone should be so lucky as to have an interest so rooted to the soul that itspractice evokes such genuine glee.

I am blessed to have two. Blues guitar and....

Birdwatching.

I am not an afficionado -- I do not own a pair of $4,000 binoculars, I do not visit sanctuaries.

But I have been watching birds in my back yard since I was ten years old (back then, I really did go to the sanctuaries).

Now, I watch birds in earnest during one period of the year, and it is almost upon me.

I live on a tidal river off of Massachusetts Bay south of Boston. It is squarely in the migratory path of dozens of warbler species. Beginning in the first week of May, they will begin to arrive, and for nearly a month, I will get up in the morning (early!) and walk around the perimeter of my yard, binocs in hand, listening and watching.

Warblers are tricky. They are quite small, and they flit and dart about, toward the tops of deciduous trees. It takes practice to hear the call and train your eye where the noise came from. Then you must use your peripheral vision to detect the darting movement, and retrain the eyes. Then, having found the object, you must raise binocs quickly before the next dart.

Very tricky. Wouldn't be quite so with the $4,000 glasses.

Each year, I keep a daily record. The different species seem to arrive and depart in roughly the same pattern. The Parulas and Black & Whites first, then Myrtles, Black-throated Greens, Yellows and Yellowthroats, Chestnut-sided, Connecticuts, Bay-breasteds, and on it goes, each day for about a month.

But I know how those two guys in the canoe felt, in the deep swamps of the Big Woods, when they cried out in unison, because I have done it myself.

"Redstart!!!"

Not near extinction, but what a pretty bird it is.

Posted by: Wave Maker / 10:25 AM/ |