Michael Price graces us from time to time with excerpts about birds from
various of his literary gleanings. I, for one, am very appreciative of
his efforts and his good taste. I make no pretense of duplicating
Michael's good taste or high literary plane, but am offering this
crude, ornithologically inaccurate, anthropomorphic excerpt primarily due
to the richness of its language, in grateful reciprocity (retaliation?). The
following is from a lyrical 1993 Southern novel by Lewis Nordan,
called Wolf Whistle (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). Enjoy!


"On top of each light post, high above the street, perched a buzzard, many
buzzards, one right after another, post by post, down the road, as far as
you could see, to the railroad tracks, an enormous flock that slept at
night in a cypress swamp not far way and came out to sit on posts with
heavy-lidded eyes by day. The big birds were slick and black with
rainwater where they sat with hunched shoulders and wattled necks like sad
old men in dark coats."

"The locals called them swamp eagles, sometimes just eagles, though they
were clearly buzzards. The birds were descendants and remnants of an
ancient flock, attracted here long ago by the corpse-stench of a Civil War
battle, when Balance Due and the Belgian Congo (Mississippi towns) were
only a big field, a significant Mississippi defeat. Cannon shells and
belt buckles and maybe a finger joint still turned up, from time to time,
in the muddy street after a hard rain."

"These birds were a part of the glorious history of the South. They were
written up, now and then, in local newspapers, and in newspapers all
across the state of Mississippi. Photographs taken almost a hundred years
ago by anonymous photographers with big, boxy explosive cameras and
tripods and black drapery over the photographer's head, and recent
photographs as well, some in color, stood behind glass in display cases
in the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson."

"Historians studied the century-old photographs and even named the birds
in the flock. Schoolchildren from all around, every county of this
sovereign state, as it was always referred to in political speeches,
visited the museum in Jackson, and even visited this dangerous street in
Arrow Catcher, on field trips, to view the historical vultures, to learn
something of their solitary nature, their weight and length, their wing
span, their reproduction cycle, their incredible longevity."

"Some of the birds on the light posts beneath which Solon Gregg trod on
his way home were as ancient as the historical battle itself, older,
ninety, a hundred years old, a few of them, so historians and
ornithologists reported, and so, as part of this same flock, those birds
on the light posts above Solon Gregg had actually fed on the flesh and
eyes and tongues and nutritious organ meat of Confederate troops, fallen,
hungry, frightened boys before they were made buzzard bait by a mini-ball
or cannon shot."

"Historical experts identified, with some certainty,
several of the very birds in those early photographs. They pointed to dim
details of broken-and-rehealed wings, or unusual posture, or mutations of
feathering. They looked through binoculars, or they even drugged and
carried individual birds away to scientific laboratories in Jackson and
Biloxi and spread them out on stainless-steel tables and poked at them and
said, "See the similarities between this bird and Bird Vardaman in
Photograph Seventeen-A, upper right quadrant, grid-number Thirty-six?
It's him all right."

"The buzzards were named Vardaman and Bilbo and Hugh White and J.P.
Coleman and Ross Barnett and other names of past and future governors and
senators of the sovereign state of Mississippi."

"Other birds on the light posts, youthful by comparison, possessed only
blood-memories of the ancient feast, genetic egg-yolk longings for
distant, unremembered culinary ecstasy and freedom from deprivation, and
sat with hope in their bird hearts and nothing at all in their bird
brains, for many years, decades really, a human lifetime and longer,
above the homes of damaged rednecks and maniacs with pistols, on smelly
light posts planted in stinking mud, whiling away all of their valuable,
irretrievable daylight hours and years in the sad innocence of
poultry-patience during this lean century since the glorious Festival of
Dead Rebels long ago, and they were content for now with roadkill."

The vulture named Ross Barnett, ancient and ugly, had excellent eyesight.
Far away in the distance, at the lucky spot on the rails where the Katy
crossed the Dog, Ross Barnett espied an armadillo, not moving."

Ross Barnett closed in prayer his heavy-lidded buzzard eyes and sucked
swamp air inside his lungs to savor the fragrance of loss."

----Tom Cotner
tcotner at u.washington.edu