>From: "Herschel Raney" <herschel.raney at conwaycorp.net>
>Subject: Late Winter Languages
>Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 19:10:12 -0600
>
>
>Into the bird woods for the first time in months. The binoculars are
>actually rusty feeling in my hands. Winter is the time for
>high-powered scopes that peer into the surface lives of ducks.
>Wooded walks are rare. No butterflies, no dragonflies to scan up
>close.
>
>
>
>Bell Slough is still mostly brown leaf and tangled vine. It is a
>watermarked emergent landscape of floatline and washup. The carpet
>of green Senecio leaves is working its way up, trying to make some
>chlorophyll headway in the scant sun. This is metalmark fodder for
>later on this year. Bell could feed the whole world of Senecio
>munching metalworms. I find myself noting these places where things
>will be, though they are empty or quiet now. Here will go the
>Magnolia Warblers. There will be the metalmarks and Byssus Skippers.
>The waterthrushes will walk over here.
>
>
>
>The buckeyes are all imminent rupture and budburst. Many soft
>leaflet hands have already unfurled. They flop and point poorly
>towards the cloudcover. The bud sleeves almost feel warm. They are
>golden and silver. I sniff them and they smell like nothing.
>
>
>
>The Red-headed Woodpeckers continue to wander freely. Like they were
>never rare here. The bright red heads are now intact and striking.
>The birds make that rattling purr of theirs and one circles a limb
>in a game of squirrel chase. Downies move, Red-bellies make their
>own pronouncements. The tappings of all still sound like winter.
>
>
>
>Towhees seem abundant. And they are. White-throats still outnumber
>them. And both scratch and scrape in the leaves. A male towhee
>sings: two whistles and a vibrato whinny. It is like I have never
>heard him before. Sibley says, ?much variation in the details.?
>Sounds like the last sentence of the paragraph describing our lives
>ahead. Other towhees chew-heee in the background.
>
>
>
>Though I think I am being quiet on the trail, at one corner I bring
>up a herd of White-throated Sparrows. We all stand to see what will
>happen next. And I whistle my best and cleanest white-throat song.
>Afterwards, I am proud. But no one answers. They all look at me like
>I am premature and spring-happy. Damn perceptive birds.
>
>
>
>On the lowland path that will soon fill up with warblers, a Winter
>Wren moves over the leaves. She circles the pools of shallow puddle
>and clear water. She (these little birds all look like shes to me)
>is feeding on something that is flicking on the water surface. I
>can?t see what it is myself. I plop down on the trail to watch her
>move closer. She stays remarkably in the open and silent. What a
>stopcock of a bird, what a toasted marshmallow of a bird. Why even
>have that tail? What lovely long tarsi you have little madam, I
>think, sounding like the big bad wolf. She looks like a fluffy
>sweetgum ball with two stems. She hangs from some fallen limbs to
>pluck at the water some more. She dangles most delicately. A male
>starts singing somewhere behind us. It is that bubbled wonder of a
>song that has no end or beginning. It just seems to blink in and
>out, straggling on with virtuosity for some undetermined time, jazz
>from a puffball that is six pair of laryngeal chords, two lungs and
>little else. She ignores him wherever he is, whatever he is saying
>to her.
>
>
>
>One robin jumps in the leaves. Looking like a giant with the Hermit
>Thrushes around us both. It appears to be a female. I'd heard her
>earlier making her pert-pert noise. What the difference between this
>bird and the herds of robins on the plains of brown grass in town?
>Something significant; it can?t be just luck. Are the worms better
>in bottomland leaf litter? I would guess so. This one must know it.
>A worm gourmet, she cocks her head. What beauty is there in running
>over flat, poisoned grass? She seems to say. Exactly, I think.
>
>
>
>And through the treetops a sound that makes me stop. I?m unsure what
>it is above the titmice and towhees at first and then it is clear.
>Geese; Snow Geese. I scan and see the lines moving overhead in those
>zagging consonants -- all those Vs and broken Ws. What is there in
>the sound of northbound geese? In that high squeak and cry in clear
>air? The sun is trying to come out full. We?ve made it through the
>cycle once again to see it -- the sky scrawled full of God's going
>geese. We are still alive.
>
>
>
>Or something like that.
>
>
>
>Herschel Raney
>
>Conway