Tag: birds

A Marshy Cacophony

barnstormingblog2 Comments

Cold, wet leaves
Floating on moss-coloured water   
And the croaking of frogs—
Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.
~Amy Lowell “The Pond”

Poets who know no better
rhapsodize about the peace of nature,
but a well-populated marsh is a cacophony.
~Bern Keating

O, I love to hear the frogs
When they first begin to sing;
How they vocalize the bogs,
And vociferate the Spring.
How they carol as they croak,
How they mingle jest and joke
With their solemn chant and dirge
On the river’s slimy verge.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their monotone uncouth
Is the music of the cogs
Of the mill wheel of my youth.
And I listen half asleep,
And the eyes of mem’ry peep
Through the bars that hold me fast,
From the pleasures of the past.

O, I love to hear the frogs,
For their melody is health
To the heart that worry flogs
With the lash of want or wealth.
And the cares of life take wing,
And its pleasures lose their sting,
And love’s channel way unclogs
In the croaking of the frogs.
~Harry Edward Mills “The Early Frogs”

I wanted to speak at length about
The happiness of my body and the
Delight of my mind …

But something in myself for maybe
From somewhere other said: not too
Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the
Frogs are singing.
~Mary Oliver, from “April”

About two weeks ago, music from the wetlands became faintly detectable in the distance. We were only a little over a month into winter, yet due to unduly mild temperatures, the chorus had begun.

The sleigh-bell jingle song of the Pacific Chorus Frogs now fills the air each evening, rising from the ponds and standing water that surround our farm. I stand still for a moment to soak up that song that heralds spring–a certainty that the muddy marshes are thawed enough to invite the frogs out of their sleep and start their courting rituals.

Now winter won’t return anytime soon with any seriousness.

This marsh music is disorienting this early, along with daffodils budding in late January and lawns needing mowing in February. With voices so numerous, strong and insistent, it feels as though a New York City of frogs has moved in next door; we are seated in the balcony of Carnegie Hall. 

They seem to be directed by an unseen conductor, as their voices rise and fall together and then cut off suddenly with a slice of the baton, plunging the landscape into uncomfortable silence at the slightest provocation, as if they hold an extended fermata for minutes on end.

The frogs’ repertoire is limited but their wind power, stamina and ability to project their voices impressive. They are most tenacious at making their presence known to any other peeper within a mile radius. Their mystical, twilight symphony of love and territory has begun, soft and surging, welcome and reassuring.

There’s a spring a-comin’, the peepers proclaim. 
Nothing can be sweeter.

I know all the behaviorist theories about frog chorus being about territoriality –the “I’m here and you’re not” view of the animal kingdom’s staking their claims. Knowing that theory somehow distorts the cheer I feel when I hear these songs. I want the frogs (and birds) to be singing out of the sheer joy of living. Instead, they are singing to defend their piece of mud or branch.

Then I remember, that’s not so different from people. Our voices tend to be loudest when we are being insistently territorial: we own this and you do not, and we are irresistibly better than you.

I’m not sure anyone enjoys human cacophony in the same way I enjoy listening to the chorus of frogs at night or birdsong in the morning. We humans are most harmonic when we choose to listen. Instead of sounding off, we should soak up. Instead of shouting “this is mine,” we should sit expectant and grateful.

Perhaps that is why the most beloved human choruses are derived from prayers and praise – singing out in joy and gratitude rather than in warning.

I’ll try to remember this when I get into my own righteous and “territorial” mode. I don’t bring joy to the listener nor to myself. When it comes right down to it, all that noise I make is nothing more than a croaking cacophony in a smelly mucky swamp.

Here’s what it sounds like all around us: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Ab4EBKYx9

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Left Up to God

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.

I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”

I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an ax—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
~Robert Frost from “Good-by and Keep Cold”

bluejay photo by Josh Scholten

Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death.  Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.   
~Jane Kenyon from her essay “Good-by and Keep Cold” found in A Hundred White Daffodils

For two months now, we’ve heard hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the ducks and geese that have stayed in the marshes through the winter.  

The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, in addition to hawks and eagle chittering, the occasional dog barking, while the bluejays and squirrels argue over the last of the filbert nuts.

In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth.   

The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of last summer’s bound hay.

Yet today felt different – today, with unseasonably spring-like temperatures in early February, things feel about to change.

As yet, there have been no birdsong arias. I am bereft, listening for their blending musical tapestry waking me at 4 AM in the spring. And soon, the peeper orchestra from the swamps will rise and fall on the evening breeze.

It has been too, too quiet. I long for the music to return, not just the surround-sound of gunshot percussion, which is no melody at all.  

I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades to return.
It won’t be long.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

A Dishwater Sky of Sadness

barnstormingblog1 Comment

A dishwater sky mutes
sun’s rays to gray, the hills
leading to the pass forested
in haze, drained of green.

Though a steady bluster, the wind
musters nothing but silence.
The plodding sound of melt
drip, drip, drips
from the askew rusted rain gutter
outside my purview.
Perhaps, I have all my life been
too much in love with sadness.
~Lana Hectman Ayers from “Window in Late January” from Autobiography of Rain

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath,
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their crest ‘gainst a sky green-gold,
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.
~Angelina Weld Grimke “A Winter Twilight”

I am astonished by my thirst
for clinging to sadness
when a gray day asks so little of me.

Good thing I’m shaken from my melancholy
by such simple moments
as a twilight shimmering gold,
a burst of unexpected evening birdsong,
a steadfast fir standing unyielding on our hilltop,
where it glimpses the edge of tomorrow
as today’s dusky horizon fades away.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

On What Has Been

barnstormingblog1 Comment

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm:
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
 ~Robert Frost “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”

Photo of Aaron Janicki haying with his Oberlander team in Skagit County – courtesy of Tayler Rae
The field of my childhood farm (1954-59) with the red barn visible on the right. The house was destroyed by fire in the mid-60s but the barn was spared
photo by Harry Rodenberger

My family sold our first farm in East Stanwood, Washington, when my father took a job working for the state in Olympia, moving to supervising high school agriculture teachers rather than being an ag teacher himself.

It was a difficult transition for us all: we moved to a smaller home and a few acres, selling the large two story house, a huge hay barn and chicken coop as well as fields and a woods where our dairy cows had grazed.

Only a few years later, that old farmhouse burned down but the rest of the buildings were spared. It passed through a few hands and when we had occasion to drive by, we were dismayed to see how nature was taking over the place. The barn still stood but unused it was weathering and withering. Windows were broken, birds flew in and out, the former flower garden had grown wild and unruly.

This was the place I was conceived, where I learned to walk and talk, developing a love for wandering in the fields among the farm animals we depended upon. I remember as a child of four sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window at the sunrise rising over the woods and making the misty fields turn golden.

This land returned to its essence before the ground was ever plowed or buildings were constructed. It no longer belonged to our family (as if it ever did) but it forever belongs to our memories.

I am overly prone to nostalgia, dwelling more on what has been than what is now or what I hope is to come. It is easy to weep over the losses when time and circumstances reap something unrecognizable.

I may weep, but nature does not. The sun continues to rise over the fields, the birds continue to build nests, the lilacs grow taller with outrageous blooms, and each day ends with a promise of another to come.

So I must dwell on what lies ahead, not what has perished in the ashes.

photo by Harry Rodenberger

Tell me, where is the road I can call my own
That I left, that I lost
So long ago?
All these years I have wandered
Oh, when will I know
There’s a way, there’s a road
That will lead me home
After wind, after rain
When the dark is done
As I wake from a dream
In the gold of day
Through the air there’s a calling
From far away
There’s a voice I can hear
That will lead me home
Rise up, follow me
Come away, is the call
With the love in your heart
As the only song
There is no such beauty
As where you belong
Rise up, follow me
I will lead you home

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

A Wordless Song

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless;
the singing will never be done. 
~Siegried Sassoon “Everyone Sang”

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
~Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers”

When it feels like the world is rent in two,
and the gulf into which we topple
too wide and dark to climb without help,
we can look to the sky
and see the birds’ stitching and hear their wordless singing,
the careful caring line of connection
pulling us out of a hopeless hole,
startled and grateful
to be made whole.
Hope borne on feathered wings:
may we fly threaded and knitted to one another, singing.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Arriving Home Without a Sound

barnstormingblog1 Comment

Once only when the summer
was nearly over and my own
hair had been white as the day’s clouds
for more years than I was counting
I looked across the garden at evening
Paula was still weeding around
flowers that open after dark
and I looked up to the clear sky
and saw the new moon and at that
moment from behind me a band
of dark birds and then another
after it flying in silence
long curving wings hardly moving
the plovers just in from the sea
and the flight clear from Alaska
half their weight gone to get them home
but home now arriving without
a sound as it rose to meet them
~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning

In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.

There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.

Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.

The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.

Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud.
Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress.
Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally.
I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
~Madeleine L’Engle

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

When All Is Said…

barnstormingblog2 Comments

A butterfly dancing in the sunlight,
A bird singing to his mate,
The whispering pines,
The restless sea,
The gigantic mountains,
A stately tree,
The rain upon the roof,
The sun at early dawn,
A boy with rod and hook,
The babble of a shady brook,
A woman with her smiling babe,
A man whose eyes are kind and wise,
Youth that is eager and unafraid—
When all is said, I do love best
A little home where love abides,
And where there’s kindness, peace, and rest.
~Scottie McKenzie Frasier “The Things I Love”

When all is said and done,
I love best the people
who bring kindness, peace and rest
to the little house
we call home.

It is enough
and everything.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Be Winged and Fed

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

O! for a horse with wings! 
~William Shakespeare from Cymbeline

photo by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak

Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses.
~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew

photo by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak

One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses. 
~Dale Carnegie

photo by Bette Vander Haak

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk:
he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it;
~William Shakespeare from Henry V

We all need someone along for the ride with us, blessing us with their company — a precious friend who has our back and scratches it wonderfully – helping to keep the biting flies away by gobbling them up.

It is symbiosis at its best: a relationship built on mutual trust and helpfulness. In exchange for relief from annoying insects that a tail can’t flick off, a Haflinger horse serves up bugs on a smorgasbord landing platform located safely above farm cats and marauding coyotes.

Thanks to their perpetual full meal deals, these cowbirds do leave generous “deposits” behind that need to be brushed off at the end of the day. Like any good friendship, tidying up the little messes left behind is a small price to pay for the bliss of companionable comradeship.

We’re buds after all – best forever friends, trotting the air while the earth sings along.

And this is exactly what friends are for: one provides the feast while the other provides the wings, even if things get messy.

Be winged. Be fed. Cleaning up together.

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Something Is Calling…

barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Something is calling to me
from the corners of fields,
where the leftover fence wire
suns its loose coils, and stones
thrown out of the furrow
sleep in warm litters;
where the gray faces
of old No Hunting signs
mutter into the wind,
and dry horse tanks
spout fountains of sunflowers;
where a moth
flutters in from the pasture,
harried by sparrows,
and alights on a post,
so sure of its life
that it peacefully opens its wings.
~Ted Kooser “In the Corners of Fields” from Flying at Night.


I am a visitor here,
even though we’ve lived here
for more than 30 years.

There is something to be discovered in the field
each day if I make an effort to look and listen.

My Merlin app on my phone tells me
the birds I hear around me.
A photo of a wildflower or weed
is identified by Google.
The jet flight tracks overhead
are pinpointed by another app
saying who is flying where.

Yet I’m placed right here by my Maker.
He knows where I am at all times,
the words I write,
the thoughts I pray.

I try to be at peace in these turbulent times:
to be sure of this life I’m given,
to be sure to Whom I belong,
to simply open my wings to the light,
to be ready to fly when my time comes.

AI image created for this post

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Wondering Where Life Has Gone

barnstormingblog2 Comments

For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke

Every poem of death        
should start
with my mother’s love        
for birds.
Finches and waxwings        
her favorites,
though she wasn’t        
one to quibble;
an eagle dragging a carp        
across the sky
would do.

There are worse things        
than being dead.
You might be swallowed   
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,        
to be spit up
years later        
wondering where
your life has gone.

But loving something        
can save you:
the way finches        
stack a feeder,
meddle in each other’s        
business until
a woodpecker crashes in,       
littering surrounding
shrubs with wings.

Last summer my wife        
found a hummingbird
on Mount Pisgah.        
Its emerald wings trembled
as its feet tried to grasp        
her fingers.
A ranger said        
that their lives
are so short anyway.        
What a curious reply,
I thought, but later        
reconsidered.
Perhaps any time       
 being a hummingbird
is enough.
~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm
when I hid in the wisteria
and watched hummingbirds. I thought
the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats
was the honeyed blood of flowers.
They would stick their piercing beaks
into a crown of petals until their heads
disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings,
and the breathing I heard
was the thin, moving stems of wisteria.
That night, my face pressed against the window,
I looked out into the dark
where the moon drowned in the willows
by the pond. My heart, bloodstone,
turned. That long night, the farm,
those jeweled birds, all these gone years.
The horses standing quiet and huge
in the moon-crossing blackness.
~Joseph Stroud “First Song”

Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing.
From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.

The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.

There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.

Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.

How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt,
once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion,
lying stilled and silenced
as if simply dropped from the sky,
a wee bit of fluff and stardust.

Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree.
And so it is the way of things…

We are here and gone.
Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded.
…but not forgotten.

AI image created for this post
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time or recurring donation to support daily Barnstorming posts

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$10.00
$25.00
$50.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is deeply appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly