#282: Birds, glorious birds 🐦

“My heart is like a singing bird.” —Christina Rossetti

Hello,

When I started writing this newsletter on Monday afternoon, I had been visited by a sunbird that had flown into my bedroom. From the corner of my eye and the sound of wings, I imagined it was a bumblebee. But it was the most wonderful feeling to see the yellow and black sunbird hovering near the open balcony door. It flew out, and I attempted to contain my squeaky joy as I sneaked up behind the curtains to look out. Eeeep, there was a second sunbird flying over the plants and just hanging out, waiting for their friend to return from the nectar search.

My excitement eventually gave way as I tried to get a closer look and as soon as they detected a wild human presence, they both flew away.

Me ^

It was one of those fleeting moments that just leaves you feeling like you were the chosen one. A purity of connection, even if the birdies didn’t realise I was there, observing. An invitation to engage with the living world, to grow more plants and keep the balcony door always open so that butterflies and sunbirds may visit me more often and make my day. 🦋

---

Poetry Corner 🌿

Elizabeth Gould

1. Bird by Dorianne Laux

   For days now a red-breasted bird

   has been trying to break in.
   She tests a low branch, violet blossoms
   swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies
   straight at my window, beak and breast
   held back, claws raking the pane.
   Maybe she longs for the tree she sees
   reflected in the glass, but I'm only guessing.
   I watch until she gives up and swoops off.
   I wait for her return, the familiar
   click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee
   and scan the room, trying to see it new,
   through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed.
   Books piled in a corner, coats hooked
   over chair backs, paper plates, a cup
   half-filled with sour milk.
   The children are in school. The man is at work.
   I'm alone with dead roses in a jam jar.
   What do I have that she could want enough
   to risk such failure, again and again?

2. Bird-Language by W. H. Auden
   Trying to understand the words
   Uttered on all sides by birds,
   I recognize in what I hear
   Noises that betoken fear.
   
   Thought some of them, I'm certain, must
   Stand for rage, bravado, lust,
   All other notes that birds employ
   Sound like synonyms for joy.

3. Evening Scene from my Table by Vikram Seth
   Evening is here, and I am here
   At my baize table with a glass,
   Now sipping my unfizzy beer,
   Now looking out where on the grass
   
   Two striped and crested hoopoes glean
   Delicious insects one by one.
   A barbet flies into the scene
   Across the smoky city sun.
   
   My friends have left, and I can see
   No one, and no one will appear.
   This must be happiness, to be
   Sitting alone with birds and beer.
   
   In a brief while the sun will go,
   And grand unnerving bats will fly
   Westward in clumped formations, slow
   And dark across a darkened sky.

4. Everything Is a Sign Today by Amanda Moore

   Feather in the grass, stippled and striped:
   hawk, I think. And then a man
   blocking the sidewalk, child on his back,
   both of them pointing binoculars toward the treetop
   where I know a great horned owl nests, though I've never seen it.
   All these birds: creatures I might never have known
   had I not spent my childhood filling her feeders, naming
   each genus from our perch at her kitchen table.
   A falcon swoops down beside me on the path
   gripping some rodent in its talons, twisting the body to kill.
   Like the time a heron a few feet from our picnic blanket
   plucked a whole mouse from its burrow and swept away. She had been
   delighted, said we, too, should grab something special
   of our own that day. Turning toward home,
   I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb:
   an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved
   those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same:
   haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference
   the season and time of day, which is to say
   they are like this grief these months later:
   all the same but for the light.

5. Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens by Jack Prelutsky
   Last night I dreamed of chickens,
   there were chickens everywhere,
   they were standing on my stomach,
   they were nesting in my hair,
   they were pecking at my pillow,
   they were hopping on my head,
   they were ruffling up their feathers
   as they raced about my bed.
   
   They were on the chairs and tables,
   they were on the chandeliers,
   they were roosting in the corners,
   they were clucking in my ears,
   there were chickens, chickens, chickens
   for as far as I could see...
   when I woke today, I noticed
   there were eggs on top of me.

---

Links of the Week 🦉

• Palestine Sunbird: A Stamp of Defiance (found on Ella Frances Sanders’ newsletter)

• Birds on Indian stamps

• Ornithology by Robin Sloan

• The Wonder of Birds, a free, self-paced course by Early Bird (Thanks, M & S)

• A Once-In-A-Lifetime Bird (via Kat’s Kable)

• Birds of the World: The Art of Elizabeth Gould

• How Bird Collecting Evolved Into Bird-Watching

“Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and everything we are.”
-Steven Nightingale (via)

Wish you wonder and chirpy visitors in your room!

Love,
Rohini