photo by Collyn Ware

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird? -Sir David Attenborough 

For much of my life, if you’d have asked me about birds, I’d have probably scoffed and conjured up an image of a doddering old fool decked in camo with an expensive pair of binoculars around his neck and an official Audubon bird guide in his pocket. I say “his”, not to be sexist or discriminatory in any way, but my notion of a birdwatcher has always been male. Probably because my father was a bird person.

From childhood, my father loved birds, particularly homing pigeons. So, we grew up with a backyard filled with homing pigeons, enough to fill two lofts that flanked the yard. We grew up in a home graced with feathers and occasional pigeon droppings. We grew up with a father who spent his Saturdays watching the sky for his birds to return home (and hopefully win the weekly race) and his evenings in a den littered with Racing Pigeon Journals, photos of champion homing pigeons, and large and assorted bird books.

Our home at 611 West 27th Street was a veritable pigeon-central. Members of my father’s racing pigeon club (I know what you’re thinking, but there are clubs of homing pigeon racers!) met there regularly to open their specialized clocks which recorded the exact minute and second that their pigeons returned from races in which they were shipped as far as 500 miles and released to fly home. The winning and losing in these races involved a lot of math, as members calculated the air speed per minute that each bird flew. Silence pervaded as men crowded around the dining table, pencils scratching away on slips of paper (no calculators or cell phones then) until someone yelled, “I won!” These were bird people at their best (or so I’m told).

One Christmas, my mother gave my father a customized sweatshirt that read Strictly for the Birds, and we all understood how absolutely perfect this gift was for a man who knew the intricate structure and feather pattern of a pigeon’s wing, a man who could identify a common barn pigeon from a homing pigeon in the air, a man who once stitched up the breast of a pigeon who’d failed to clear a utility wire in our alley. Indeed, he was strictly and wondrously for the birds.

So imagine my surprise when a few days after my recent birthday, I woke up and said to myself, “Wow, I’m a bird person!” In truth, I’d been becoming a bird person for quite some time, but I’d spent so many years with my head in books or bent over student essays that the realization snuck up on me. The signs were there, though. In the early days, my family snickered when I walked the edge of the timber searching for the elusive indigo bunting whose song I’d heard all day. When I walked into a bush once (my eyes had been fixed on the tree tops), they guffawed. I was becoming the doddering old fool I’d imagined a bird person to be. Outfit me in camo and hang a nice pair of binoculars around my neck, and the picture would be complete.

Oh yes, the signs had been there for quite some time. A solar bird bath, a line of bird feeders edging my deck, and jumbo bags of black-oiled sunflower seeds–always a surplus, just in case we run out. It would probably behoove me to invest in sunflower seed stock at the rate and quantity we buy them. And grape jelly stock, definitely grape jelly. We’ve taken to buying it in gallon cans to keep up with the local oriole population’s needs. This is what bird people do, I’m told. They present a smorgasbord of food choices in an array of feeders. They aim to please.

The naturalist John Burroughs writes:

 The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

For my father, and now for me, the bird as a poetic subject is gloriously at the top of the scale. How can you not love a creature that’s large-lunged, hot, and ecstatic? How can you not marvel at the gold of the gold finch, the blue of the mountain blue bird, the scarlet of the cardinal and tanager? How can you not be humbled by the dogged persistance of the arctic tern who wings its way thousands of miles from its Antarctic breeding ground to summer in the north? Or the soul of the sandhill crane who mates for life?

So, in my 67th year, I’d like to reintroduce myself: Hello, I’m Shannon. I’m a bird person. Better late than never, I say.

Barn Swallows

As I push my cart of baby carrots,
two onions, and a bunch of green bananas
around the corner of the produce aisle,
a barn swallow swoops 
from the bunting above the meat counter.

Instinctively, I duck.
It flies yards above me,
but I fold myself over the cart,
which I’ve pushed to the side
seeking refuge beside the canned goods.

Silly me, I think, as I push my cart
back into the aisle
and am just passing the condiments
when the swallow slices
the air so deftly
I don’t feel the cut
until seconds later.

I stand agog—
there’s no other word for it.
I stop traffic.

For seconds, I throw my head back and say
(aloud and to no one in particular)
Would you look at that—

And just as I turn down the cereal aisle,
a second swallow bisects the path of the first, 
shearing the fluorescence above. 

Such cruel geometry,
their angles too desperate,
their lines unfixed.

A pair, I think,
star-crossed lovers destined to die
at the meat counter or in the freezer section.

I want more for them. 
I want the blue June sky that opens generously
over the world.
I want the breeze which fans the hardwoods.
I want the waning and the waxing moons,
the sun giving itself to the western hills
all orange and pink and carmine. 

I want to coax them through the electric doors
which stay open and expectant. 
I want the man who will enter after hours with his pellet gun
to find them gone,
to find only melons nestled in their bins,
bottles of laundry detergent and tubs of margarine
tucked in dreamless sleep.  

And in a dark corner of an old barn,
I want them paired and nesting,
the day but a sigh
in the wild, velvet night.