May 26, 2006

• Shoot, should have linked to this earlier thread: Project PigeonWatch.
• You can also listen to many many different birds here! I spent about an hour here one day, found it fascinating. I do like dem boids, I do!
• I don't know why people don't like town pigeons. They are dirty, but no more so than, say, sewer rats.
• yes, Chy, but i have rarely, if ever, found sewer rats flying over me... personally i prefer my vermin underfoot. and to at least stay on topic, now here's a bird.
• Apart from being dirty and having behaviour patterns that are rather intrusive, they're an introduced European birds that crowds out native species, as do starlings and house sparrows.
• You can eat them.
• sfred... thanks for the link to the What Bird? site... great resource.. Nice to know I'm not the only bird watcher here in Monkey land! My highlight so far this season is the return of an Osprey to my river. He's been hanging out the past couple of years. Osprey have been somewhat rare in this part of Michigan, it is nice to see this beautiful bird return. Nice hit on the Night Heron...I've never seen one!
• Re: eating pigeons: that's what they were introduced for, I'm told. But I don't wanna. They can have them back.
• I love to whistle back at the mourning doves.
• i love that hummingbirds live in the tree next to my house... they love to come and investigate my flowers. boy do they talk a lot and make a racket tho! when i was a boy, i visited jamaica and got to go to a hummingbird feeding station, where i held a jar of sugar water with a hole in the lid for hummingbirds to drink from whilst perching on my finger... sublime! when it comes to reincarnation, hummingbirds, manta rays and large cats are all battling it out for my soul.
• Humming Ray Cat? Awesome.
• There is a short radio program in Seattle called Birdnote. It is produced by Seattle Audubon. Nearly every show has bird sounds, and, well, I really like it. It reminds me of nice, quiet walks in the woods. Listen online.
• BTW, if you check out Birdnote, just skip that first story. Much better content below that...
• Nifty! Thanks heady!
• Yeah, birds. I dig 'em. It's nice watching all my little buddies come back in the spring -- they're my new calendar. Some birdies are tastier than others, though. I have 5 geese (if I'm unlucky, I'll have about a dozen more in a week or so). Those are tasty. I'd have fewer left if they weren't such a pain to pluck. I ate a pidgeon a few years ago. It lived mostly on organic corn so I figured what the hey, eh? It was... so so. Not as good as duck, and certainly not as much food. It takes a lot of pidgeons to make a pot pie.
• (Huh. For some reason I'd always thought rock doves were native to north america. Live and learn.) Osprey are among my favorite birds... I've been seeing one around my work the last couple of months. Saw a downy woodpecker on a telephone pole just yesterday, and a pair of squabbling Anna's hummers. Yellow-rumped warblers made a sweep through town a few weeks ago. And possibly my favorite favorite, bushtits, swarm en masse around my neighborhood all spring and summer long. Yay birds!
• I've always loved osprey as well. Years ago when I lived in the Maritimes I used to pack a lunch and a book and go to a spot where you could watch both osprey the kingfishers hunt. Awesome little spot, that.
• Many sorts of pigeons and doves -- with the Victoria crown pigeon probably the most eye-catching of the wild varieties, while fantails, pouters, and other unusual domestic strains produced by pigeon fanciers but are less spectacular critters, to my mind. The mourning dove, noted for its sad-sounding call, is a wild species found from Canada down through Mexico and the Carribean, and in the US it's the most commonly hunted game bird. People eat mourning doves. These birds are found all over the continental US -- and this species is in no danger whatsoever of being hunted to death, due to the decline of native predatory birds like the hawks. Pigeons and doves are superprolific birds; like rabbits they function in the wild as living luncheons for other critters. Two weeks for an egg to hatch, and in three more weeks the young squabs are flying and fending for themselves. In cities, an occaisional rat will sometimes eat their eggs or the young, but unless hawks move in, there are relatively few predators for pigeons. [Not counting humans.] However, mourning doves don't seem to like the cliffside/concrete building lifestyle -- in contradistinction to the city pigeons, which are descended from the North African rock dove, a cliff-dwelling species. I can't see that there's the slightest danger to any native North American dove or pigeon from the presence of the feral descendents of imported birds.(Now if we wanted to tear down cities and restore the countryside to what it might have been like centuries ago before Europeans arrived here -- or go even further back, to restore the natural world to what it was like before the 'Native' American peoples arrived here, well, that's another thing altogether.) But our poor old city pigeons are not filling a niche some native species had formerly carved out for itself, and only uninformed folk, like those unfortunate people unable to read MoFi threads, would assume it has. Many folk in cities enjoy keeping pigeons, and pigeons are some of the few close-up contacts many urban dwellers have with wild/feral critters. People keeping pigeons in cities I think is not so common as it used to be when I was a kid. There are spectacular ruins out in the American southwest, small cities built into the cliffs at Chaco and other steep-sided canyons, and although mourning doves are seen in that general area, they don't take the slightest advantage of those empty stone chambers. Some mourning doves even prefer to nest in a hole in a saguaro cactus.
• Beeswacky -- starlings and house sparrows have certainly been implicated in pushing out native species from certain habitats. As for the pigeon, perhaps it hasn't, it's been many years since I took ornithology, but the map I linked to in my original post would seem to suggest that it has spread outside purely urban habitats. Who knows what native bird or birds might have filled the urban niche but for the introduction of domesticated pigeons? As our compatriots from New Zealand and Australia can attest, introducing new species is rarely a good idea.
• Great Blue Heron in the back field tonight. I lubs me some GBH
• One thing I really miss about my home country (Australia) are the beautiful variety of colours and noises of the birds. Here (Japan) you pretty much only see/ hear pigeons and crows. I was down the beach once and I saw a pair of eagles. Everyone stopped and stared in amazement. Because it's so uncommon to see. It's a bit sad really. Apparently some type of bird has been fond of making nests in the baskets of abandoned bicycles in the main areas of towns. This may sound like a stupid idea - but the theory is that they use the presence of people to ward off their birdy-enemies. The idea is so novel that people in these areas have been very protective about these nests - and most of the birds have managed to produce healthy broods.
• ah gomichild, that is REALLY COOL bicycle basket bird nests, I love it!
• sfred, that's most interesting about the spread of city pigeons; my first guess would be an association with large surburban mall-type setups or high-rise condos, an island of isolation in a soon-to-be-city ehabitat. Second guess : a case of misidentification of the birds. Haven't read any articles about this yet, and would be obliged if you could post a reference or two, for birds are both a lifelong and a professional interest of mine. Because city pigeons are not insect eaters, they fail to compete with birds like native cliff swallows or house swallows, neither of which have shown so far any interest in penetrating asphalt-and-concrete dominated habitats. If city pigeons should now be evolving/mutating into countryside dwellers, a thing I admit I am very skeptical about, then this would place them into competition with the native mourning dove and other species; however, as I mentioned in previous remarks, the mourning dove is so sucessful now that I don't see how these city slickers can make much headway. But I could be wrong there, of course. And you're correct in that introduced species have often been devastating to native ones. (I often wonder what Oz folk tell their kids about the Easter Bunny, who surely is depicted as a villain!) In North America, right now, some of our most notorious alien offenders seem to be assorted invasive dwellers in the waters of our streams, lakes, sewer-lines and water-systems, the price we pay for having no way to filter the Great Lakes or stop ships from dumping foreign-water ballusts. I've enjoyed your post on birds very much. Unfortunately, I guess, I've a passion for wanting to see all the facts laid out, whether pro or con, before I reach a final conclusion. Please don't take any of my remarks for criticism of your enthusism for birds, or your post, both of which have delighted me no end. Alas, we just don't know nearly enough about how interactions between a species introduced into a new habitat to it are likely to play out in the long run, except by hindsight. We human beings have already muddied the natural waters -- literally and figuratively -- to such a degree that we have fewer and fewer unaffected or hitherto-uncontaminated natural habitats left. And sadly fewer inhabitants of those, with every passing day. A situation I am convinced you deplore as much as I do.
• Well Medusa I found some piccies for you - links are in Japanese though. キセキレイ、巣は自転車　西城 放置自転車かごでキセキレイ巣作り…広島
• beeswacky, On a quick search most of the literature seems to agree with you that feral pigeons don't compete with native dove species for nest sites. I couldn't find anything addressing other modes of competition. For starlings and house sparrows, the problem is well enough known and it makes it onto their wikipedia pages. House finches, a California bird that was introduced to the east in the 20th century, seems to out compete the sparrows for nest sites (this entry stanford birds makes brief mention of it -- I wrote a course paper on this when I was an undergraduate in the early 90s). I guess for me seeing the city pigeon is symbolic of just how completely we've altered the environment on this continent. Walking through a city park that at least notionally should be pretty good bird habitat and seeing nothing but pigeons, starlings, and house sparrows, as gomichild describes in Japan, is a profoundly sad experience. And in one sense they do directly limit the food supply for native birds: people like my parents put away their feeders in the spring as soon as a pigeon shows up.
• I like those Japanese links. I really enjoy just clicking around Japanese websites. It's like a little treasure hunt. You never know what you'll find, and sometimes it's pretty cool. Then again, if you do find something cool, you really can't read what it is. Such is treasure hunting.
• About eating pidgeons- My dad told me that during the Depression, it was common for city folk (in Chicago, anyway) to pluck nesting birds from bridge underpasses, feed them cornmeal for a few days, then fry them up like any other poultry.
• MonkeyFilter: fry them up like any other poultry
• Pigeon Pie.
• Peacock Pie, if ye want to get really fancy.
• At this lowest low tide of the soon full moon oysters and mussels lay in the sun. Has the crow taught the gull or the gull the crow to carry aloft a tight closed shell and release briny flesh when it shatters apart on the rocks below?
• Rare starling 'hounded to death' by birdwatchers after landing in UK
• sad pilgrim blown too far from home grew camera shy not left alone
• People are such horses asses. Birdlovers my ruby red Monkey rump. Inflated ego Listlovers more like it.
• Keeping your own list - to yourself - is no harm. when it gets competitive, though ...
• crow cusses swoop as he will above the valley shawled in snow crow finds scant trace of fields once fireflied broken stalk and windshred leaf sole souvenirs of goldcob corn still crow can't flap his wings to reach last summer's dream of harvest home
• The Heron One of the most begrudging avian take-offs is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right, I'll go the garage for your flaming fags cranky departure, though once they're up their flight can be extravagant. I watched one big spender climb the thermal staircase, a calorific waterspout of frogs and sticklebacks, the undercarriage down and trailing. Seen from antiquity you gain the Icarus thing; seen from my childhood that cursing man sets out for Superkings, though the heron cares for neither as it struggles into its wings then soars sunwards and throws its huge overcoat across the earth. --Paul Farley
• Loved that, bees. The idea of a beautiful bird heading off down to the gas station for a pack of smokes is somehow... well, just damn poetic.
• Mysterious, anyway. Herons in these parts don't often carry much cash.
• Lovely poem. I Like the his unusual metaphors. Returning David Wagoner At the brim of a deep pool before the rapids below that stone stairway for days overhead the under-sheen of the other world turning darker lighter again still holding the first taste of rain from the mountainside moving once more to scale the shallowing ridge fishtailing over down to the end of a deeper pool where the river is windstorming around them among whirling alder roots into what guides them lifts them constantly toward colder water leaping above a leaping whiteness swirling from blue green light to a wash of silver current again again again returning they plunge upstream.
• On the very slender pretext that geese are birds ... mostly. World Hypothesis The geese again. Each call is a rent in the rouse it have felt. Each soiled thing ratchets it back until it bland with the hinge or begin to hear, clairvoyant. Now the absent martyr, it go netted when it go, and guilt is its inhibitor. Words lamb like little kings, killed for their thrones. It feel then the drop calculate in it, it feel the shadow level for flight. The geese frond, models to the eye, missing the world by a margin. The sky wipes itself clean, it feel genes in it calculate, a hammer fall, it feel itself treading water. --Jennifer Militello
• 8 count from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone wire. one flies off. then another. one is left, then it too is gone. my typewriter is tombstone still. and I am reduced to bird watching. just thought I'd let you know, fucker. --Charles Bukowski
• Bukowski certainly has his own way of communicating writer's block.
• Not THAT kind of bird, you filthy monkeys? Well, I had to scroll down, but they're missing a great looking silent actress we saw a picture of at an historical house at Leu Gardens, Florida (She was the wife there).
• One Train May Hide Another Kenneth Koch (sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya) In a poem, one line may hide another line, As at a crossing, one train may hide another train. That is, if you are waiting to cross The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read Wait until you have read the next line-- Then it is safe to go on reading. In a family one sister may conceal another, So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another. One father or one brother may hide the man, If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love. So always standing in front of something the other As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas. One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe; One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another, One small complaint may hide a great one. One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another, One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain. One idea may hide another: Life is simple Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory One invention may hide another invention, One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows. One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass, These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here. A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it. In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by the mother's And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love or the same love As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts" Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that" And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the Garden of Eden cont
• cont Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve. Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem. When you come to something, stop to let it pass So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where, Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading A Sentimental Journey look around When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see If it is standing there, it should be, stronger And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the foot of a tree With one and when you get up to leave there is another Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher, One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass. You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be important To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.
• Bird Pablo Neruda t was passed from one bird to another, the whole gift of the day. The day went from flute to flute, went dressed in vegetation, in flights which opened a tunnel through the wind would pass to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air - and there, night came in. When I returned from so many journeys, I stayed suspended and green between sun and geography - I saw how wings worked, how perfumes are transmitted by feathery telegraph, and from above I saw the path, the springs and the roof tiles, the fishermen at their trades, the trousers of the foam; I saw it all from my green sky. I had no more alphabet than the swallows in their courses, the tiny, shining water of the small bird on fire which dances out of the pollen.
• *biff bang* Koch and Neruda back to back writer's block and birds Take that, you suckas
• It is neither spring nor summer: it is Always, With towhees, finches, chickadees, California quail, wood doves, With wrens, sparrows, juncos, cedar waxwings, flickers, With Baltimore orioles, Michigan bobolinks, And those birds forever dead, The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the Carolina paraquet, All birds remembered, O never forgotten! All in my yard, of a perpetual Sunday, All morning! All morning! --Theodore Roethke Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings We are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water looking out in different directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you looking up from tables we are saying thanks you in a culture up to its chin in shame living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the back door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks that use us we are saying thank you with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of out lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us like the earth we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is --W. S. Merwin My wife is at the computer. The cat is sleeping across the soft gold cushion of my chair. Last night there was a frost. I am practicing to walk like a heron. It's the walk of solemn monks progressing to prayer on stilts, the deliberate cadence of a waltz in water. I lift my right leg within the stillness, within the languid quiet of a creek, slowly, slowly, slowly set my foot on the dog-haired carpet, pause, hold a half note, lift the left, head steady as a bell before the ringer tugs the rope. On I walk, the heron's mute way, across the room, past my wife who glances up, holds her slender hands above the keys until I pass. --Jack Ridl, "Practicing to Walk Like a Heron"
• The starlings are singing! You could call it singing. At any rate, they are starlings. --James Schuyler, "Starlings"
• I love it, bees! Gack, but I hate starlings. Nasty, noisy, dirty birds. Why anyone would miss them enough to bring them to a new continent is beyond me. I'd be willing to move across an ocean to get away from the dirty buggers. We have so many lovely melodious native birds, and the stupid starlings and grackles drive them off.
• I enjoy starlings, they can be quite musical, while their flocks flights are remarkable, too. As for grackles, they too have great spirit, and are far more versatile vocally than most folk credit. Black birds so often seem to be natural mimics, even to incorporating songs of other birds in their output. And best of all, they are not bee-eaters!
• Speaking of mimics, we have a squirrel in the big maple tree out back. It can sound like a crow sometimes, and my wife calls back to it. But beyond that, I once saw it cling to the tree head down and vibrate its tail while making a buzzing sound. Seriously.
• when up a tree squirrels ratchet especially if they spot you coming with a hatchet
• squirrels are odd birds they may sing by and by most squirrels here are grey but a few squirrels fly these flyers have loose skin between wrist and shin this can be stretched taut they climb and launch themselves from trees and can't be caught
• The four known species of bush wren in New Zealand are, by now, endangered or extinct. Possessing trifling tails and wings, none fly far— instead they hop and dart in whatever undergrowth scrapes the landscape. Those on Cook Strait's margin of rock entirely lost the capacity for flight and in 1894 were destroyed not by farmers, hunters, pet traders, rats, disease, natural disaster or want of food— but by Tibbles, the lighthouse keeper's cat. Oh, what we think we need to survive kills others: I have consuming need for my beloved, he knows— and I hope he is not sorry. --Kimiko Hahn, "Xenicus Longipes"
• Crows You came with your dark hats, fringed shawls, gifts— armloads of flowers and grief. You came with twigs, muddy houses, ashes smeared on your cheeks. You came with your broken clocks, loud warnings. You came with your wisdom, but your wisdom was air. You came with your umbrellas open despite the sun, and the sun shone in the feathers of your wings held close to your bodies. You came with your offering, the corpses of mice and birds, bundles of bones, and the bones were bloody, and bloody were your beaks and talons ticking the long black table. --Jeff Friedman I enjoy watching crows and ravens, such clever and beautiful birds. But unquestionably they have some negative associations for many people. o black is the colour of my raven's hair
• His frowning beak, his fleck-of-granite eye. Against the rough pine planks he beats his wings, and dirty feathers drift across the yard. I feel that dark, blank eye on me. He struts atop the coop as though he hears my heart pounding in its fist-tight cage. I turn my back, reluctant, and scan the ground for the morning's eggs. A brown one rests beside the water trough. Its perfect oval is a poem, one I've tried to write, about the planet's orbit and charts describing Earth's trajectory. I cradle it; my palm repeats the shape. Then I feel a quick, sharp thump on my anklebone, and a perfect bloody flower blossoms there. --Shane Seely, "The Rooster"
• Woodpecker Again he startles me, mid-stanza, words left hanging, rhythm lost to his rapid-fire knocks, a crazy Morse code. I curse this bird who doesn't know house from tree. Three times this morning I've opened the window, rattled the blinds, shouted him away. He doesn't understand his one-note scolds are not the bones of poetry. Not oriole, all color and song. He can't help his shadow-gray feathers, his diligent digging. He's hungry. Let him bore into the wood, hammer out o after o after o in straight little rows as he hunts for food he cannot see— is the taste always a surprise? --Christine Rhein
• Down The Stream The Swans All Glide Down the stream the swans all glide; It's quite the cheapest way to ride. Their legs get wet, Their tummies wetter: I think after all The bus is better --Spike Milligan
• At the horislope of the mountizon The violinswallow with a cellotail Slipped down this morning from a lunawing And hurries near Look here swoops the swooping swallow Here swoops the whooping wallow Here swoops the weeping wellow Look here swoops the sweeping shrillow Swoops the swamping shallow Swoops the sheeping woolow Swoops the slooping swellow Look here swoops the sloping spillow The scooping spellow The souping smellow The seeping swillow The sleeping shellow Look here swoops the swooping day And the night retracts its claws like a leopard Swoops the swapping swallow With a nest in each of the torrid zones As I have them on the four horizons Swoops the snooping smallow And waves rise on tiptoe Swoops the whelping whirllow And the mountain's head feels dizzy --Vicente Huidobro, from ALTAZOR, trans Eliot Weinberger
• Bird It was passed from one bird to another, the whole gift of the day. The day went from flute to flute, went dressed in vegetation, in flights which opened a tunnel through the wind would pass to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air - and there, night came in. When I returned from so many journeys, I stayed suspended and green between sun and geography - I saw how wings worked, how perfumes are transmitted by feathery telegraph, and from above I saw the path, the springs and the roof tiles, the fishermen at their trades, the trousers of the foam; I saw it all from my green sky. I had no more alphabet than the swallows in their courses, the tiny, shining water of the small bird on fire which dances out of the pollen. --Pablo Neruda
• The Phoenix By feathers green, across Casbeen The pilgrims track the Phoenix flown, By gems he strew’d in waste and wood, And jewell’d plumes at random thrown. Till wandering far, by moon and star, They stand beside the fruitful pyre, Where breaking bright with sanguine light The impulsive bird forgets his sire. Those ashes shine like ruby wine, Like bag of Tyrian murex spilt, The claw, the jowl of the flying fowl Are with the glorious anguish gilt. So rare the light, so rich the sight, Those pilgrim men, on profit bent, Drop hands and eyes and merchandise, And are with gazing most content. --A. C. Benson
• "Crying cranes and wheeling crows... I'll remember them," she said; And I will be your own, God knows, And the sin be on my head. I will be your own and glad; Lovers would be fools to care How a thing is good or bad, When the sky is everywhere... "I will be your own," she said, "Because your voice is like the rain, And your kiss is wine and bread Better than my father's grain." So I took her where she spoke, Breasts of snow and burning mouth... Crying cranes and drifting smoke And the blackbirds wheeling south. --Orrick Johns, "The Answer"
• Questions about Birds I am going to sit down on a rock near some water or lie supine on the grass under the trees and under a high ceiling of white clouds and I am going to stop talking so I can wander there like some American of the nineteenth century who is wandering through a forest of speckled sunlight and I am going to imagine him stopping to lean against an elm to mop his brow as he listens to the songs of birds and wonders—like me—if they sleep with open eyes and how they regard the songs of other species. Would it be like listening to the rapid Chinese of men bargaining over a stall? Or do all the birds perfectly understand each other? Or is that nervous chittering I often hear high in the pine trees the sound of some tireless little translator? --Billy Collins, "Questions About Birds"
• Peacock Display He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune, Perfectly cocksure, and suddenly spreads The huge fan of his tail for her amazement. Each turquoise and purple, black-horned, walleyed quill Comes quivering forward, an amphitheatric shell For his most fortunate audience: her alone. He plumes himself. He shakes his brassily gold Wings and rump in a dance, lifting his claws Stiff-legged under the great bulge of his breast. And she strolls calmly away, pecking and pausing, Not watching him, astonished to discover All these seeds spread just for her in the dirt. --David Wagoner
• How like a female. Peacock William Butler Yeats What's riches to him That has made a great peacock With the pride of his eye? The wind-beaten, stone-grey, And desolate Three Rock Would nourish his whim. Live he or die Amid wet rocks and heather, His ghost will be gay Adding feather to feather For the pride of his eye. Oldie, but goodie
• The Owl Beneath her nest, a shrew's head, a finch's beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the hour, and disregards the rest. --Wendy Videlock
• Ravens Hiding in a Shoe There is something men and women living in houses Don’t understand. The old alchemists standing Near their stoves hinted at it a thousand times. Ravens at night hide in an old woman’s shoe. A four-year-old speaks some ancient language. We have lived our own death a thousand times. Each sentence we speak to friends means the opposite As well. Each time we say, “I trust in God,” it means God has already abandoned us a thousand times. Mothers again and again have knelt in church In wartime asking God to protect their sons, And their prayers were refused a thousand times. The baby loon follows the mother’s sleek Body for months. By the end of summer, she Has dipped her head into Rainy Lake a thousand times. Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your life Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you Do that again? I would, a thousand times. --Robert Bly
• Oh, wonderful!!! Bly's side-address to himself there is especially amusing.
• Hopkins Palindrome I caught this morning morning's minion, then gushed glossolalia thus: "Suh tail a loss olg deh sug neht! Noinims gninrom gninrom sihtth! Gu aci!!" --Aaron Belz
• Paired Things Who, who had only seen wings, could extrapolate the skinny sticks of things birds use for land, the backward way they bend, the silly way they stand? And who, only studying birdtracks in the sand, could think those little forks had decamped on the wind? So many paired things seem odd. Who ever would have dreamed the broad winged raven of despair would quit the air and go bandylegged upon the ground, a common crow? --Kay Ryan
• Dead Thrushes Nicarchus(1st century A.D. translated by William Roger Paton The birds of Stymphalus Vexed not so the Arcadians, As those dead thrushes vexed me With their dry bones, Very harpies, Ten of them, A dry drachma's worth. Out on you, wretched creatures, True bats of the fields.
• Felix Crow Crow school is basic and short as a rule— just the rudiments of quid pro crow for most students. Then each lives out his unenlightened span, adding his bit of blight to the collected history of pushing out the sweeter species; briefly swaggering the swagger of his aggravating ancestors down my street. And every time I like him when we meet. --Kay Ryan
• Far Company At times now from some margin of the day I can hear birds of another country not the whole song but a brief phrase of it out of a music that I may have heard once in a moment I appear to have forgotten for the most part that full day no sight of which I can remember now though it must have been where my eyes were then that knew it as the present while I thought of somewhere else without noticing that singing when it was there and still went on whether or not I noticed now it falls silent when I listen and leaves the day and flies before it to be heard again somewhere ahead when I have forgotten --W.S. Merwin
• The Birds are heading south, pulled by a compass in the genes. They are not fooled by this odd November summer, though we stand in our doorways wearing cotton dresses. We are watching them as they swoop and gather— the shadow of wings falls over the heart. When they rustle among the empty branches, the trees must think their lost leaves have come back. The birds are heading south, instinct is the oldest story. They fly over their doubles, the mute weathervanes, teaching all of us with their tailfeathers the true north. --Linda Pastan
• Crows in a Strong Wind Cornelius Eady Off go the crows from the roof. The crows can’t hold on. They might as well Be perched on an oil slick. Such an awkward dance, These gentlemen In their spottled-black coats. Such a tipsy dance, As if they didn’t know where they were. Such a humorous dance, As they try to set things right, As the wind reduces them. Such a sorrowful dance. How embarrassing is love When it goes wrong In front of everyone.
• Wintering All night, hemlocks drop their cones on stone steps. If the cones were slippers, I'd unlock the latch for the woman who fled from her home in her nightgown. From under the purple shade of the pines she'd come to warm her feet in my hands. If her gown were hemmed in hailstones, I'd fold it over my shoulder to thaw, and with my lips, drop a seed under her tongue. We'd fall asleep listening as the pines mourn the waxwings— those birds in black masks who huddle on high limbs passing berries from one mouth to another. --Kristin Bock
• Raven First on the road, stripping flesh, then on my shoulder, squeezing; it appeared, no larger than my palm and blind, when I was young, uniformed, and driven to Saint Sebastian's School. With me most days, it smells life. I find small digs in my skin, and sometimes feathers brush my ear. Outside chapel black birds laugh and make war. They find each other in the sky, form cities, raise generations of shadows while I squirm on the worn bench. At night the wind comes through sashes and makes my dry house sing against its will; my shutters shake like weak elbows. It's then, tiny enough to fit in my pill box, the raven sleeps. I would give this small pinching thing to you, then smoke salmon caught from the river as it left the sea. Hang the shining flesh over green wood, so together, you, and I, and the raven could eat the body of the old soul that swam so far, then its roe, its tiny stars, the possibilities. --D.M. Gordon