The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher
May 9, 2022
Rising temperatures and incessant wind. Water levels in the well creep downward, the tanks filling less and less each day as we enter the tawny season of desiccation. The Foresummer Drought. As we push into the 90s, one incandescent sight gives me hope: The Emory oaks renew their leaves. After shedding leaves all through April (our normal seasonal oakfall), the giant trees now sheath their branches with tassels of yellow catkins and new green, a gift from last summer’s record monsoon rainfall since this winter gave us less than an inch of moisture. I was afraid the oaks might remain bleak and skeletal until the next monsoon gullywasher. I’ve seen it before. And I hate the look almost as much as I hate the wind.
Still, the Big Yard is an emerald oasis in a spreading sea of brown. The sound of water feels magical if incongruent. Liquid and stone. The burble moves in and out with the wind, rising in the blessed stillness, then retreating with the crooning trees.
Flex and flux. I may resist it, but everything bends to the flow. Even the birds.
This morning the thrushes do the bending.
Since last October, hermit thrushes have shadowed the stones in the predawn light. Today, they are gone, replaced by a single, lookalike Swainson’s thrush skulking among the gray oaks in the dry leaf litter. Both—the Swainson’s after wintering South America!—journey to breeding grounds in central Arizona and as far north as Canada and Alaska, driven through my yard by an urge as old as Nature herself.
In his poem, “Our Real Work,” Wendell Berry says that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
So, too, I realize, cursing the blowing dust from my chair, that a wind without impediments has no voice.
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I've been lucky to have one of each this year. Swainson's was a new yard bird too.
I am always delighted to find a new posting of The Big Yard in my inbox and today's feature on Hermit and Swaison's Trushes was particularly welcome. In my spruce and alder-filled big back yard in south-central Alaska we frequently enjoy the descending lute-like song of a hermit thrush. The ascending song of the Swainson's are far less common now than they once were because they prefer to nest in a canopy of dense spruce, which were decimated by spruce bark beetles in the 1990's. I loved your photos, and feel more confident now in identifying these treasured birds. Thanks so much for your postings. They add levity to what is often a grim litteny of news feeds.