The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Sandhill Cranes over Whitewater Draw

January 31, 2023

This past weekend, the wife and I drove to nearby Whitewater Draw to join the celebration of thousands of sandhill cranes at their winter sounding grounds.  We waited for twenty minutes as the cranes warmed up off stage and the audience took their seats.  Then, all at once, dozens of people rose from the benches as the birds launched into the hard blue ceiling above our heads, their voices filling the cathedral with their bugling song.

The moment felt as transcendental as the hallelujah chorus.

This morning, on the final day of January, a month that saw 45 species of wintering and resident birds in the Big Yard, I listen to the dawn chorus from my back porch.  The air is still and cold. Sunlight kindles only the tips of trees.  But the pine siskins are already in full-throated exposition, scores of them introducing a central melody in C major from the elderberry tree.

Then, an answer from the house and Cassin’s finches in subdominant key, the house finches accompanied by a new, contrapuntal melody from the more numerous Cassin’s. 

This is getting interesting.  Synchronicity seems part of the show, but discordance is rampant.

Now come the episodes, short musical passages of wiry tsitt-tsits and tleess and dry chups from lesser goldfinches and hermit thrushes, dark-eyed juncos and yellow-rumped warblers.  Then, the acorn woodpeckers layer in a stretto section with their nasal waak, waak, waaayk that adds intensity and builds toward what feels like a climax...

This is a fugue!  A multi-voiced composition of interweaving parts in repeated themes.  I imagine a wide range of keys, subjects rising and manipulated through retrograde, inversion, augmentation, and diminution of bird song until the final coda closes out the piece.

My spirit rises.  I have front seat at a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue in G minor.  Only instead of the early 1700s, this sacred masterpiece stems from the Cretaceous.

The Players:  

Pine Siskin

Cassin’s Finch (male)

House Finch (male)

Lesser Goldfinch (male)

Hermit Thrush

Dark-eyed Junco

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Acorn Woodpecker

Thanks for listening! More to come in February as we approach migration!