The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

March 8, 2023

The chokecherry trees unfurl chlorophyl among dark stems that the early morning sun ignites to green flame.  First leaf.  A pair of curve-billed thrashers, unconcerned by my presence, carts dry twigs to a haphazard nest they are constructing on a beam beneath the porch directly above me.  Fifteen feet away, siskins and goldfinches and the most Cassin’s finches I’ve ever counted in the yard (35) cluster at the fountain to dip beaks into trickling water.

After an emotional weekend away, this is how I rewild myself.

It’s that simple: We are the ones who need to be rewilded, not nature.  For the birds, this is their space.  I enter it quietly and wait and watch.  I don’t own a bird blind; there’s no shrubbery to hide behind.  I sit in the open, but I am not the subject here.  When Jane Goodall went into the forests of Tanzania to study chimpanzees, she sat in plain sight with only her binoculars, a notebook, and patience—without which, she says, she could never have revolutionized our understanding about our closest living relatives.

“When you watch closely, you learn how to care,” says Christopher Preston, author of Tenacious Beasts, “and caring is a matter of necessity.”

This past weekend, I entered the space of my late friend and mentor, Richard Shelton.  We held a celebration of his life at the UA Poetry Center in Tucson, a gathering of people—friends, students, teachers—influenced and touched by him in his more than sixty years as a professor and writer.  We read his poetry and told stories about our encounters with him.  I spoke about meeting him in 1989 when I walked into his prison writing workshop, how he said my sappy religious writing was “a terrible waste of really good punctuation.”  How he fell asleep reading my first book manuscript and offered this as his best criticism of my work—which I’m so happy never saw the light of day.  How he pushed me into shaping my words into what would become Wilderness and Razor Wire, which would win the John Burroughs medal for outstanding nature writing.

Then I read a poem I found in his files, written by Carolyn Kizer on his stationary, called “Reading Your Poems in Your House While You are Away.”  She writes about following a dry wall, “as it twists from page to page/the glowing yellow stones/spontaneous but neat/nested together, by your sweat.”

I held up pretty well—until my youngest daughter read her poem “Talking to Stones” and mentioned a time when most people saw our family as broken but Richard always believed we were pieces of art to be treasured.

The next day, my wife and daughters and I gathered at his home in the desert foothills to collect a few stones from his wall as keepsakes.  Although a thousand stones could never fill the space he left in our lives.