April 26 2018
Curve-billed Thrasher at nest
Curve-billed Thrasher at nest
Many birders, for whom the name Emily Dickinson probably does not mean a thing, are nonetheless undoubtedly acquainted with the title of her most well-known poem, “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.”  Dickinson, a New Englander who wrote during the latter half of the nineteenth century, is linked with Walt Whitman as poets who infused Romanticism with a uniquely American voice.

I recently came across a reference to what some believe to be one of her earliest poems, “Nature Is What We See,” in which she continues after that opening line to simply enumerate—the Hill--the Afternoon—Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee.  And then, “Nature Is What We Hear—the Bobolink--the Sea—Thunder—the Cricket.”  Dickinson ends her first list with this leap—“Nature is Heaven,” and her second with this—“Nature is Harmony.”

I was catching up with Dickinson one evening following a morning of my own in “nature” with the camera. It was a weekday morning in which I had inadvertently stumbled upon a pair of Curve-billed Thrashers attending a nest with apparently as yet unhatched eggs.  “Apparently” because neither parent came or went with prey items, and the nest was never left unattended for more than a few minutes once the sun came up on the Valley’s first 100 degree day of the year.

A Curve-billed Thrasher nest is a dense and ugly agglomeration of thorny twigs and sticks, typically embedded three to six feet high into the crotch of a cactus.  This one was in a “Jumping” or “Hanging Chain” Cholla, and one can only watch with wonder how an avian species has thriven in the Sonoran Desert while risking impalement on this lethal cactus while raising its young.

Let me channel Dickinson for you here.  Nature is what I see.  I see the cholla—the thrashers—the sclerotic clot of rush hour traffic on the freeway atop the berm beyond the irrigation canal—the Harris’s Antelope Squirrel—the garish abandoned grocery bags littering the desert floor—the Bee Fly—the torn party balloon—the sunrise in the east—the frenetically feeding Yellow-rumped Warblers—the brown cloud in the west.  Alright, and I’m having a little trouble with her leap to Heaven.

Nature is what we hear—the thrashers’ soft, trilling dawn contact song, so contrastive from their sharp, shrill “wolf whistle”—the high chip notes of the warblers—the roar of the news helicopter monitoring the freeway scrum—the whisper of the east wind through the mesquite—the whine of heavy equipment haulers on their way to development projects on the far edges of our urban sprawl.  Perhaps not all Nature’s Harmony.

Romanticism began in the late eighteenth century as an artistic and cultural backlash against the scientific rationalization of nature as a commodity.  The Romantic poets espoused idealism, individualism, a reverence for the natural world, and a belief that nature reflected the supernatural.  Dickinson was a birder long before that label had meaning or cachet, but the thing with feathers called “Hope” is her extended metaphor for the bird that lives in the soul, singing incessantly to steer us through the storms of life.  These are stormy times for our environment.  Commodification of nature is high on this administration’s agenda.  As Emmanuel Macron told Congress this week, “There is no Planet B.”  Get outside.  Take a hike, float the Salt, read Dickinson, look for beauty.

Feed the bird that sings in your soul.  The song must never cease.
Curve-billed Thrasher singing
Curve-billed Thrasher singing