Birds, Books, and Winds

I received a couple of books as gifts - for Christmas and my birthday, from two of my sons. The first is about exploration and attempts to establish trade routes in the Pacific - following the journeys of John Kendrick four years after the American Revolution - Morning Fire by Scott Ridley. This book will set the stage for the period of micro-discovery that David Douglas carried out in the inland Pacific Northwest during the later part of first quarter of the 19th Century - I read his biography a year ago. Morning Fire will likely provide context to another book I have on my Amazon Wish List - Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America by Barry Gough. That book will give much more

detail about the disputes between Great Britain and the United States that were eventually mediated by Washington Irving - another biography that I read a couple of years ago - which helped avert another war after the one in 1812. The second book, The Bedside Book of Birds - An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson, is light fare; a compilation of literature about birds. Like the first book, it was a satisfying experience - nothing like a surprise that fits my personal interests with my taste for books.

The winds across the Mid-Atlantic region were wicked yesterday - howling as fast as 60 miles per hour at times. Regardless of the severity of the weather, the power to our house seems to hold up without faltering, when others' may be knocked out for days by lesser storms. I wondered what effects these kinds of winds would have on the birds that visit our backyard this time of year - would little birds be blown to far reaches from our house. A quick look this morning turned up: Common Grackle, Eastern Blue Jay, Mourning Dove, Brown Thrasher, European Starling, Tufted Titmouse, Black-capped Chickadee (maybe a Carolina Chickadee - I need to look more closely to tell the difference), and Northern Cardinal. (1)

The other night I read Alberto Manguel's account of Cardinal in the Gibson Avian Miscellany. This morning I caught a quick photograph with my Nikon of the male cardinal perched in the dwarf peach tree that is waiting to be trained to look like a grape vine. I thought about what I had read two nights ago as I focused the 200 mm lense and shot the image. The prose goes like this: Outside my window is a cardinal.

Northern Cardinal

There is no way of writing this sentence without dragging in its tow whole libraries of literary allusions. The frame of the window and the margins of the page entrap the bird that serves as a sign for any idea. Noah's dove, Macbeth's rooks, Horace's swans, Omar Khayyam's pigeons, Theocritus's nightingale, Count Fosco's cararies - they are no longer birds but usages of birds, feathered with words and meaning. My cardinal of symbolic colour and symbolic name bleeds now across this page as it did a moment ago across the sky. I wonder, corrupt with reading, if there ever was a moment when this sentence - outside my window is a cardinal - was not an artifice; when the blood-red bird on steel blue tree was quietly surprising, and nothing urged me to translate it, to domesticate it into a textual enclosure, to become its literary taxidermist. I wonder if there ever was a moment when  a cardinal outside my window sat there in blazing splendour signifying nothing. (2)

Outside my glass door 

Perched on the peach tree limb 

Is a cardinal. (3)

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(1) There were also a gray squirrel, and large house cat that resembled a Maine Coon. Of course, they are not avian, rather mammalian. Quite bound to the ground, other than squirrel when leaping to the feeder full of seeds from the pruned but untrellised fruit trees that must be formed into an espalier soon to put a stop to the intrusion upon the birds' banquet table. The cat, perched on the fence, fancies birds not seeds, appears too lazy to take flight after them. (4)

(2) Alberto Manguel. Stevenson Under the Palm Trees. Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, 2003.

(3) Playing on Manguel's introductory sentence and using a 5-7-5 haiku form, is a verse for what I saw out the window this morning. It was just about five years ago that I moved into our house in Annapolis. The only furniture I purchased while I waited for Jan to move our household in June was a queen-sized bed and night stand with a built in lamp. There was also a chair in the den that sat in front of the build-in desk in the closet to hold my laptop computer - my link to the world back in Oregon: wife, family, home. It may have been the next Saturday morning, but when I looked through the shade at the upper limbs of the leafless ornamental cherry tree at eye-level with the second floor bedroom, there outside my window was a cardinal.
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(4) Just to see what this footnote looks like in verse:

There was a gray squirrel

and a large house cat -

that resembled a Maine Coon;

of course not avian, rather mammalian,

quite bound to the ground.

Squirrel,
leaps to the feeder full of seeds,

from a tree that must be espaliered soon - 

to put a stop to the intrusion
upon the birds' banquet table. 

Cat,

perched on the fence,

fancies birds not seeds -

appeared too lazy
to try and take flight after them.