Spring Song
by Karen Baldwin [reprinted from TCR 2005]

In this cruelest month of annual reports, tax filings, conference proposal deadlines, and final paper grading, one of the most important things I do is sit each dawn and dusk in the backyard listening for the flute-note song that signals the migratory return of a speckled-breasted bird.  Behind our house is a riparian corridor of bottomland forest featuring southern red maple, sweet gum, sassafras, mulberry, tulip poplar, magnolia bay, and holly growing in the floodplain of a creek.  There I listen for the ethereal notes of Hylocichla mustelina, the Wood Thrush.  When I hear the first songs, the tension of the winter and the tortion of the ending academic year abate.

Wood Thrushes return just about the same time every year -- mid to late April, after Catbirds and other migrants come to nest, and after the Goldfinches brighten up for breeding.  Each spring I start to worry that this year will be the one absent the trilling song of the Wood Thrush.  So many dangers threaten the lifecycle of neotropical migratory songbirds, and this bird's population has declined nearly by half in the past 50 years.  Habitat loss is the main problem, both here, where Wood Thrushes widely disperse for breeding advantage, and in their neotropical habitats where, crowded densely with other species, these songsters spend most of the year.  The species needs forests near water to survive.

We do what little we can to help.  We drink gallons of coffee, but only if it's certifiably "shade grown." (If it isn't shade grown, it has been grown in monoculture sun plantations where neotropical forests and birds once were.)  We plant trees, especially native species bearing food.  We create brush piles that the birds use for cover near open areas, and we chase away neighborhood cats.  We also feed birds, but that's primarily for window-watching entertainment.

I am haunted by the preventable losses of avian and other species in our world and our grandchildren's world, reading yet another book about the willful neglect that brought about the nearly certain extinction in my lifetime of North America's resident largest woodpecker, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, a denizen of the same bottomland forest type (albeit covering many more acres) we enjoy in our Greenville backyard.

Of a morning last week, when my spirit sorely needed good news, I went out to listen.  The morning chorus was a swelling symphony of sex-charged, full-throated wheedles, chirps, coos, and tweets.  I sat mesmerized inside the melodious, polyphonic soundscape, waiting for my brain to recognize the characteristic, soft e-o-lay among all the songs.  There!  No, maybe not for certain.  There!  Yes.  The Wood Thrush had returned, a male who bred here or one who hatched here last year.  One bird sang, then another, down the creek.  Soon, we hope, the females will arrive to nest.  I sighed in relief.  Safe for another season.  Hope springs eternal in the birder's heart.

"'Hope' is the thing with feathers --" [Emily Dickinson. "254."]

Late-breaking news!  My birder's heart still pounds with excitement at the April 27 announcement that during the past 14 months there have been several confirmed and documented sightings of an adult male Ivory-billed Woodpecker in a riparian preserve in eastern Arkansas.  The "Lord God bird" lives!  Perhaps we've been given another season or more with this magnificent species.  Next spring, when I hope to hear the Wood Thrush's e-o-lay fluting softly from the leaf cover along the creek, I'll rejoice again for thrushes all and for the survival against all hope of the "ghost bird" of the southern bottomland forest.  [Here depicted are early images of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker from a 1935 expedition in Louisiana.]

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Suggested reading:

Christopher Cokinos. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. 2000.

Jerome A. Jackson.  In Search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. 2004.

Greg Lewbart. Ivory Hunters: A Novel of Extinction. 1996.

Scott Weidensaul. The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species. 2002.

_____. Living on the Wing: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds. 1999.
 

                                                                                                 --Karen Baldwin

[Thanks to Karen Baldwin for contributing this guest feature to The Common Reader in place of "From the Chair."  The Chair's column will return in December.]