Nature Study

Mystery Bird

I woke this morning thinking of a birdsong, heard way back in July. Maybe it’s because I’ve read references to the warblers in two different books lately. Or maybe it’s because it was cold and windy today with light snow, and I went to a sunny, green place in my mind.

In any case, this is a warbler I heard in the Adirondacks. We were on the trail into Ferd’s Bog, a primeval place full of pitcher plants. I heard this incredibly complicated song in the same vicinity both going in and coming out. Though I aimed the camera at the treetops, I never did see the bird, and I still don’t know what it is. But oh, what a song.

Maybe it’s the Muse of Ferd’s Bog.

Recent reading on the mystique of the warblers:

Birds were dripping from the trees, little birds, singing and flying and pouring over the limbs.
“This must be the warbler migration,” I said, and I laughed because there were so many birds. I had never seen so many. My big voice rolled through the woods, and their little voices seemed to rise and answer me. (Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain)

At a distance these little birds usually look drab, and the species are hardly distinguishable, but the binoculars show them to be beautifully colored and marked, and wonderfully various in their kinds. There is always something deeply enticing and pleasing to me in the sight of them. Perhaps because I was only dimly aware of them for so long, I always see them at first with a certain unexpectedness, and with the sense of gratitude that one feels for any goodness unearned and almost missed. In their secretive worlds of treetop and undergrowth, they seem among the most remote of the wild creatures. They see little of us, and we see even less of them. I think of them as being aloof somehow from common life. Certain of the most beautiful of them, I am sure, have lived and died for generations in some of our woods without being recognized by a human being. (Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House”)

2 Comments

  • Barbara H.

    Sometimes I wonder at creatures that God made that people rarely see. Did He make them for His own pleasure and glory? I assume so. There is a line something about that in one of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy books, but I don’t remember which one or exactly how it goes. How sweet that He gives us a little glimpse from time to time.

  • bekahcubed

    What a delightful song!

    I love the bit in Wendell Berry’s quote: “I always see them at first with a certain unexpectedness, and with the sense of gratitude that one feels for any goodness unearned and almost missed.” It’s a little reminder for me to look a little closer, to let the unexpected emerge in gratitude instead of missing it in the bustle of getting from one place to another.