I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO LEARN TO IDENTIFY BIRDS BY THEIR calls. You’d think this would be easy. I can pick up a tune quickly and, like it or not, remember it forever. Why else would Everly Brothers songs endlessly repeat in my mind? But bird songs just don’t seem to stick to me. Frank, for all his other virtues, couldn’t pick up a tune if it had a rope handle. But he can walk along a trail and call out the names of the birds by their songs. I don’t get it.
I can read the music of a flock of blackbirds on a five-strand barbed-wire fence. Any singer can do it. Take their little black bodies to be musical notes; take the wires to be a musical staff, the five horizontal lines and four spaces that represent musical pitch. The position of the birds, arrayed high or low on the lines, mark the melody. If you can read music, you can sing birds on a fence, although sometimes they line up one above another, and you need friends to help sing the chords. But this ability doesn’t help me much when what I want to do is remember which song which bird sings.
Just last week I was reading Rachel Carson, the environmental writer who changed history with her book Silent Spring. This is the book that sounded the alarm about the deadly effect of the pesticide DDT on songbirds. I imagine she called the book Silent Spring, rather than Colorless Spring, or Odorless Spring, or Tasteless Spring, or Spring You Cannot Feel, because it was the loss of the birds’ music that would grieve her the most. Her love for birdsong saturates her books. Hear how closely and fondly she listened:
And then there were the sounds of other, smaller birds—the rattling call of the kingfisher that perched, between forays after fish, on the posts of the dock; . . . the redstarts that foraged in the birches on the hill behind the cabin and forever, it seemed to me, asked each other the way to Wiscasset, for I could easily twist their syllables into the query, “Which is Wiscasset? Which is Wiscasset?”
My mother tried to teach me bird calls that way, translating their calls into words. Birds make surprising statements in English. American goldfinches say “Potato chip.” Barred owls ask “Who cooks for you?” My mother said that eastern towhees say “Drink your tea”—good British advice. But I understand that American ornithologists translate the same towhee call as “Hot dog. Pickle.” You’d think the ornithologists were hungry. But maybe they had other needs beyond food: The hermit thrush says “Why don’tcha come to me? Here I am right near you.” The solitary vireo calls “Come here Jimmy quickly.” But then we’re back to the presumed hunger of the MacGillivray’s warbler, “chip-chewy-chew.”
These mnemonics help. Somehow it’s easier for me to remember words, spelled out, than the slippery, wavering, vanishing calls. Then it’s just a matter of remembering who says what. You’ve got to love the birds who say their own names and get it over with. Killdeer. Chickadee. Cuckoo. Willett. Poorwill. Kittiwake.
Just yesterday, I learned the most wonderful thing about paying attention to birds. Searching through Rachel Carson’s papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, a writer named Maria Popova discovered a single sheet of stationery from the Portland Rose railroad company. At the top of the page, Rachel had written, in scrawling pencil notes, pee-a-wee—a wee. The page below was filled with rows of the strangest hieroglyphs. Short, shaped lines, each maybe half an inch, one after another: Down-up. Up-all the way down-up. Up-down. Down-up. Forward slash. Up-down-up. Down-up. Up-down with a little bend at the end. Down-up. One can imagine Rachel sitting on a log, jotting down her transcription of the song of the wood pewee. It made an intriguing pattern. How closely she must have listened. How joyfully she would have made the little marks, tracing the path of bird songs on the page. How deeply she must have wondered about the meaning of the marks she made.
I imagine she felt the same wonder listening to the wood pewees as she felt listening to sandpipers and oystercatchers at the edge of the ocean. “Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp,” Carson wrote in The Edge of the Sea. “What truth is expressed by the legions of [animals]?” I would like to know too. What are they saying to one another, and what would their mingled voices tell us if we listened?
Maybe it’s not so important to learn the names of the birds after all, I’m starting to think. Maybe it’s a mistake to put English words in their mouths. Maybe we don’t even need to know who’s saying what. Maybe we just need to listen.
“It is not half so important to know as to feel,” Rachel wrote. You don’t have to know the names of the plants and animals to nurture a sense of wonder. “Drink in the beauty, and think and wonder at the meaning of what you see.” And then Rachel told of her plan to take her nephew into the garden to look for the Fairy Bell Ringer.
She had heard a small ting in her garden some nights before, a ting in the midst of the cricket calls and owls. “It is exactly the sound that should come from a bell held in the hand of the tiniest elf,” she wrote, “inexpressibly clear and silvery, so faint, so barely-to-be-heard that you hold your breath as you bend closer to the green glades from which the fairy chirping comes.” She and the little boy took flashlights and crept through the damp grass, but they never found who rang the fairy bell. That would remain a mystery to wonder at.
Rachel hoped to write a book about wonder but had time in her abbreviated life only to write an article for the Woman’s Home Companion, “Help Your Child to Wonder.” HarperCollins later published it as a book called The Sense of Wonder. I love this book.
The Sense of Wonder begins on the Maine seacoast at night, in the rain, “just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see.” Of the sky, nothing is visible. Of the sea, only dimly seen white shapes. Carson and her little nephew laugh for pure joy, sharing the “spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.” Carson calls a sense of wonder an emotion, but the philosopher in me wants to use the old-fashioned word passion and its old-fashioned meaning—when, moved by some outside force, a person feels and responds. But what outside force, what feelings especially, what response?
Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul, René Descartes wrote. “When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we knew in the past or what we supposed it was going to be, this makes us wonder and be astonished at it.” Astonish, from the Latin tonus, thunder, to be struck as by lightning, the sudden flash that startles us and, just for a moment, lights the world with uncommon clarity, the honest awe that Christopher Sartwell calls “the shock of the real.”
The emotion that comes next could be delight, if a person is struck by the beauty of nature or the brilliance of its design. But what catches someone by surprise can take her into a darker place too, where she is clobbered by the sweeping wing of the deeply mysterious beyond the boundaries of human experience. Then wonder leads to “a sense of lonely distances,” Rachel admits, a sense of isolation from what is profoundly apart. Loneliness turns to yearning, love for something beautiful and mysterious and other.
Rachel compared wonder to a child’s view of the world, where everything is new, and the child is open to a surprise around every corner. The late rabbi Abraham Heschel called this seeing “radical amazement.”
Wonder is a state of mind in which . . . nothing is taken for granted. Each thing is a surprise, being is unbelievable. We are amazed at seeing anything at all; amazed . . . at the fact that there is being at all. . . . Amazed beyond words . . .
Souls that are focused and do not falter at first sight, falling back on words and ready-made notions with which the memory is replete, can behold the mountains as if they were gestures of exaltation. To them, all sight is suddenness.
It seems to me that if wonder is the capacity to see as if for the first time, then wonder has a moral purpose. It’s a lot like the moral purpose John Dewey found in art: “to do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive,” and “enter . . . into other forms of relationship and participation than our own.” That makes me think: Maybe that kind of attention is necessary for any moral relationship—the ability to set aside our own stories and recognize and sympathetically listen to the story told by someone else. If so, then a sense of wonder is the open eyes, the sympathetic imagination, the respectfully listening ears, seeking out the story told by nature’s rough wings and flitting wrens and, by that listening, entering into a moral relationship with the natural world.
That close relationship is a source of strength, healing, and renewal, Rachel believed. “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts,” she wrote. “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”
If I could, I would tell Rachel a story about our grandson and a red-winged blackbird. She would understand why the story means so much to me. For reasons I still don’t understand, the little boy was dejected on the day we hiked to a marsh in a bird refuge. He sat crooked and slumped on a rail fence, turning away from a red-winged blackbird that balanced on a cattail nearby. Okalee. This child is our whistling grandson, but he didn’t respond; maybe he didn’t even hear the call. Undaunted, the bird continued to sing, Okalee. Okalee? Finally, the boy lifted his head, as if he couldn’t help himself, and listened closely. Okalee, he whistled to the blackbird. Okalee, it whistled back. Okalee. Okalee. “I think that bird is answering me,” he said, and it surely seemed to be. Their confidences went on for a long, wondrous time.
Wonder is the opposite of boredom, indifference, or exhaustion. “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,” Rachel wrote, “I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
I think of “sterile preoccupations” and marvel that Carson could have so clearly foreseen our own time, sixty years away. The economic forces of our lives are centripetal, tending to spin us in smaller and smaller circles, creating a kind of solipsism that comes from separation from the natural world and our biocultural communities. It’s not that we humans aren’t natural creatures; it’s not that we don’t live always in the most intimate contact with the natural world that seeps in our pores and rushes through our blood. It’s that we sometimes lose track of that fact or deny it, and so shut ourselves off from a large part of our own humanity. When we measure our successes and failures against our own mean interests, they grow to grotesque proportions. Then, self-importance and self-absorption bloat and distort our lives and our relationships.
Meanwhile, Earth turns, birds fly north or south, fish rise or sink in the currents, the moon spills light on snow or sand, and we—do we think we turn the crank that spins the Earth? A good dose of wonder, a night of roaring waves, a faceful of stars, the kick in the pants of an infinite universe, the huge unknowing—these remind us that there is beauty we didn’t create. There is mystery we cannot fathom. There are interests that are not our own. There is time we cannot measure. When we live humbly in full awareness of the astonishing fact that we have any place at all in such a world, we live richer, deeper lives, more fully realizing our humanity.
And so a sense of wonder impels us to act respectfully in the world. There is meaning and significance in these products of time and rock and water, far beyond their usefulness to human purposes. The sweep of time and the operations of chance have created a world that leaves us delighted and dazed, struggling to understand the very fact of it, its colors, its squeaks and songs. It deserves respect, which is to say that a sense of wonder leads us to celebrate and honor the Earth.
Too, a sense of wonder shows us our own responsibilities to care for the objects of wonder—to do them no harm, to protect their thriving. Rachel: “Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.” To the extent that she’s right, wonder may be the keystone virtue in our time of reckless destruction, a source of decency and hope and restraint.
Lately, I’ve been studying the scream of the red-tailed hawk. So ferocious, so reckless, it has become to me “a symbol that stood for life itself,” as Rachel put it, “the delicate, destructive, yet incredibly vital force that somehow holds its place amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world . . .”
I am proud that I can distinguish the hawk’s screech from the Steller’s jay’s, which is a perversely spot-on imitation, so the last time I was out in our field with our grandsons, I quite confidently pointed into the oaks on the fence line and announced to one of the boys, “Hear that? That’s the red-tailed hawk.” He almost fell over laughing and pointed to his brother, who was blowing a sharp call through a blade of grass held tight between his thumbs. The laughing, screeching boys, the blade of grass, the red-tailed hawk, the Steller’s jay, Rachel’s redstarts and pewees—all of them call out with the same eagerness for life, all in their own languages, haunting and untranslatable. Maybe by listening to them with a wondering heart, we can, in Rachel’s words, “approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”
When the U.S. government chose the bald eagle as the national bird in 1782, the country held about 100,000 nesting birds. But almost two hundred years later, a combination of hunting, habitat loss, and poisoning by DDT had reduced the numbers to an estimated 487. After the United States outlawed hunting eagles and banned DDT, the eagles recovered to 9,789, about 10 percent of their original abundance. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service now recommends tripling the number of bald eagles that the electricity-generating industry can kill without penalty to 4,200 per year.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FWS.gov)