Serenades

This time of year we sometimes see chevrons of geese honking across the sky--not always going south. And then there are the flocks of swallows which gather over our rivers, swooping and diving. Great flocks of starlings and other birds swirl across the sky like lofted scarves. Then there are the trees we pass where a bazaar of twittering and fluttering busy among the branches. Later on, the crows will congregate and caw.

But where is bird song? I hadn't missed it until, time after time in Scotland, I heard songbirds warbling in the hedges and trees. There were calls and caws as well, but it was the songs, made by one or several invisible birds of (I think) various species, that took me. I recorded five segments of song on my phone while I was over there, and continued the habit of recording song even when I went to Walden on Friday and heard repetitive clucking and cheeping up on the hillside above the water. Those were bird sounds, yes, but not varied in pitch and cadence like those of the Scottish birds.

Listening to these recordings again as I write this, I am touched once more. These aren't purchased sound loops but fresh song flowing out from thickets as I walked by, stopped at. I remember of this one, the brightness of the sun; of that, the pre-dawn airport; of another, the view of the Clyde and Rothesay in the distance. But it's the songs that reach out to my heart. I'm no good at attributing challenge or joy or other message to these songs; I hear them simply as music produced on the spot by songbirds I never saw.

Singers, why are you not here serenading us whose ears are thirsty for relief from brutish traffic sounds, plane roars, copter wappings. It lifts my spirits just listening to you. The winter is coming; the news is bad; I'm not getting younger. Your songs may not be for us but just listening in is plenty, is abundance, in fact.