Way up there tiny warbler sings a whole sky full

PLACES OF CALM

From my morning perch before the beloved woodstove I take calm delight in the blizzard out there, all that blurry air roiling across the mountainside the way mountainsides make blizzards do, and wailing around the house the way houses make blizzards do.

Out in the deeps of the storm I observe that despite the wild roil, even the smaller birds now and then fly hellforleather through the blinding tempest in search of the odd seed or berry (bold red berries are a bright help in winter, as I see from the diminishing supply on our many nanten bushes around the house). And when, after winging across the white whirls of the open stretches, the flying featherbundles reach our tall hedge of evergreen kinmokusei trees they swoop beneath the lowest branches and swerve upward into the inner recesses as into cathedrals of calm, where they can sit and be out of the wind and the snow for a time, shiver off the rime, plan their next move across the maelstrom to wherever a stock of food might be, plot their next path through the storm.

After watching the first couple of birds do that this morning, I imagined swooping with the next few, up from out of the howl into the calm perches that the inner unleafed portions of the smooth kinmokusei branches so generously provide, perhaps for just this use by just these birds! Who knows what forms of natural "friendship" abide out there in the deeps of the real world, how far these homely allegiances go, and where they integrate like two hands clasping. Or how far back in time they reach, how they began to be-- seems as much like an interweaving of wild wisdom as a mosaic of chance that worked out well.

Plant and bird have been carrying on this way for far longer than the flash we call history, the birds over eons perhaps carrying seeds, or paying a small toll in fertilizer for the privilege of stopping to rest during the times of hardship both forms of life have ever gone through together, and there in the hearts of the trees the birds can enjoy the quiet that abides in a plant, in exchange for the motion that abides in a bird; plants seem to appreciate rhythms of all kinds-- they dance in the wind, as I observe from my cathedral of calm, up here at the fire in the heart of the storm...

It must be that in all storms there are places of calm to be found, havens in which to pause and renew, from which to prepare for advance, that in all paths of life there are ancient sanctuaries where the traveler can stop to rest, where there is calm, where there is no pain; for that is how we ourselves survive the storms of living, stage by stage, how we nourish an entire life before moving on to the next discovery.

SCIENCE AND THE HEART

Since the strawberry events of a few days ago as related in my previous post, whenever I'm out in the garden now, every once in a while an irritated brown-eared bulbul - a skittish, reclusive bird that normally doesn't talk much at all, and then always from a place unseen in the screen of the trees - flies low through the garden screeching a new call that sounds to my gloating ears a lot like "Strawberry thief! Strawberry thief!" I'm sure the previously mentioned animal scientists would rotfltao at this idea, though they should really get back to work, but the redder, sweeter and juicier MY strawberries get, the more the bulbuls come right out and yell whatever it is right toward me, one wing pointing at the strawberries.

There are, let us admit it, countless places where science cannot go...

BREAKFAST

Moving along the mossy slope that's covered with fallen oak and beech leaves, Mr. Thrush bounces quietly from there to there, pointed beak deftly flicking the leaves and twigs left and right to find what's for breakfast-- he's an expert at this subtle art! Flick--flick--flick he forges along, now and then pausing to listen... or snap up some sudden delicacy on the priceless menu...

He never knows what he's going to get when he sets out for his morning repast at the forest edge right outside my bedroom window, where upon rising I saw him only when he moved, there among all the leaves the night wind had gathered into a broad carpet of shelter for local insect life.

When in the pale brown gradations of his ethnic dress the landlord of the moment stops to listen for any tastinesses that might be rustling softly beneath the leaves, he becomes a leaf himself, disappears from sight by simply standing still - watching eyes are misdirected by the flicked leaves - but then he moves, my eyes do a thing that eyes learned at the dawn of light and there he is, step taken, head cocked, listening for breakfast, driven by a winter night's hunger...

Think I'll go rustle up some grub too...

THUNDERSTORMS

Thunderstorms rise up in distant jeweled towers all around the far shores of the the striated rose and gray Lake, all quiet on this shore but for the insect song, the high chatter of swallows bathing in the last of the sun, flashing the white of their underwings, bursting now and then into clouds of aerodynamics... The rising columns of clouds insist into the sky, like insect song into silence, like clouds of wings into empty air-- they are each and every moment's thought of the earth, working things out, balancing all, earth and sky negotiating like sea does with shore, like birds do with air, like we do with our employers-- wait,,,,what??

From the archives, April 2002:

SWALLOWS

Every Spring, with no deeds or Japanese bureaucratic permits at all, the swallows build their nests above the doorways of houses and shops in the village, and homeowners and shopkeepers in a very pleasant spirit of community tenderness create ingeniously ad hoc structures of newspapers, magazines, plastic bags and bits of wood, cardboard, string and tape to catch the droppings, keep their doorsteps and wares clean, and soon the nests, just above head level, are home to eggs, and not long after come the tiny cheeps from bright yellow bigmouth beaks poking over the nest sides, when people-neighbors gather beneath for oohs and ahhs that lead to chats about the goings on in their own nests; and the adult swallows, of evenings after whirling the curlicues of their airy calligraphy of catching insects to feed the swelling brood, and soon having been put out of tiny house and home by the size of the kids, sit near their nests on a convenient awning rod or a telephone wire, soft little featherbundles calm even though within easy reach of shoppers and homeowners passing by beneath, and severely tempting kids to grab for them but the kids always find the wherewithal within themselves not to, for the tiny birds mean so much more where they are, sitting up there so proudly in their fine white ties and tails, about them a confidence and majesty that simply cannot be treated lightly, they are grace in every aspect; even male teenagers, who in the itchy clutch of hormonal chaos are tempted to scare the tiny creatures very satisfyingly into flight, nevertheless never do, the swallows in return for such restraint giving the teenagers the priceless life lesson that grace, not size, is what really matters, and so the neighborhood kids are educated by the swallows in essential regards, then one morning the adult birds take their own gawky teenagers to a nearby overhead wire, where the grownups sit like the people-parents in the park, taking what ease they can at last while cheerily prompting the kids to fidget and whir, whiffle their wings, learn to leap and flap and dive and climb and back and again and again, swooping over and over like people-kids on swings and sliding boards all day, until finally one evening the fledglings too are soaring through the summer sunsets, feeding themselves for autumn, and so the flocks both bird and folk are winged from day to day and year to year, and every village neighborhood is lifted to heights that once known are not forgotten, even in the swallow-empty airs of winter.

THE BIRDS

There are a lot of interesting birds around here. I don't mean interesting species, but interesting birds. Individuals. Real characters. Some of them are complete mysteries. When you live where this great a variety of birds actually do their thing, you get to see that they have character, for example the manic warbler, and the crazy bird I’ve never spotted that shouts "What the hell?" over and over at every Spring sunrise, then there's Dr. Crow of course, couldn't go without mentioning mister dark wisdom himself, much referenced in these ethereal pages-- or the hawks, the swallows, the pheasant in lust or the ducks in love--

For recent example - this afternoon in fact - there's a certain bird, the screaming blur that hangs around here and is highly secretive about his true identity (I suspect it may be a brown-eared bulbul, but I've never spotted him in well-lit stillness), he blends in so well with the gray lower branches of the cedars where he mainly seems to hang out cloaked in the darkling invisibility he prefers, all in perfect keeping with his gothic mood, because although he's very territorial, he's also extremely paranoid at all times of year (which for a bird is really extreme), so whenever I go outside in this leafless time and that bird is within 50 yards of the house he spots my sinister movement and screams "Look out everybirdy! The monster just came out of that unnatural structure there and it's coming for us, it's moving this way with giant claws, it has two legs but no feathers! Fly for your lives! FLYY! FLYYYY! FLYYYYY!" And he keeps that racket up until everybirdy within 100 yards has flown to safety in fear of their lives, he himself taking off at the last minute, still screaming for all he's worth, leaving behind only a dancing branch just before I can grab him with my long giant claws and devour him whole. Interesting bird. Don't really know him; just a gray blur streaking off screaming into the dusk of the trees.

Then there are the frantic tiny feeders who come by once or twice a year in large numbers and scour every inch of every tree for insects and whatever they can find in the way of avian fast food. Some weeks ago Echo put up a pretty realistic sort of 3D sticker butterfly high up on the big glass doors by the weeping cherry for when the grandgirls came over the holidays, and when a few days ago those birds arrived to scour the tree, every five minutes during bird-party time one of them would spot the delectable butterfly hovering right there midair in delicious stillness (talk about out-of-season but who cares, it's like caviar in NYC) and dive for it before any other bird could get it, hit the glass BONG!, flutter stunned to the deck below and stand there wobbly for a few minutes looking up, trying to figure out the meaning of glass and what the hell was that butterfly, then it would fly back to the tree and give another of its fellows a crack at the inviting delicacy.

This went on for a goodly time (Bong! Bong!) until a couple dozen birds had gone for the big bright snack and hit the deck, by which time I suspect some of them were sitting there in the cherry tree chuckling to each other, chirping "Psst: There goes Harry: Look: He spotted the 'butterfly.' Go for it, Harry, Grab that baby! Go get it, Harry, it's all yours! HA HA HAA!"

There's also the thrush that collided once with our big kitchen windowpane, and no thrush ever since has done so.

Like I said, when you get to be really neighbors with them, not watchers or hunters or simply-passing-byers and whatnot, bird personalities can be pretty surprising, anthropomorphically speaking. No doubt just as surprising as I am to them, aviomorphically speaking.

Mountain sunset -
birds move down the wire
remain in light

Wheatear on the wire
hunkered into heavy mist
singing anyway

CROW REMEMBERS

Hurricane now gone by, trailing a heavily clouded sky. The big wind was called Man-yi or number 4, depending on whether it was Korean or Japanese - they both claimed it, had different predictions for the big windy spiral, neither of which panned out - the Korean weatherpeople expected it to plow up the center of their peninsula, the Japanese ditto expected it to roil its way up the center of their archipelago, posing a serious wind and rain threat to every major city, indeed, every village and house in the country, but they didn't give regular updates on tv as one in a focused world would expect.

Surf the tv channels urgently for the latest and all you got was it the usual celebrities cooking and eating, the usual celebrities in silly quizzes and the usual celebrities in hot tubs, they just carried on with the the always startling vacuousness of regular programming - such as that is - in the hours after warning the nation of imminent weather disaster. Which approach would have been disastrous had the hurricane performed as the weatherpeople predicted-- there would have been no time to batten down, evacuate, whatever; just thank the big wind (the weather-p as wrong as they so often are), that it pivoted slightly at a crucial point and just broadshouldered its way along the side of the country, with pretty strong winds and heavy rain...

Yesterday afternoon, after the rain had stopped, out in the stormedge, the sky was empty of life except for a crow, of all birds. As I watched him way up there quietly doing his thing, it came to me that back in the way-ancient days, when the animals made their early tradeoffs, the crows traded aerodynamic skills for the kind of lowdown savvy that enabled them to survive yet be lazy, a quality that over the eons of crow-cunning evolution has led to the uniquely non-aerodynamics that crows exhibit today, such as understanding the nature of trash bags and the potential value of shiny objects. But apparently they've never forgotten what they gave up in exchange, as I saw in the sky.

You know how crows have always flown since the big tradeoff, all wingknuckles, gawk and bentfeathers when it comes to serious aerodynamics, outflown and pestered all the time even by sparrows. Well that crow was recalling what joys his kind had once embodied, he was ecstatic at being able to fly so fast, even moreso that the hurricane was doing all the work. He wasn't about to go sit down in a safe tree like every other bird, including the hawks-- he kept gawkily climbing, spreading those big black wings and speed-spiraling in wide circles alone, now and then gliding straight then diving swiftly even as a hawk: he was remembering the ancient but alien feeling of speed and elegance, wanted to do so for as long as it lasted.

I kept expecting maybe a YIHAAA! or corvine equivalent, but being savvy he wasn't reckless. He was silent with a kindred to the concentration one summons in zen archery, after a target unknown but remembered, a black bundle of nostalgia in a darkening sky.

As for me watching - and you too, I hope - may we so savor own hurricanes...

BIRDWORDS

For the barnswallow family (Mom, Dad and the two post-nestlings), the becalmed evening sky isn't offering much in the way of soaring insect snacks, so the four spend the time preening. For the parents, that means routine elegance of motion; for the gawky newbies, who don't yet know how to do a professional job at the beak-through-feathers thing, it's an awkward business. And they really need some preening: from here it looks like they still have a lot of poky kidfeathers.

Then when that's all done to respective satisfactions, from their darkling perch atop the wire the four whir down and scour my plum and weeping cherry trees, their wing flutters and bouncy bustling rustling up small insects from the leaves and twigs as they venture in along the branches toward the trunks, looking for gourmet caterpillars along the way, chattering as they go, about all sorts of important things. I wish I had a barnswallow dictionary.

First snow - one by one
nanten berries turn
into hungry birds

WINGING IT

On the weekend I was standing by the kitchen sink pondering a cherrywood-shelf-installing approach when I heard a thud and looked up to see a thrush jump up and down at the large window over the sink. With what mind I had free at the time I wondered why the bird was so excited, and what it was trying to tell me, then I realized it had been some time since I had conversed with the birds or they with me, so somewhat more of my mind left off shelfness to ponder this, and I realized like a sun rising that the bird had flown into the window, thinking it a way through to the other window across the living room, so I rushed outside and saw the soft brown bird lying there in the throes of shock, and picked him up (so very light!), brought him inside (I know it was a 'he' because he was wearing a suit and tie) and put him on a newspaper in front of the fire to be warm, as is the way for shock (not the newspaper but the warmth), and he just lay there gasping less and less and less--then he began flapping a bit and looking around, which told me his neck wasn't broken and made me think he might have a better chance if he wasn't handled too much (what a greater shock it must be to be laying there after a shock like that and watch your giant featherless enemy come slowly toward you and pick you up when you have never even been close to one of these creatures, let alone been touched, even more let alone held, by one before!). So while it was still light I put him outside on the deck, where he stood into the darkness, and in the morning there was a bird hopping perkily around the garden wearing exactly the same suit and tie.

BIRD GOSSIP

Oh how wondrous are three-day weekends and no matter the brevity of your list, you never get it all done, because there's always a bigger list operative: the cosmic list, that stands waiting immutably for you when in the eagerness of all innocence you walk out the door to begin work on your own personolocal and much less relevant list, such as cutting firewood or caulking a wall, or some such rationally immediate objective. So although I did get a few of my own items done, there were just enough cosmic perturbations going to skew my aim a bit and have the Monday sun set as I was halfway done planting the beans I'd planned to plant since Friday.

But epiphanies abounded: Sunday morning when I awoke I heard a tiny, delicate ruckus going on in the dawn outside my window; looking out I could see nothing but some chestnut tree limbs and a few late leaves in sunshine, all very nice, until on closer examination with hastily de-bleared eyes I saw that the tree was festooned with tiny bark-and-sunlight colored long-tailed tits, like delicate christmas tree ornaments bouncing around, who in their formal wear went hopping from branch to branch pecking at tiny bugs and such, the tree no doubt liking it very much, I could almost hear it say "Yes...YES! Right--there--aaahhh!" over and over again as the suitably dressed and chittering mob passed through on a long and leisurely mountainside breakfast over an extended bit of bird gossip.

ROMEO

At the edge of the field across the road the flashy male pheasant struts back and forth, back and forth obsessively, hypnotically almost, giving it all he's got in front of a newly adult pheasant hen who keeps trying to get away but is cut off expertly at every turn by this relentless wolf in rainbow feathers, this honey-voiced charmer.

The little hen, demure and dull by contrast, is new to the game and not quite sure why she merits all this attention as the feathery dude flaunts his perfect pompadour, drives by in his low rider, flexes his muscles, revs his engine, shows his tattoos, lays rubber with his drag racer, stretches his tight t-shirt, croons a hit tune with some air guitar, opens the inviting door to his chopped and channeled hot rod as he drives by slowly, hangin out the window, and then for a moment he himself is entranced by the very sheerness of his unequaled talent and irresistably staggering handsomeness...

The hen, taking advantage of this lull in the intensity, scoots off into the bush and disappears, when all at once The King hits the reality brakes, acts as if nothing has happened, tosses his feathers back as if he hasn't just been turned down cold by the cutest chick in town...

DR. CROW

He wears black all the time, has big feet and a nose five times the size of his brain, but don't let that fool you. With eyes like shoe buttons he is one sharp cookie, knows his business, tends it like a miser, watches it like a hawk. Has a raucous laugh, talks to himself a lot, has few acquaintances and none he can really trust, because he knows they're just like him. He walks with a swagger and is very nervous around houses, which people unpredictably pop out of just as he's about to pull off a heist. A member of the avian underworld, godfather of these parts, he is known to me as Dr. Crow.

Sunday evening, as I was enjoying a beer out on the deck, the cattle egrets were settling in to their usual roost in the small grove of trees across the paddies, maybe a dozen of the elegant birds, so graceful in their flight, but so ungainly when settling into trees for the night, that it takes time for them to get everything just the way they want it, the elegant are often thus fussy, and there was a good deal of commotion and bustle and tipsy-testing and rearrangement and moving and changing and what not; finally they got settled in, when all of a sudden they burst from the trees in a cloud of white, and swirled around screaming in cattle egret "What in heaven?!" "Oh my goodness!!"and "Dear me!!"

Right at the acme of where they'd all been, suddenly appearing in all his blackness, was Dr. Crow, who had dive-bombed the egrets from the other side to scatter them, and now he stood there right on top of where they'd all just gotten flustered from, sticking his big beak out and going "HaaaH! HaaaH! HaaaH! HaaaH! " And they swirled around in the distant air saying "You nasty fellow!!", finally giving it up and winging off in search of a more refined neighborhood to roost.

Dr. Crow NEVER spends any time in those trees. He just didn't want to see any big elegant white birds settle in as though they owned the place, when in fact a smaller, floppy black bird owns it.
The land we have a human deed for, and upon which we built our house up here on the mountainside, is also owned by Dr. Crow, who oversees many of the primary aspects of the enterprise, watching over everything with a dark and careful eye to make sure that all is going corvinely. He accepts our late and ongoing presence for fees in kind, such as an entire row of bean shoots from our spring garden, or a really messy look in our garbage. He doesn't ask much. In fact he doesn't ask at all.

Crows don't really like each other, either; they may act like they do now and then, but you can see they don't in the blackness of their eyes, and in that floppy solo get-your-hand-off-my-shoulder kind of way they fly. Sure you might on occasion see crows in a cawcus of three or four or even more, but whenever possible they sit on separate telephone poles and talk long distance, which they prefer, that's why their voices are so loud, and why they're never very close to one another for long.