Sherry Chandler

“The fence post is the meadowlark”

Verlyn Klinkenborg, in today’s NYTimes, muses thusly:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the volume the birds around us occupy. I don’t mean the vast migratory territories they mark out over the course of a year. I mean the spatial dimensions of their ordinary lives among us. This is a thought that has been working away in my head for a long time, ever since I saw a red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail and realized that the bird and the wetland in which the cattail was rooted were nearly synonymous.

“Habitat” sounds awfully general. It turns out to mean not some willful choice — the kind a human would make deciding to live in Dallas rather than in Denver — but a profound correlation. The marsh is who the red-winged blackbird is. The fence post is the meadowlark.

When I first began to notice birds, I thought of them as autonomous creatures whose habitations were simply unconnected matters of fact — as though the pictures of the birds in my bird book could somehow fly free of the pages themselves. But recognizing what you see means, first of all, taking account of where you see it. It becomes clear, sooner or later, that we live in a world of infinitely overlapping and abutting habitats — and that we are one of the rare creatures that are unbound, except in the broadest sense, by place and vocation. It takes an act of will on our part to remember how profoundly, and how beautifully, bound to habitat all the other creatures around us really are.

On Friday evening, my son and I strolled down the farm lane, chatting, and I was sipping my glass of Australian merlot. Suddenly from the alfalfa on our right, three young turkeys flushed up, followed in an eye blink by an adult bird I took to be their mother. And then, as we were marvelling that the adult turkey soared up and over the mature wild cherries in our little woods and, I assume, into the next predator-free hay field, a fourth youngster took off. We had been oblivious to them in the high alfalfa but they were taking no chances. Who knew a full-grown turkey could fly so high?

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