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Chickadees and nuthatches swirl in small chattering flocks in the first light, to drink dew from the cups of leaves. Birds are gifted, as Henry Beston wrote, "with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
BirdNote®
Chickadees at Dawn
Written by Todd Peterson
This is BirdNote!
The birds are mostly silent now, the need long past to warn off interlopers to their domains or attract a mate with their arias of spring. The days are often bright and warm. The sun turns untended grasses golden, their ripe seed-heads nodding in the dry wind. Water is scarce. Where do birds drink?
Walk through the meadow to the orchard at sunrise. Spray the leaves of an apple tree with water. All of a sudden, chickadees and nuthatches swirl in small chattering flocks in the first light, to drink from the cups of leaves. [Calls of Red-breasted Nuthatch and Black-capped Chickadee]
Dawn sparkles through diamonds of light created by the water. The birds fill the tree with an intense and fleeting animation. Theirs is an unguarded freedom. They have no systems of protection or relief from the vicissitudes of life.
But they have an exquisite responsiveness to what the natural world—and sometimes we—provide. [Black-capped Chickadee calls throughout quotation] They live by reading the world in ways we cannot, gifted as Henry Beston wrote, “with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
For BirdNote, I’m Frank Corrado.
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Quotation by Henry Beston, from The Outermost House, 1928
Call of the Red-breasted Nuthatch and Black-capped Chickadee provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Red-breasted Nuthatch recorded by G.A. Keller, Black-capped Chickadee by R.S. Little.
Ambient sounds recorded by C. Peterson
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org August 2012 Narrator: Frank Corrado
ID#081505BCCHKPLU BCCH-03-FCr
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