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Monday, June 13, 2022

For My Feathered Friends

 

Doves eating scattered seed
at the farm


While all the trilling birdsong , throat by throat,
sings the morning into waking, note by note,
bold robin red and mourning dove doth coo,
and I will share their skysong here with you.

In meadow fair and forest glen of green,
the songs of many can be heard, not seen.
Within the trees, the hidden wild birds live,
us grateful, for the melodies they give.

A scientist came to the living woods one day
to see what sounds the loggers took away,
set out his recorder, before and aft.
The loggers thought him daft; they laughed
and laughed.

Before the felling of the greenly trees,
enough song was heard to bring him to his knees.
But, sadly, truck after truck, day after day,
with the trees, all birdsong, too,
had flown away.

The feathered flocks, the doves and jays, are gone.
Where birdsong swelled, a silence now lives on.
How can we fit? Our actions don't belong.
How can we live, if we lose all the song?

How to bring back all we love so much, and soon,
when we are the ones so wholly out of tune?
Bring back, bring back, those stands of ancient pine.
Bring back the songs, those feathered friends
of mine.


In the Ted Talk, Voices of the Natural World by Bernie Krause, Bernie explains that "Every wild habitat produces its own unique soundscape," an ecology impacted by human activity and global warming. He recorded the amount of birdsong, before and after a logging company did selective logging, (not even clearcutting!) The logging company had promised no damage to the environment.

Bernie recorded a high level of birdsong before the cut, and nearly no birdsong at all even fifteen years after the logging had occurred. The recording caught a lonely woodpecker, and not much else. That is just one small meadow. Think of what is happening globally.

This chills me, that greed is running so insanely rampant, while endangering the survival of all species - including our own. We are a strange breed, the only ones who destroy our own habitat, (along with that of every other creature.)

For my prompt at earthweal: Earth's Wild Music - still continuing in spite of us, though diminished and, in places, drowned out by bombs.


8 comments:

  1. The wastes of our civilized life clearcut the choir whose nourishment we ignore and die for lack of ... or come to yearn too late. There's a great collection of birdsongs in Australia under the title ""Songs of Disappearance," 53 songs of Australian birds in threat of extinction. (Sample one here - https://youtu.be/Ta_eqF9qENw) It soared to #2 on the Australian music charts after it was released late last year -- perhaps that suggests the mood that voted for a government committed to the continent's environment ...

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  2. "what sounds the loggers took away" - how heartbreaking that we have to measure the loss of habitat by the intensity of birdsong... what on earth are we doing to the life around us!! This is just so sad. Thanks for writing this, Sherry.

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  3. if ever there was proof, here it is: misery loves company. miserable humanity, all cooped up in our dead-wood walls, apart from birdsong ~

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  4. I do hope it is not too late to bring back the things we love. I fear we will not miss them until it is too late. Your poem is a cautionary tale and will expressed.

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  5. This is a real warning that the landscape is changing. With the disappearing trees also goes the creatures that inhabit those very trees. I cannot imagine a world without trees or birdsong. Sigh...

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  6. A true song, a song of truth: May it be sung in coffee houses up and down the coast. That ted talk, oh my!

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  7. A world without birdsong would be frightening. In a bit of optimism, we have more birds than I ever remember in the city. They wake me at 4 am and continue all day. It's a bright spot in the world for me.

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