Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that's been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it's a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska.
The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls.
This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.
And hear the pleasant cockoo, loud and long - The simple bird that thinks two notes a song.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?
I can recognize the calls of practically every bird in North America. There are some in Africa I don't know, though.
Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.
Lord, I do fear Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year My soul is all but out of me-let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Amid thy desert-walks the lapwing flies, And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
The older I get, the more I think birds are the best musicians on the planet.
What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.
I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.
All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.
The significant owl hoots in the night.
Whenever I heard the song of a bird and the answering call of its mate, I could visualize the notes in scale, all built up within my consciousness as a natural symphony.
