What's with All the Birds?

         I am not what you would call a serious birder: I don’t travel to spot rare species for my life list, nor buy fancy equipment to maximize my ability to find them; I don’t participate in birding tours or hang out in blinds or have a membership in the Audubon Society or partake of any of the other activities in which serious birders feed their obsession.  And yet nevertheless, I apparently have a bit of a bird obsession!  How do I know?  How about the fact that so many of my block prints feature birds?  At my rough count I’ve done at least 30 block prints with birds as the main subject, plus another 10+ featuring mythical or fantasy birds, plus another 5+ in which birds appear as part of a larger scene.  Or how about the fact that so many of my poems feature birds?  At a rough count I have about 15 published poems that mention birds (some more centrally than others), and of my poems that are currently in rotation being sent out on submission, I count 9 out of about 16.  So what’s with all the birds?

        For me birds just seem utterly magical.  There are the beautiful, intricate, colorful feathers, sometimes sleek, sometimes fluffy, sometimes iridescent, always amazing.  There are the diverse songs and calls, ranging from beautiful liquid musical passages, to cheerful twitterings, to haunting evocative cries, to the ability to mimic every other sort of sound from creaky hinges to human speech, always amazing.  There are the nests and the eggs, always amazing; the behaviors that combine familiarity with otherness, always amazing.  And then, of course, there’s flight, which seems like a metaphor or embodiment of joy, always amazing.  I’ve written a little more about this in my prior post F is for Forgotten How to Fly (featuring a poem that I didn’t even include in my count above, because even though it’s about flight, it never actually mentions birds).

        I’m far from the only person to be fascinated with birds and especially with the magic of their flight.  From Daedalus to daVinci and beyond, people have dreamed of the ability to fly like birds.  (A poem about Daedalus is one of those currently out on submission - also not actually counted among my bird poems, because it’s people flying, not birds, however bird-inspired.)  Plenty of other artists and authors have also taken inspiration from birds.  Back in May I wrote my monthly Poet Laureate column about bird poems.  Here’s what I shared:

        "A robin is nesting on an arbor in my yard this year, and although I don’t want to spend too much time snooping lest I disturb her, it gives me joy to know she’s there.  What is it about poets and birds?  Perhaps we feel a particular kinship with birds: their song, their flight, their beauty, their strangeness… They seem like metaphors for everything from Hope (Emily Dickinson) to Despair (Edgar Allan Poe).  Poems about birds keep coming up: one of three poems shared at last year’s Juneteenth commemoration was all about a bird, three of the four winter gift poems given out at the library in December featured birds, and I keep finding birds in my own poems.  (In 2020 another robin nested right outside my door, and the poem inspired by that appears in my book Bittersweetness & Light.  Or you can read another of my poems with a bird theme here.)

        Just to get you started on bird poems, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats is one of the most famous, although its style is not very accessible nowadays.  In “The Windhover” Gerard Manley Hopkins lets raw emotion overwhelm mere grammar.  Wallace Stevens finds “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” while Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” is as simple as a thunderbolt.  Mary Oliver comes back to birds over and over, and Bashō wrote this famous haiku (as translated by Daniel C. Buchanan):

     Hark to that cuckoo,

     Singing, singing while flying,

     How very busy!

        Do you know any poems about birds?  Or perhaps you could try writing a bird-inspired poem yourself.  What is it that strikes you the most about the many birds that share the world with us?  From wild turkeys to chickadees, hawks, geese, and of course those robins, how about hatching a little bit of poetry this spring?"

        Of course it’s not spring any more, but I stick with my encouragement above to try writing a poem inspired by birds – or of course if visual art is more your thing, that’s excellent, too!

[Pictures:  Birds of a Feather, rubber block print with watercolor by AEGNydam, 2023 (originals sold out);

Chickadee, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Nectar, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (one left, see it at NydamPrints.com);

Carolina Wren, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Tufted Titmouse, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Pelican, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (at NydamPrints.com).]