Birdsong by Lauren Scharhag

My mother hung a bird feeder 

from the white sugarplum tree.

Now they would come year-round,

even after they’d eaten all its fruit,

robin and tufted titmouse, 

crow and mourning dove, 

woodpecker, noisy blue jay.

It’s mostly the males who sing, though some, 

like the Carolina wren, sing duets. 

In some species, they achieve such harmony,

that two voices become one. 

How they are able to coordinate such virtuoso performances 

is a mystery to man.

Birds collided with the garden window. 

I remember the first time we noticed,

a sound like stones pinging off the glass 

where they struck, beak-first. 

We found them stunned on the grass beneath,

toes-up, trying to understand how their beloved air 

could have failed them. 

Some birds are born with their songs, 

some learn them in the nest,

while still others mimic—

other species, cats, frogs, even car alarms, 

auditory magpies hoarding sonic treasures. 

Mockingbirds know up to 200 songs,

brown thrashers, 2,000. 

In a tenth of a second, cardinals can sweep 

through more notes than there are piano keys, 

and birds of the Bay Area speak with a different accent

than their relatives in Virginia or Colorado.

We painted the window with soap, 

smeared peanut butter on pinecones.

When the snows came, how they gorged themselves, 

sparrows with their feathers fluffed, 

swollen to the size of softballs.

Syrinx, from the Greek, meaning “shepherd’s pipe,”

for the shape of so many songbirds’ vocal apparatus,

though the Greeks couldn’t have guessed at the variety: 

tubes, trees, Popoids, ridged, curved, forked, 

each branch individually controlled, 

respiratory switch-hitters, 

able to sing both rising and falling notes at the same time. 

We kept the birdbaths filled, and in flood season,

we wept over the hatchlings, worm-pink, eyes unopened, 

washed from their nests.

We buried them in backyard graves sprinkled with violets.  

It’s hard, with our limited range of breath and tone, 

to believe that something so tiny can produce such sound,

until you hear the chorus from their sheltering places.

It’s hard, in the depths of February, 

to believe that spring has not forsaken us,

and Vivaldi can only suggest a goldfinch,

and Prokofiev’s oboe makes for a poor duck.

It’s no wonder the first-ever radio broadcast featured a nightingale, 

or that we offered the universe birdsong on the Voyager Golden Record.

Since the Nixon era, almost 3 billion birds 

have vanished from North America, 

forests, grasslands, powerlines, 

our backyards growing quieter, billions of songs lost, 

unsung.

It’s thought that birds vocalize for practical purposes, 

for mates and territory, 

but it just might be for the fun of it. 

We bell the cat, cut the plastic rings from soda cans,

plant seed-bearing daisies and marigolds, viburnum and aster, 

inviting the hollow-boned music-of-the-spheres conveyors, 

and we don’t actually know why it is they sing at dawn. 

Some say it’s because the mornings are so still, so dry and cool, 

their songs to carry better, 

and some say it’s so the male birds can display their full-throated vigor, 

or, for the already mated, 

to signal that they’ve made it through another night, 

Don’t worry, darling, I am still here. I have survived. 

Another day, another tune, another flight.

 

Lauren Scharhag is the author of fourteen books, including Requiem for a Robot Dog (Cajun Mutt Press) and Languages, First and Last (Cyberwit Press). Her work has appeared in over 100 literary venues around the world. Recent honors include the Seamus Burns Creative Writing Prize, two Best of the Net nominations, and acceptance into the 2021 Antarctic Poetry Exhibition. She lives in Kansas City, MO. To learn more about her work, visit: www.laurenscharhag.blogspot.com