Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.-- Chinese Proverb
I am going to tell a story.
As I was leaving a dairy farm in the rural community of Springport, Michigan after a photo shoot, I noticed along the side of the road in a pasture a couple of newly-born Angus beef calves laying down in the grass with their mothers grazing contentedly along side them. It was a beautiful spring day and I was enjoying the slow ride down the gravel road from the farm, windows down smelling the freshness of the air. I thought it looked like an idyllic shot, so I stopped along the quiet road, whipped the camera from the case and started to capture the scene as viewed from my passenger side window.
Then my attention was taken over by not the sight but the sound that came into the driver’s side window. It was a bird song, one that just made my brain cloud and try to find a focus of what it was it was hearing. A sound I had not heard in quite some time, I was sure. It was a vague recollection of something in the past that meant something. I lowered the camera and turned to the opposite side of the road and began to search for the vehicle causing this memory. The roadside I was peering into was an overgrown, viney stretch of thicket, brown with just a smattering of green emerging from the newly opening vine and tree buds.
Then movement, large movement, and again the song. I immediately recognized it among the branches, a brown thrasher. I felt warm all over, flooded with a feeling of peacefulness that I had not experienced yet during this day.
How could this happen? This feeling?
While I was thinking this, I raised the camera and got a few quick shots of the brown thrasher, hoping that he would present me with a decent pose in the tangled mess he was singing from. He did allow a few photos and continued to entertain me with his singing, just a few yards from me.
The song the thrasher sang transported me back to a time when I lived across a dirt road from an Osage orange tree fence row. Spring mornings I would take my coffee on the front steps of my house and breathe in the silence that only nature can provide. It is a silence that is not quiet, but is a cacophony of birds singing, frogs creaking and gentle trembling newly-budded leaves quaking in the breeze. Every year, a brown thrasher, would take up his place in that fence row and sing and sing and sing with a voice so loud and a song so variant that it is very difficult to describe.
It just plain made me happy. Happy then, as it did now. And for that feeling, at that moment, sitting in my Jeep along a country road, I thank that bird and the memory it stirred of all those songs those many springs ago.
Share a favorite bird story...we all have at least one. I could tell you the one about the flock of starlings and the motorcycle...
Listen to the song of the brown thrasher at these 2 sites below. They don't do justice, heard on a computer, so try to find an old hedgerow in the country, the thicker the better, and listen for the loud call and song that may be coming from it. You may hear it for real, against a natural backdrop, if you are lucky.
http://www.nps.gov/miss/naturescience/upload/BTHRA.mp3
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brown_Thrasher/id
I am going to tell a story.
As I was leaving a dairy farm in the rural community of Springport, Michigan after a photo shoot, I noticed along the side of the road in a pasture a couple of newly-born Angus beef calves laying down in the grass with their mothers grazing contentedly along side them. It was a beautiful spring day and I was enjoying the slow ride down the gravel road from the farm, windows down smelling the freshness of the air. I thought it looked like an idyllic shot, so I stopped along the quiet road, whipped the camera from the case and started to capture the scene as viewed from my passenger side window.
Then my attention was taken over by not the sight but the sound that came into the driver’s side window. It was a bird song, one that just made my brain cloud and try to find a focus of what it was it was hearing. A sound I had not heard in quite some time, I was sure. It was a vague recollection of something in the past that meant something. I lowered the camera and turned to the opposite side of the road and began to search for the vehicle causing this memory. The roadside I was peering into was an overgrown, viney stretch of thicket, brown with just a smattering of green emerging from the newly opening vine and tree buds.
Then movement, large movement, and again the song. I immediately recognized it among the branches, a brown thrasher. I felt warm all over, flooded with a feeling of peacefulness that I had not experienced yet during this day.
How could this happen? This feeling?
While I was thinking this, I raised the camera and got a few quick shots of the brown thrasher, hoping that he would present me with a decent pose in the tangled mess he was singing from. He did allow a few photos and continued to entertain me with his singing, just a few yards from me.
The song the thrasher sang transported me back to a time when I lived across a dirt road from an Osage orange tree fence row. Spring mornings I would take my coffee on the front steps of my house and breathe in the silence that only nature can provide. It is a silence that is not quiet, but is a cacophony of birds singing, frogs creaking and gentle trembling newly-budded leaves quaking in the breeze. Every year, a brown thrasher, would take up his place in that fence row and sing and sing and sing with a voice so loud and a song so variant that it is very difficult to describe.
It just plain made me happy. Happy then, as it did now. And for that feeling, at that moment, sitting in my Jeep along a country road, I thank that bird and the memory it stirred of all those songs those many springs ago.
Share a favorite bird story...we all have at least one. I could tell you the one about the flock of starlings and the motorcycle...
Listen to the song of the brown thrasher at these 2 sites below. They don't do justice, heard on a computer, so try to find an old hedgerow in the country, the thicker the better, and listen for the loud call and song that may be coming from it. You may hear it for real, against a natural backdrop, if you are lucky.
http://www.nps.gov/miss/naturescience/upload/BTHRA.mp3
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brown_Thrasher/id
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2 comments:
This is a great "Bird Story" we loved it,and to see the bird thru your photo is great. Thanks for putting in the song of the thrasher,I guess Ive never seen or heard one,Dad cant hear birds songs now but Im sure as a kid as much time as he spent in the fields and marshes he heard and saw them.It is so nice you enjoy nature and the sounds of it.Love Mom and Dad
It still amazes me that even as I get older there still seems to be so many things that I haven't seen and are new to me. Pilated woodpeckers, white-throated sparrows and brown thrashers are all a few birds that are new to me but were surrounding me all along. I just didn't hear and see them then, and I look and listen for them now.
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