Escaping the prison house

The following is excerpted from Jerry Wilson’s “Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff,” published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press in 2008.

By Jerry Wilson

Having descended from dinosaurs, modern birds are timeless, yet they keep track of time. Should I ever complete my calendar of birds, it will be less accurate than calendars devised by ancient peoples, whose calculations were based on the faithful tilting of the Earth and the shifting of planets and stars. Bird habits, by contrast, vary with the season and the weather, and are increasingly affected by climate change. Yet the arrival and departure of most of our resident birds is predictable.

Among the first to mark his territory and call for a mate each spring is the cardinal, usually by March 20, the first day of calendar spring. Many cardinals migrate, but others winter here, so they are on location, ready to herald what they perhaps hope will be the first of spring in fact as well as fable. Brilliant red on a sunny morning, the male’s whistle, whistle, chirp, chirp, chirp from atop the tallest cottonwood begins well before mating time. It’s never too early to put yourself on the market, to display your charm for the ladies.

For years I have engaged in translating bird language to English. My efforts are inconclusive and incomplete, and likely, not all humans, let alone the birds, would agree with my translations. Yet the effort encourages me to truly listen to the tweets, whistles, screams and songs. I hear the call of the mate-seeking cardinal, for instance, as “pechur, pechur, whit, whit, whit, whit.” The first phrase may be repeated from one to four times, though two is common, and the second phrase I’ve heard repeated up to six times, though three or four is more likely.

Most summer residents arrive in March or April—between goose day, March 1, and brown thrasher day, May 1. Every day for two months, the Earth grows greener, the tree branches fuller, the air more charmed with song. But spring is not fulfilled until the brown thrashers come. I have so learned to count on their arrival by May Day that if they are two days late my nerves stand on edge. But they always come.

Every spring for a quarter century I taught an introductory literature class. When the first flowers bloomed, I told freshman students to take a hike. Mount Marty College in Yankton is built on the Missouri River bluff, so it was a short walk to a natural world. “Go to the bluff,” I told them. “Sit down in the grass, look around you, listen, breathe deeply and write about what you experience and observe.” After years as a recovering academic, I still cringe when I recall how many students observed “birds chirping in a tree.”

“What kind of birds?” I demanded to know. They often couldn’t say.

“What did they look like?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t get a good look.”

“Describe the song.”

“I don’t know. They chirped.”

“And the tree, what kind was it?

“I don’t know my trees.”

“Could you describe it, then?” And so on.

There are two problems here, and they are related. The first is the failure to really listen and look, to fully engage the senses, to gather details. The other problem is the lack of names to attach to what the observer sees. Our schools, and our society, do not place high priority, as did earlier generations of almost every culture, upon knowing the other creatures and life forms with which we share our scraps of planet. Every college freshman knows the TV stars, but most know few stars in the sky. Some are fans of the Cardinal or Blue Jay baseball teams, or in South Dakota, the Sioux Falls Canaries, and many may even recognize the common and easily identified birds for which sports teams are named, but that may be the extent of their knowledge of birds.

By the first of May, the day the brown thrasher returns to the North Forty, we had typically worked our way from William Shakespeare to Walt Whitman—to “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” Whitman’s wondrous poem about how as a boy he learned the mysteries of death and life from the sorrowful song of a mockingbird whose mate was lost.

The mockingbird is the best-known member of the Mimidae family, birds with the amazing capacity to mimic other songs they hear. South Dakota is northwest of the mockingbird’s usual range, and only once have I discovered them nesting on our land. But we sometimes have the mockingbird’s cousin, the catbird, and always, the brown thrasher. The thrasher sings a long repertoire of varied songs, and like the mockingbird, can mimic other birds. That is why no bird brings me greater joy than the thrasher. And as habitat grows more dense, the thrasher population expands; in 2006, five pairs nested on our piece of bluff.

The sleek, brown bird with a long, graceful tail prefers to nest in brushy places, of which we have many. Under the theory that a healthy habitat is one in which small animals from mice to rabbits can find refuge in less than 100 yards, I haven’t burned a pile of brush in 25 years. Because a good brush pile is the favorite home of our common cottontail rabbit, I call brush piles “rabbitat.” But in fact, brushy areas are shared by many creatures, including the thrasher.

Once a nest is built and the female settles down to the task of laying eggs, the male is never far away. He perches in rotation atop three or four nearby trees that define the territory of his mate’s nest, and sings unceasingly for as long as an hour at a time, dozens of songs and variations of songs in a seemingly random repertoire.

It is not surprising that South Dakota students were unfamiliar with the mocking bird, but most don’t know the brown thrasher either, our most accomplished singer. In a few happy springs, when I asked about the mockingbird’s song, and then about the brown thrasher, a face lighted up. But over the years I came to acknowledge with sadness that the college student who was familiar with our greatest vocalist was a rare bird indeed.

“Go to the woods on a warm May day,” I implored them. “Listen and wait. When you hear what sounds like a dozen songbirds in a single tree, each in succession singing his most beautiful song, you will have found a brown thrasher. Creep toward the tree, and perched on an uppermost branch you will find a brown, long-tailed bird, his beak opened toward the sky.”

The British romantic poet William Wordsworth saw the disconnect from nature coming with the growth of industrialization at the turn of the 19th century. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” he wrote. “Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy.” I do not wish to be condescending, or critical of my former students. They knew much about computers and television shows and sports and celebrities and their small towns and their academic specialties that I will never know. But what fact would I not trade for a brown thrasher’s song?

This excerpt is reprinted with permission of South Dakota State Historical Society Press.

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