Farm Birds

Terry Tempest Williams wrote that "there are those birds you gauge your life by," and I have had a few.  I try not to begrudge any bird but admit to having problems with the English house sparrow.  Recent MSUM graduate Matt Pullen argues that when it comes to animals and birds, everyone creates their own hierarchies.  The birds that one person values, the next person could cheerfully blow off the face of the earth.  While I would love to have a nest of barn swallows on my house, a former colleague of mine power-washes the little mud cups off his house every season, cursing all the while.  Pullen says that it is "too easy to value one targeted species over another . . . When we listen to the story of the land, we tend to privilege the portion of the narrative that is most relevant to ourselves."

The work that goes into nest building is astounding.  The Killdeer lays its eggs on the ground.  She carefully chooses a site and sifts the earth so that the finest grains line the shallow scoop which cradles her earth-colored eggs.  Last summer a man who had a longstanding irritation with the "faker" bird that drags its wing along the ground to lure away would-be predators was heart-broken for her.  She laid her eggs in the corn field, and the farmer who leases the land plowed the nest under.  Had the spring been less damp, he would have been in the field earlier and she would have laid her eggs after he had done his work.  Undeterred, she busied herself to scooping out a new nest.  Those eggs were eaten by a large orange-striped Plains Garter Snake, a knock-out beauty amongst the more typical yellow-striped garter snakes.  The Killdeer had no nestlings last summer.

The woman who owns the farm enjoys the song birds, even the Barn Swallows that she calls comical, graceful, and sweet.  But she does not want them nesting in the garage or the shed, and certainly not on the window by the front door, when there are other places they could choose.  Last weekend we sat in the recess on the porch, and the swallows swooped in to survey the window frame.  The garage door was open, and they drifted up into the rafters to inspect those possibilities.  Down went the garage door and up went long streamers of brightly colored Christmas ribbon on the front window frame.  The breeze tosses the ribbons, and the swallows will look for a nest site with fewer distractions.

Last winter we said that we would clear out the swallow nests in the shed.  What happened to the one swallow we do not know, but there she still sat in the cold, a reminder of the tireless workers that birds are and the short, brief lives that are theirs on the farm.  I wrote about her in a piece that was accepted by a journal at the university, although the editors balked at the title.  "Flitting" is a word I re-learned from nineteenth century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.  While it suggests a type of quick flight movement from one place to another, it also suggests a change from one state or stage to another.  Often our mere impatience with species other than our own prevents us from acknowledging their toils and vanishings, from hearing the narratives relevant to them.  Of course, we humans construct their narratives, and, as I suggested in the previous blog entry, there is often potential danger in that act.

I reprint "The Flitting" here:

                 All summer the swallows careered over the fields, toiling to build nests in the barn, sculpting mud and grass from the slough into rude down-lined cups plastered onto the rafters, hurrying to raise inky-eyed, gape-mouthed, floppy-necked babies.  Now December snow races, wind-driven, between the wallboards in long fingers over the earth floor.  The barn smells crisply of familiar things: decaying mouse turds, rusty tools, flaking paint, crumbling rags on an old man’s workbench.  The swallows’ nests still cling, dry oyster half-shells glued to the rafters.  The birds have all gone into the great southern warmth, but one sits lingering here:  tiny and sunken and frail, wingtips folded over forked tail, like a messenger from a forgotten world.  Did she wait too long, heart stopping in the deepening cold?  Or did a germ take her in that patient attendance on new life from summer’s full ripening arc?  Are the eggs beneath her yet, arrested mid-blossom, calcified into a powdery silt clasped by the mild-clawed feet?  Winter’s ice-crystalled air eddies in the barn’s roof trusses, rippling the soft gray feathers that once glittered midnight blue.  The startlingly naked, dark-socketed skull is like a fine cameo or a dusky pearl wreathed by a circlet of downy neck fluff.

                Eyeless and uncomprehending, she seems as vulnerable as a lone figure midway across a harvested field on a cold moonless night.