BONUS EPISODE: Words in Flight

Bird note presents.

One of the first books, Pieces of Literature, any way that I read as a child, was this book

by an author named Fred Bodsworth called The Last of the Curloos.

And it was this beautiful story about the last of a bird that's now extinct, the Eskimo

Curloos.

And I remember reading that book and then I saw an ABC after school special that like

set me on fire, right, because I was, I was like, oh wow, this bird is gone.

And in my mind, though I was like, maybe it's not gone, maybe it's there, but you know,

as the writer had written this story from the point of view of a bird, it's like he had

become this bird in a way.

And so I went on to read other writers that were writing about nature, sometimes writing

specifically about birds.

And that was sort of the genesis for me that maybe while I was still in the egg, somewhat

that was singing to me in a way that said, okay, when you hatch, you get to write about

birds yourself.

From bird note, this is Words in Flight, a celebration of contemporary poetry about

birds.

I'm Mark Bramhill.

There's something about writers and birds.

Take Emily Dickinson's Hope is the Thing with Feathers.

Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven or John Keats owed to a nightingale.

I mean, Shakespeare's works mentioned birds more than 600 times.

There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, it is not to come.

This hour we'll hear selections from episodes of Bird Note Daily and Bring Birds Back.

They feature poets sharing what birds mean to them and what they teach us about ourselves

and our world.

Poetry has a reputation for being inaccessible or hard to understand, but just like with

birds, you don't need to be an expert to find joy and delight.

We started with Ornithologist, Naturalist and Writer, Dr. J. Drew Lannam.

When you hatch, you get to write about birds yourself.

Who did eventually get to write about birds himself?

Although it took him a while to get there.

I wasn't doing what I loved to do.

I was doing what others thought I should do.

And part of the way that I stayed alive during that period of time that I was living by

expectation was to write little bits and pieces about birds, but really more thinking about

the writing and reading it.

And so then, when I finally hatched into my own and enough confidence to say, no, I'm

not doing what you want me to do, I'm going to do what I love to do.

I started writing about birds.

Sometimes Drew was writing Ornithology research papers, other times, versus about connecting

with the birds around him.

Like in his poem, Sparrow Envy.

Were I the Sparrow, brown-backed, skittish and small, I would find Haven in Thorniest

Thickets, search far and wide for fields, laneed fallow, treasure the unkempt, worship the

unmoan, covet the weed strewn row.

I would slink between sedges, chip unseen from brambles, skulk deep within hedges and

desire the ditches grown wild.

I would find great joy in the mist sod and morning, sing humble pleas from the highest

weeds and plead for the great days to stay.

Sparrows are often written off as just little brown birds because of how common they are,

but Drew is hardly the only poet to be inspired by them.

In her poem, Sparrow, what did you say?

Former US poet laureate, Italy Mone, works through a major life decision, while listening

to a white crown Sparrow from her porch.

I wrote this poem when my husband and I were trying to have a child and maybe contemplating

stopping fertility treatments.

So I was in this moment of my life where I was like, well, maybe it's time to release

this idea and what would that feel like?

And so this poem kind of deals with that duality of different possible futures.

Sparrow, what did you say?

A whole day without speaking rain, then sun, then rain again.

A few plants in the ground, newbie leaves tucked in black soil, and I think I'm good

at this, this being alone in the world, the watching of things growing, this older me,

the she uncomfortable shoes and no time for dishes, the she who spent an hour trying

to figure out that the bird with the three note descending call is just a Sparrow.

What I do with a kid here, teacher to plant, watch her like I do the lettuce leaves tenderly,

place her palms in the earth, part her black hair like planting a seed, or what I selfishly

demand this day back, a full untethered day trying to figure out what bird was calling

to me, and why?

Figuring out it was a Sparrow was just hilarious to me because I kept thinking, what is that

beautiful sound?

And it was just a Sparrow, not that a Sparrow should be just a Sparrow, but you know,

and it was that kind of, wow, I just probably spent an hour doing that, and that's not something

you could do if you had a toddler, perhaps if you had a child at all, I don't know.

I'm happily child free, and it was the right decision for us, but I do think that poem

was me letting go in some ways of that idea of maybe having a kid in my life, and also

the idea of holding on to what it is to be a child free person and to have a sort of

freedom as an artist to play in the world.

And I think it was an afternoon when of course I thought the work I was doing was trying

to identify a bird, but the work I was doing was deeply deciding on whether or not I wanted

to be a mother.

Ada has loved birds all her life, and this was not the first time she'd turned to them

for comfort.

When she moved to Kentucky for her husband's work, she struggled to adjust to her new home.

One of the ways that I get to know any place and get connected and to feel grounded and,

you know, feel like I'm not just swimming out into the universe, not knowing where I am,

is to name birds and plants and trees, and I was sort of doing that work, and just sort

of, you know, just naming what kind of trees that, what, you know, that's this and this.

And in her research on the local plants and animals, Ada looked up the state bird of

Kentucky.

It's the Northern Cardinal, and the idea of a state bird resonated with her and inspired

this poem.

State bird, confession, I did not want to live here.

Not among the golden rod, wild onions, or the drop seed, not waste high in the barrel-aged

brown corn water, not with the million dollar racehorses, nor the tightly wound round

hay bales, not even in the old tobacco wastation we live in, with its heavy metal-safe doors

that frame our bricked bedroom like the mouth of a strange beast, yawning to suck us

in each night like air.

I denied it, this new land, but love, I'll concede this, whatever state you are, I'll

be that state's bird, the loud, obvious blur of song, people point to when they wonder

where it is you've gone.

I'd kept thinking of me being the poet of the state bird being the one who makes the

song, so I thought while he's working on his business, my business will be to make

music and to sing, so that's where that poem came from.

Ada would go on to be named the first Latina U.S. poet laureate.

Even if you don't know much about birds, you might be aware of how, for some species,

when males are trying to attract a mate, they do these elaborate dances and songs.

Their rituals can be beautiful and complex, and sometimes birds seem to understand courtship

better than humans.

Years ago, poet Danika Kelly was trying to figure out how to date when she saw a nature

documentary about a bower bird.

When it comes to jewels, blue is undoubtedly his favorite.

Male satin bower birds will gather all the blue items they can find, build a beautiful

structure called a bower, and do a dance to try and woo the females.

And this caught her attention.

And so I turned to the birds, because they're much smarter than I am, they have systems

in place.

And I thought there might be some comfort in having a system of my own.

I just wish there was a dance I could do, and then a woman could just be like, yes,

no.

And I would be like, okay, great.

It would just be clear.

But that's not really how that works.

And this inspired a series of poems, reflecting on the bower bird and this idea of courtship.

Bower.

Here are the bower bird and his obsession of blue.

And then the island light, the acacia, the grounded beasts.

Here the iron smell of blood, the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone.

And there, the bower bird.

Watch as he manicures his lawn, puts in all places a bit of blue, a turning leaf.

And then how the female finds him, lacking, all that blue for nothing.

The second one shares the same title.

The sequencing sort of allows the poem to build it in a different kind of way or resonate

in a different kind of way.

And it's driven a little bit more by sound, like the repetition of the O sounds groomed

ground, his wooing place.

And I think that movement into sound helps me sort of then figure out, oh, is this

what I'm interested in?

It provides that sort of bridge between the originary experience of watching the documentary.

And then why I feel compelled to spend time with this bird and with this image.

Bower.

The bower bird finds a blue eye to line his nest, his groomed ground, his wooing place.

The blue eye does break and weep when the bower bird leaves or brings leaves or branches

or bits of simple blue string.

The blue eye does look and look and flinch at the open beak, the narrow maw, the trauma

of being dug deeper into the arched and closing bower.

The bower bird has lost his sense of blue, his sense of eye, but the string tangles beautifully

on his dark, clean grounds.

And with a third and final part of this sequence, the speaker of the poem talks to us directly

to address the idea of wooing a partner and how it can feel foreign, so she has a different

species.

I think one of the things that the speaker knows is that she is not a bower bird and

there's this sense of resignation, like who will listen to the song of a nut-brown

hen, right, like that's not who does the singing, that's not who does the wooing.

Bower.

A small hat, the fedora, gray blue-banded tweed, sits a top and unkempt nest, my unpicked

hair, a brimiliad in the canopy.

This is a failure.

This ill-fitted hat, these boy things, these men things, this hurried disrobing, my ash

and body and untrimmed nails, but who will listen to the song of a nut-brown hen?

In case you're worried, Denika did eventually untangle the mysteries of courtship.

She married writer Melissa Fibos in 2021.

In most of the poems we've shared so far, the birds are relatively literal, but often birds

are used more abstractly as an image or metaphor.

Like in this poem by Tracy Brimhall, about a nightjar, a kind of small bird that's most

active at dusk and dawn, the bird is more allegorical about the end of a relationship.

Obad with a broken neck.

The first night you don't come home, summer rains shake the clemitis.

I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabega and eat it rough with dirt.

The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar.

In her panic she sings in his mouth.

He gives me her pain like a gift and I take it.

I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let

her go until I get into the house.

I read the auspices.

The way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost.

How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches.

You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her

body a dart, her body the arrow of longing aimed as all desperate things are to crash,

not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it.

The poem is an obod, a lyric form of poetry that one lover would sing to another before

they had depart in the morning.

Traditionally, this type of poem was simple and romantic.

So Romeo and Juliet fighting over whether it's a lark or a nightingale is really a debate

over whether or not he's got a roll out of bed and climb out the window or if he can stay

and snuggle for a few more minutes.

But in this poem, the parting is very different.

There's something else going wrong in the relationship and that's why the relationship's

going to be over.

So instead of a sweet love poem where the parting is just the fault of the sun,

there's something else darker happening with it.

Many poets write about birds in a romantic style,

exalting nature as this pristine thing, separate from people.

But Brimhall's work has a level of intimacy, a more everyday and immediate view of nature.

Fledgling.

I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries in the garden,

ripened ovaries reddening their mouths.

You take down the hanging basket and show it to our sun.

A nest, secret as a heart, throbbing between flowers.

Look, but don't touch, you instruct our sun,

who has already begun to reach for the black globes of a new bird's eyes,

wanting to touch the world.

To know it.

Disappointed, you say, common housefinch,

as if even banal miracles aren't still pink and blind and heaving with life.

When the cat your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful.

I'd never seen a man grieve like that for an animal.

I held you like a victory, embarrassed and relieved that this was how you loved,

to the bone of you, to the meat, and we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy

so we risk it, we do.

Every day we take down the basket and prove it to our sun.

Just look at its rawness, its tenderness, it's almost flying.

In Fledgling, there's a real celebration of the every day of banal miracles as Tracy puts it.

The problem with miracles is most of them are so common that we forget to notice.

So something even like childbirth.

Everybody's like, oh, it's such a miracle.

I was like, are you kidding?

That was bloody and painful and gross.

But it is miraculous.

I think we forget what a miracle is,

or that it can be all of these things at once.

It can be so extraordinary and sublime and also common and also maybe messy.

But I think we forget the miraculous has many qualities.

After the break, we'll hear poets inspired by the incredible abilities and behaviors of birds.

On Words & Flight, from Bird Note.

Welcome back to Words & Flight, from Bird Note.

I'm Mark Bramhill.

Birds can so easily inspire wonder in us.

Maybe it's learning about a surprising ability or behavior,

a meaningful encounter with a bird or just the sheer beauty of a species.

And few people notice and hold on to this feeling of wonder, better than poets.

A jibboi poet Hyde E. Erdrich has loved birds since she was a little girl.

Her family loves to tell her first bird story.

I was just a little toddler and my mom let me go up wander in the yard and I came running

back in, she said my eyes were just big and I looked terrified and she said go outside and play

and I said no, there are chickadees fighting with English sparrows out there.

So I always knew the particular birds in their names because my family were people who loved

birds and paid a lot of attention. My dad was the one who began keeping track of the birds,

making lists, talking about birds that he'd hope he'd encounter,

coming home from supposedly deer hunting with a bird report instead.

Erdrich grew especially fond of the little birds.

The red poles, the kinglets, the indigo buntings, but not just the small ones.

We all were really obsessed with the big woodpeckers because they're just so dramatic

and we were lucky enough to live where there have always been piliated woodpeckers.

Like just now when I sat down and I heard a piliated out there, you know normally

I would have jumped up to go to a window to try and get a look at it.

One of her poems is about another kind of dramatic woodpecker, the northern flicker.

The birds have tan bodies with black dots and blazoned on their chests and they have either red

or yellow feathers on the underside of their wings and tail feathers.

The yellow-shabbed flicker lives in the eastern US, the red-shabbed in the west.

But in parts of the Great Plains, the ranges overlap and both colors can be found

and that is where Erdrich grew up.

I have friends from the tribe in California and when I went to go visit them,

I saw that they used the feathers for various artworks and so forth

and Erdrich remarked on how they only had red flicker feathers

and offered to send some yellow feathers back from the Midwest.

So I went to go try to find some feathers for my friend

and I just had to go a little south of where I grew up and my memory was correct.

There were both colors there.

Flickers.

Abandoned town on the border.

I wait in tedious drilling noise.

Flickers.

My sister birds try a whole grub full and greedy.

They ignore me.

Fine, I say, just fine.

One of those birds ever waited for me.

What's in that hole for me?

It is hot while I stalk flickers for feathers.

Red and yellow shafts, I mean to collect for prayer fans.

Hen body, they would plummet so easily.

It's a pity they act so disappointed in love.

They make their mates sob, sad wet notes that move them to nest in dead wood.

I watch my gaze still hot.

Their wings burn right past me.

One eyes me, the sun in a crushing black rock.

She blots me bone dry, sends me dreaming.

Through a red and yellow thirst, this prayer they will teach me.

I don't think people notice them that much.

They just think it's a woodpecker, they don't notice.

But I think they're fancy.

They always look like they were wearing medals to me like they'd been given an award.

Many people don't notice birds.

They're just something in the background,

until you purposefully tune in.

For a lot of people, the lockdowns early in the COVID-19 pandemic

became a moment of tuning in, sparking lots more interest in birds.

And poet Susan Nguyen was one of those people.

I was home all the time as many of us were, and my neighbor gave me their extra

hummingbird feeder, and we kind of had a competition just to see like,

out which one are they going to go to.

Susan took to naming some of her regulars, like Clementine and Jelly Belly.

And watching these birds brought a kind of peace.

It was a little bit of magic happening every day outside my window during a time.

I think that was pretty difficult.

As Susan began researching her new feathered friends,

she learned how much these birds defy our expectations.

Like for almost two centuries, scientists believe that hummingbird's tongues

works through capillary action.

But in 2015, they found out like they've been wrong this entire time.

Their tongues do not work like a straw.

It works differently, and I just thought that I thought that was incredible that

we went that long just assuming like, yeah, of course, that's how their tongues work, you know,

and then someone actually observed them.

Like just set up a camera and were like, this is not what I'm seeing, right?

And it was so much more recent.

Learning about these tiny glittering marvels wound up inspiring a poem.

In praise of a hummingbird's tongue,

so long it coils around their small skulls, a forked miracle that traps nectar,

collects it in the beak and forces it to the back of the throat.

That's where the hum begins, flicks in and out and again.

Something about surface tension, how a dead hummingbird's tongue and nectar will drink repeatedly.

A flock of live hummingbirds is a bouquet of white bellies humming.

Something about how hard it is to stay still, be an absence of sound.

I name each bird as they float at my feeder, a glittering of green,

the way they ban their tail feathers, the way they dive on each other through the notes

of their body's hum, so small a marvel.

But back to the tongue, back of the throat, anything but the absence of miracle.

In her book, Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungee writes about themes of nature and becoming a mother.

The title is an ecological term about how ecosystems go through far-reaching changes

with the removal or introduction of a top trophy predator.

In the titular poem of the book, Camille writes about this phenomenon with the reintroduction

of gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park, how their presence had an incredible cascade

of positive effects on the ecosystem. And she draws a parallel to her introduction to motherhood.

In this book, there are many ways in which I'm thinking of that

trophy creature, that top predator who's been introduced into my life is my daughter.

There are other poems in this book that talk about the loss of elders as well.

And I think that we experience this very frequently when

people are introduced into our lives and removed from it, everything in our landscape shifts and changes.

Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone, and, as anticipated,

their calling of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt of the mid-century.

In their upreach, songbirds nested, who scattered seed for underbrush,

and in that cover, warrant snow shoe hair.

Weasel and water shrew returned, also vol, and came soon hawk and falcon, bald eagle and

kestrel, and with them hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade and kestrel shade haunted

newly buried runnels, where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious as they were now

of being surprised by wolves.

Berries brought bear, while undergrowth and willows growing now right down to the river

brought beavers, who dam. Muscrats came to the dams and tadpoles, came to the night song

of the fathers of tadpoles.

With water striters, the dark gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools of the river,

and fish stayed, and the bear who fished also called deer fawns and to their kill scraps came

vulture and coyote, long gone in the region until now, and their scattered seed, and more trees

brush and berries grew up along the river that had run straight and so flooded.

But thus damned, compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun.

Don't you tell me this is not the same as my story.

All this life, born from one hungry animal, this whole new landscape, the course of the river

changed. I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself. This time, a mother.

After which, nothing was ever the same.

Sometimes just looking at birds can be inspiring. Their shapes, colors, movement,

like for poet Joyce Clement. She writes Haiku, a traditional Japanese form of poetry.

Often thought of as having three lines with five, seven, five syllables.

English Haiku's don't always follow this pattern. Joyce thinks of the form like this.

It is one breath palm usually consists of two parts of fragment and phrase, and those two parts

are juxtaposed to next to each other and form a type of relationship.

Haiku have many common traits. They're often about nature, about a moment in time, or reference

a season. In this sequence of Haiku, Joyce juxtaposes punctuation marks with images of birds,

drawing on their similar appearances as well as meaning and function.

Listen for how these work together and birds punctuate the days.

Apostrophe, the nut hatch inserts itself between feeder and pole.

Semicolon, two mallards drifting, one dunks for a snail.

Ellipsis, a morning dove, lifts off.

Asterisk, a red-eyed virio catches the crane fly mid-air.

Kama, a down feather bobs between waves, exclamation point.

Renn on the railing takes notice.

Collin,

Merkanzer's paddle toward, warning trouts world.

M-dash,

at dusk, a wild goose, heading east.

Question mark, the length of silence after a loons call.

Period, one blue egg, all summer long, now gone.

In each Haiku in the sequence, you can see the different kinds of relationships between bird

and punctuation. Joyce was initially inspired by the down feather, bobbing in the water.

It's shaped like a Kama, moving in arcs with a repetitive list-like quality to its motion.

Or in the Haiku about the loon.

It's all about asking questions. You've got a question mark, and then that silence

that it talks about creates a question, you know, will there be a response?

It fosters a sense of loneliness, which, you know, the loons call often evokes, right?

When we come back, we'll hear how poets write about traveling and migration,

on words and flight from bird now.

Welcome back to words in flight from bird note. I'm Mark Bramhill.

Maybe it's obvious by now that many of the metaphors we use in writing about birds

involve moving from place to place. Migration is something all birders pay attention to.

At certain times of the year, some birds will leave, others will arrive,

but human migration isn't always as easy to understand.

Poet Sean Hill has moved around many times in his life, between Georgia,

California, Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and now to Montana.

While getting to know his new home in the treasure state,

Sean went up to Mount Helena for a hike.

When I saw the western manager flew by, it was this beautiful flash. I was like, okay,

that's a good omen, good auspice. I think I'm going to be okay in this place.

Around the same time, Sean went to a reading for a book about Rose Gordon,

a black woman born in Montana in the late 19th century.

There's a lot of black folk who moved here more than you might think in the 19th century.

And raised families and stayed for generations.

And this person in the audience was like, why Montana?

Why did these people come here?

So, part of it was like, why do people move places?

The western manager, or why Montana?

Our wanderings, the same as migrations, I came to Montana for love,

which sometimes is how we know our destinations.

The western manager flies here for procreation when the snow goes wet, puddles, runs,

and takes to far wandering.

Is this the same as migration?

A life is the sum of grand and modest perigrenations.

Communities bloom at the meeting of opportunity and ambition,

and can be a way to know our destinations.

A fire engine redhead cooling to orange to a sunny yellow body with those charcoal wings.

The male western manager flashes conflagration, or an eastern autumn in flight.

One familiar greeted me after we both arrived, letting me know our wanderings weren't the same.

Is a migration?

In a stand of ponderoses where a blanket of snow waved for decades or longer,

the dendrologist says, these trees moved up from what's Mexico, as that quiet water pulled back,

a different migration, moving seed by seed north generationally migrating to where they had been,

and where they could live, never asking how do we know our destination?

Why Montana?

One among my interrogations, both public and private, like how big is a home?

Are wanderings the same as migrations?

And how do I know my destinations?

If you noticed a lot of repetition in this poem, that's because it's what's known as a villainel.

It's a poetic form, like a sonnet or a limbric, but rather than simply having a rhyme scheme,

a villainel also has two lines alternately repeated throughout the poem.

In why Montana, you have...

Are wanderings the same as migrations?

And how do we know our destinations?

But journeys don't always go as planned.

Sometimes we find ourselves where we didn't mean to be,

like the lost soul that poet Timothy Steele saw in an airport.

I saw this little warbler that had found its way into the airport and didn't seem able to find

its way out.

You know, I thought things were a little upside down in the situation that I was able to fly off

without the benefit of wings and it was trying to migrate north.

In the Memphis Airport,

above the concourse from a beam, a little warbler pours forth song.

Beneath him, hurried human stream, some draw-wheeled suitcases along,

or from a beeping belt or purse, apply a cell phone to an ear.

Some pause at banks of monitors where times and gates for flights appear.

Although by nature flight endowed, he seems too gentle to reproach these souls who soon will

climb through cloud in first class, business class, and coach.

He may feel that it's his mistake he's here, but someone ought to bring a net to catch and help

him make his own connections north to spring.

He cheapes and trills on, swift and sweet, though no one outside hears his strains.

There, telescopic tunnels greet the cheeks of their arriving planes.

A ground crew welcomes and assists luggage that skycaps,

treating bags like careful ornithologists,

banded with destination tags.

Plains aren't the only way people get around.

In the U.S., we're mostly traveling by road.

Poet Claire Wamenholm's work focuses on nature and the environment.

So, when she was at the Ragdale Writers' Residency, north of Chicago,

it's no surprise she spent a lot of time exploring the outdoors.

Which is a beautiful residency.

The buildings back up onto like 50 acres or so of prairie and wetlands, I think it

adjoins to nature preserves, the Skokie River runs through it,

and walking is like a big part of my poetic practice and so every day I was taking these long kind

of rambles through this like beautiful nature area. And as she walked around, Claire was listening

for birds, but there was something else she was hearing as well.

I was like, what's that?

Know it? Is it like really windy? What does that sound?

And I was like, oh, it's the highway.

There's like this beautiful, beautiful nature area and there's a highway right behind it.

Hideways are something I generally tune out because I like I live in an urban area.

Industry is kind of my ambient soundtrack,

but when you're trying deliberately to hear something else, you really notice it.

And I was like, oh my gosh, like, it's always there.

Claire's experience inspired this poem.

You can always hear the highway.

Beneath the eastern Phoebe, it hums alongside the Hermit Thrush and Indigo bunting.

It is almost like a river, but it is not a river. It is not outrunnable.

There are moments when the marsh runs die down and the highway fills them like the blood in your

ears. There are no real lulls. You could call the highway a zipper because of the way it

buzzes above the ruby crown to kinglet and the willow fly catcher.

You could call it a drone or a moan. I have never heard a vesper sparrow or a dark-eyed junco.

A chickadee is hatching crisply from its egg. A gray catbird is ripping a millipede from the meadow,

but how would you know? The highway's sound is like a strong wind or like a heavy curtain being

dragged along the ground. It is louder than the alarm call of any bird, louder than the noise

of barn swallow-makes when it is being eaten. I may never hear a brown thrasher, a pine warbler,

a rose-breasted grow-speak, a common yellow throat.

There are 160,955 miles of highway in America.

Birds

Birds are facing so many threats and challenges. And yet, poets still continue to find hope in these

creatures. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, hope is the thing with feathers.

Poets have always found joy and inspiration from birds, and that's still true today,

like in Camille T. Dunge's poem, Clearing, where up Lujay gives her a new perspective.

Clearing

All night, the wind blows, and my mind? My mind is like the hawthorne that loses limbs.

They litter the ground, crush the black-eyed Susan, scatter buds over rows of lettuce,

bean sprouts, whose greens are clusters of worry in raised beds.

Blown leaves and crack limbs threaten our foundation. Water backs up in gutters,

seeps into the house's walls. But my mind, my mind is not in the house.

In the yard's far corner, the eye of my mind rests on a hawthorne branch, shaken,

snapping, hectic, then still. The day dawns without anger.

The blue-jay I looked for pushes sky off his crest. House blended his wings and tail.

It's not so much that before this he'd hidden himself. It's only he favored a roost I could not see

until the storm thinned the tree.

For some poets, like Craig Santos Perez, writing about birds can be a source of hope.

Growing up, his relationship with birds was somewhat abstract.

Perez is Chamorro and grew up on the island of Guam. By the time of his childhood in the 80s and 90s,

most of our native birds had either gone extinct or were taken into captivity by zookeepers to

keep them safe from the invasive brown tree snake which had come to Guam a few decades earlier

and colonized the entire island and taken over the ecology. And so sadly growing up when I would

go into the jungle and to the forest, it was very silent place. I didn't hear any of the native

birds. So early memories of the birds, you know, it was basically learning about them in school,

learn their Latin English and Chamorro names, which is our native language. We would learn about

their characteristics, their feather colors, their patterns. And we would even do some projects in

school where we would build fake nest or color in pictures of the birds. And it was kind of,

you know, memorial kind of way because they were either no longer wild or no longer even in existence.

Later in his life, Craig moved to Hawaii and he saw so many parallels between Hawaii and Guam.

You know, not only in terms of colonial and military history, but also of course the

the environmental history Hawaii struggles with invasive species as well. Just like Guam,

many of its native birds are either endangered or extinct. Hawaii has the unfortunate distinction

of being the extinction capital of the world where two thirds of their native bird species

have gone extinct. And beyond that being a heart wrenching fact, it also was complicated for Craig

as a dad. My eldest daughter really loves birds and, you know, she was born and raised in Hawaii.

So I wanted to write a poem kind of bringing together my concerns as a father, as a environmentalist.

For me, poetry has always been a space of catharsis and healing and a kind of sight where I can

reckon with a lot of the devastations of the world around us whether it's related to colonialism

and my home island or climate change and bird extinction. And so I tried to come to the page with

the openness and vulnerability and the willingness to just feel all the feelings and find the words

that will kind of help me to just articulate those emotions and express them in a way that

gives me, you know, a feeling of hope but also of course of memorial and kind of a way to

honor and to utilize what we've lost. Here is the poem that came from that.

The Last Safe Habitat.

I don't want our daughter to know that Hawaii is the bird extinction capital of the world.

I don't want her to walk around the island feeling haunted by tree roots buried under concrete.

I don't want her to fear the invasive predators who slither,

pounce, bite, swallow, disease and multiply. I don't want her to see paintings and photographs of

birds she'll never witness in the wild. I don't want her to imagine their bones in dark museum

drawers. I don't want her to hear bird song recordings on the internet. I don't want her to memorize

and recite the names of 77 lost species and subspecies. I don't want her to draw a timeline

with the years each was first collected and last sighted. I don't want her to learn about the

Kawaii O-O who was observed atop a flowering oheat tree calling for a mate, day after day, season after

season. He didn't know he was the last of his kind or maybe he did and that's why one day he

disappeared forever into a nest of avian silence. I don't want our daughter to calculate how many

miles of fencing is needed to protect the endangered birds that remain. I don't want her to realize

the most serious causes of extinction can't be fenced out. I want to convince her that extinction

is not the end. I want to convince her that extinction is just a migration to the last safe

habitat on earth. I want to convince her that our winged relatives have arrived safely to their

destination, a wondrous island with a climate we can never change and a rainforest fertile with seeds

and sun.

I remember writing this poem and you can probably hear my voice that I became very emotional while

writing it just thinking about the island and the feature that my daughter will inherit and of course

most children you know they have a very beautiful and kind of wondrous sense of awe to the natural

world and especially towards animals and I want to her to hold on to that before she has to kind

of reckon with the facts of the world we live in today and so for me this is kind of a poem about

a father who doesn't want his daughter to learn the truth about the world just yet.

Craig's daughter is still young and hasn't heard the poem but he hopes that for her and for others

it might also bring a sense of hope and possibility. Having this kind of fantasy idea of this

last safe habitat using that wondrous magical space to inspire activism and conservation in the

present knowing that we can never create that magical space but we can at least kind of return to

the beauty of the ecology that once was maybe if she can imagine such a place maybe her generation

or future generations can actually create a planet that is safe for all species.

Many species like the Koei-e-o-o we can never bring back but for others there is a small chance.

Since Craig's encounter with the Kingfisher at the San Diego Zoo captive breeding programs have

had some limited success with the Kingfisher's there are about 150 alive today enough to keep

the species around though not to release them into the wild but the breeding program for Craig's

Elementary School mascot the Coco or Guam Rail has been much more successful.

The Coco is now the second bird in history to recover from being declared extinct in the wild

many of them have been released onto neighboring islands that are free of the brown tree snakes.

There are several hundred of those now released back into the wild and so that's you know very

hopeful news so an endangered bird obviously the population is still very vulnerable but most

zookeepers consider them to be self-sustaining at this point so that's really exciting.

We've spent the hour exploring why poets are so inspired by birds but there's still so much

more out there to read to witness to experience. We'll end this program the way we started with Dr.

J. Drew Lanham reading an excerpt from the title poem of his book joy is the justice we give ourselves.

Joy is the sunrise breaking through nights remains bright shown new on a shell racked

shore a fresh tide scrubbed world redeemed what was to is joy is on Wimbrill's wings the wedge

and fast flight wandering curloughs curved beaks cries stitching top of the world to bottom.

Joy is the soul stirred underneath the journey gaze snagged on wonder not knowing final destination

blessed as a witness moored to ground worshipful tears dripping into grateful smile.

Joy is the silent spring unquiet Rachel's world not come to pass the season dripping

rightful of wood thrush song. Joy is all the black birds flock together too many to count

too many to name everyone different from the next swirling in singularity across amber purple sky.

Joy is being loved up close for who we are.

Joy is the last song drifting in as dark curtains fall the sparrows vesper offering whistle

laying down in pine-templed woods. Joy is the justice we give ourselves.

Words in flight is a production of bird mode. This program was written and produced by me

Mark Bramhill along with Joni Franklin and Laura Alice. Fact checking by Ariana Rennel.

Special thanks to Jazzy Johnson, Connor Geeran, Sam Johnson, Billy Almond, Josh Fisher,

and Kentucky Shakespeare. Birdnote is an independent nonprofit that relies on the generosity of

listeners like you. Learn more about our work and listen to our other programs about birds at birdnote.org.