Personifying birds

They waken ears deadened in winter from heavy, water-infused cold air. Spring, though it coaxes vegetation to rise again through summer’s full blooms, rouses that life with bird songs.

How tempting to write lyrics for them, like the frantic wooing calls of the phoebe that cuts through twilight first, then on through the day as the season progresses, “feebay,” he declares, desperate to attract a mate.

But the equivalent of a solo concert, though often longer than a five-minute standard song number, comes from a mockingbird; its own aria, according to bird books, hardly features repetitions, as it improvises imitated sounds caught even impromptu like an ambulance siren, and could last more than seven minutes.

Of the 51 listed British Columbia birds whose names, aside from those mentioned that I romanticized in literature, such as starlings, blue jays, blackbirds, sparrows, skylarks, swifts, and nightingales, I have sighted only a few, so far. But their unabashed singing wakes us up unseen at dawn, or even earlier like that one enchanting after-midnight rhapsody of a mockingbird.

Throughout the day, though, crows would also pierce the calm with their cawing, the mourning dove’s one-note cries, and, if walking by the river, a loon’s wail. Once, long ago in Baltimore, I personified a robin’s sweet coda as a serenade, and an oriole’s close-to-end-of-spr ing three-note-plea for love as mine.

Could my sister and I be blamed, then, if at dinnertime, instead of discussing the evening news, we make up commentaries from bird songs or what to her and my uneducated ear seem just tweets and chatter, that fill our living/dining room?

Her favorite: “More slugs out there, but beware of giant birds of prey like a fierce eagle, that swoops down faster than a sparrow’s blink,” (figuratively referring to China’s horrendous claim of the Scarborough and Ayungin shoals). And mine: “Stay away from that birdfeeder—a cat ever, vigilant of innocence hides behind the hydrangeas,” (a simile for traps that opportunists lay anywhere, disguised as caring).

“Could they be analyzing candidates’ merits in the upcoming federal elections?” I had pushed the limits of our imaginings one evening when bird sounds seemed agitated. Jan, who I call for nature wisdom, explained that possibly “a male arrived at the roost, telling of a threat.”

After learning from a neighbor who had sensed my wonder at a crow, “yakking” at a couple of crows digging and turning up lawn grass, that the caws meant, “do this, do that” onthe- job instructions, I have softened my perception of their grating sound and sinister color, switching my thoughts to Edgar Allan Poe’s sympathetic raven.

Passing on such birdwisdom to my sister, she laughed at first, realizing how everyone personifies birds.

Admittedly subjective, our “emotional response” to their music “is not unique,” according to Adrian Forsyth in his book The Nature of Birds.

Poets like John Keats with his “Ode to a Nightingale” and Henry David Thoreau, who as quoted by Forsyth, thought the hermit thrush was “right about the slavery question,” have long immortalized bird songs that we seem to be hearing for the first time.

Why had we flown this far to dwell on this mystery, anyway? We grew up with the maya’s sweet notes, the kalaw’s baritone calls, the kalapati’s tender cooing and many more songs of exquisite Philippine birds, didn’t we? Who’s the Filipino who hasn’t braved through Sylvia la Torre’s chords of “Ang Maya” and “Ibong Pipit”? Or name me an Ilocano who hasn’t lived the plaintive notes searching for Bannatiran, the mythic white bird/ eternally unreachable lover?

Forsyth also confirms that a disjunction between emotions and science still exists, in that to this day, bird studies have yet to yield exactly why they do or of what they sing except to attract a mate. What a relief then, to learn that my sister and I turn out to be fairly normal after all.