These are the birds whose songs I heard first thing this morning, with the Woodthrush the lone singer while the night still lay on the ground.
Purple Finch
Eastern Phoebe
Northern Cardinal
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Chickadee
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Tufted Titmouse
Wood Thrush
Eastern Towhee
White Throated Sparrow
American Goldfinch
Blue Jay
Louisiana Waterthrush
Song Sparrow
Mourning Dove
Common Yellowthroat
Red-winged Blackbird
Downy Woodpecker
Swamp Sparrow
Eastern Phoebe
Later today I will certainly also hear my beloved Northern Flicker, likely the Pileated Woodpecker, a Red tailed Hawk or two up high and now, already, the Crows stirring things up in the woods, the very vocal Kingfishers swooping over the pond where the Canada geese are breeding and honking.
The language I have to speak can't contain or express just what birdsong touches in me; but it feels revelatory, significant and comprises a large part of my moral compass. I know things, understand aspects of my possible humanity I can only feel and act on that comes from their transmissions. As beautiful as their songs are, it isn't only an aesthetic, companionable blessing I receive; it is the long tides of history, of the continual remaking of the world. Birdsong inspires the values of a listening life, a slowed-down, patient life, one whose conditioned worldly ambitions have been eroded for something better.
They are really struggling with disease everywhere now.
The H5N1 virus is devastating the world’s birds. The populations of raptors, waterfowl, shorebirds, ravens, songbirds, parrots are losing large percentages of their kind due to this virus, studied and greatly suspected to come from the massive industrialization of poultry. This virus which is carried endemically in wild aquatic birds and which, when it has spilled over into other birds (and pigs, humans and poultry) in the past has caused sickness but not had such lethal significance as it does now; it has mutated into a killing sickness and all but two out of 39 studied conversions of the virus has occurred among commercial industrialized poultry.
(Abbreviated research accumulated and written by David Quammen in NYTimes)
Time to allow our ambitions and desires to mutate as well.
(Art: Windfalcon at Deviant Art)