by David Hoyt

Two Types of Bird Walks

There are moments on every bird walk when my heart sinks. In those moments, the woods are still. Sometimes the roar of traffic on nearby roads drowns out all other sounds. Sometimes it seems the roar of traffic is all that’s left. Often, these moments of desolation occur in more poorly managed areas, where invasive undergrowth has formed thickets dense enough to hinder the movement of anything with legs or wings. But it is a silence that can strike anywhere. Though such places are green in summer and into early fall, they can feel devoid of life. When I enter them I immediately sense the absence of birds—even the low, inconspicuous chipping from within the shrubbery, where they hide from the building heat of day.

These stretches make me worry if it isn’t all over. Perhaps, finally, there is no more to see. Perhaps, overnight, the avian collapse has occurred—one collapse among others—and now we must finally confront a world more silent and less colorful, a permanent silent spring. Even those unlikely patches that seem to regularly pull birds out of the atmosphere—our own backyards, that pond, or a city park down the block—sometimes feel deserted. I experience these periods as warning visions of future life in a world without birds—as I experience a quiet summer pond without frogs, or a late summer evening without crickets.

Yet, if there are walks in the woods that sadden me, there are others that overjoy me, striking me with the full, unforeseen power of the miraculous. On these mornings, I am transported to the misty Guatemalan Highlands, or to the ancient basalt ledges and spruce stands of the Canadian boreal. Moments after stepping out of my car in a humble forest preserve parking lot, warblers descend from unseen perches and bob about my head. A Yellow-rump rummages the moss on a tree stump. A Chestnut-sided, somewhat the worse for wear, moves through the understory chasing prey invisible to me. Down by the edge of the pond, the orange on a Blackburnian is still atomic enough to startle.

What did I do to earn this bounty? I should have to put in the time, I think to myself; I should have to march far and wide through woods and fields, into swamps to the height of my boots and beyond, before being graced with a view of anything. The truth is, I’ve done nothing to earn this experience. I can only accept it, marvel at it, and be thankful for it.

There’s a Hebrew word for this last notion: chesed. I find it helpful. It means “love without precondition or limitation.” A relation in which you receive surpassing compassion that you neither deserve nor have worked for. It’s not a statistically meaningful concept; there’s no field for it on eBird, and it’s probably not in the latest field guide or app with sonograms and silhouettes. You won’t find it on the Cornell website, though King David leaned on it and Aldo Leopold knew that without it there could be no land ethic.

Chesed beams with drying light on goldenrod, and falls with the autumn rain. It collects in pools where the trail used to be and where a few warblers bathe, and in the potholes left by the roots of a fallen oak where a pair of mallards make their unassuming ménage. It comes with the late afternoon light on the browning grass of the riverbank, when the air is warm but the leaves are dropping.

Then, in some patch of woods, sometimes no bigger than a living room, sometimes as large as a barn, you stumble into a festival. The chickadees confer to one side, while the nuthatches race to consider the merits of each tree. The sparrows rise up from the grass like dry leaves perturbed by a gust. Kinglets and flycatchers pirouette along the edges, while a bluebird pauses on a branch to consider it all.

And, if last night’s wind was fair, there are migrants. Dignitaries of foreign nations just beginning to arrive in their dusty costumes and speaking unusual accents. They present themselves in the mud at your feet, on the log stretched out ahead of you, in the lattice of branches around your head or in the canopy high above. They never stop moving, and if you lose sight of one, your eye picks up another. It is a convention of birds, a parliament, a Shabbat descended upon your shoulders like so many antique candelabras lowered from the trees. It gives light to a festival scene of peace, eating, play, more eating, and the very pulse of life.

It won’t last long. In fact, it may be over before you’re done hastily fiddling with your camera. The festival will move on, and come again. Your best option is to sit down and simply take it in. The bouts of relative silence will return, but now the experience of chesed has armed you to endure them. It is better this way, I think. A photo just can’t capture the hope that you’ve been given.

Birding Through the Year: August 2022

Two Types of Bird Walks