At home and away, thrilling at the trilling.
I grew up in a house surrounded by woods in a nascent suburban development built on former farmland. The first summers, I fell asleep listening through open windows to older kids playing hide-and-seek and a bird’s repetitious lullaby: Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! That neighborhood is lawns and asphalt now. I doubt the McMansions’ windows are ever open. There are no woods for kids to play in. The whippoorwills are gone.
Rachel Carson might shake her head and say, “I told you so.” A scientist and conservationist, she lived about a dozen miles away from my home in another suburban neighborhood. She was writing her prescient warning, Silent Spring (1962), as I listened to those whippoorwills.
The modest brick home she designed and set among trees is now a designated National Historic Landmark. Her final book, The Sense of Wonder, published posthumously in 1965, remains the classic introduction to celebrating and exploring the natural world. Annually, the Rachel Carson Landmark Alliance sponsors a writing contest for intergenerational teams of children and adults to write poems and essays portraying nature as a source of wonder and strength.
I live in a city neighborhood in Washington, DC, now, close to the forested ravine of Rock Creek Park. Through our open windows at night, we can hear a barred owl calling: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Though I’ve never seen a barred owl, its four-beat call is, like the whippoorwill’s, birdsong I know by ear and heart.
This is a scorching, dry summer here and throughout the nation; climate-change warnings and predictions are coming true with a vengeance. We’re fortunate to live on a shady street and to have ceiling fans and a state-of-the-art air-conditioning unit. But that means our windows now stay closed, even at night. The only birdsong in our bedroom is the insistent, chirping wake-up call of the phone alarm.
My husband and I are also fortunate that this is our season of frequent back-and-forth migration from city to country, to our family’s summer place — an old house on a former farm. This year, it’s unusually hot and almost drought-dry in the foothills of Pennsylvania’s Alleghenies, but breezes blow up the ridge. We close the house during the day; thick chestnut logs beneath layers of clapboard and siding keep the indoor temperatures down. At night, we open everything up and turn on the exhaust fan in the attic for a while before bed. It roars as if it’s lifting the house off its foundation. The rooms exhale the warm air and inhale the cool.
Some nights, we hear a barred owl. We wake to the dawn chorus of birds tuning up in the woods and meadows. Listening to this avian serenade, it’s tempting, though foolish, to anthropomorphize. Scientists report that songbirds dream of singing in their sleep. Do birds, like people, begin the day in a liminal state? Might those dawn calls articulate the transition from night’s suspension to day’s activity? Is a sleeping bird’s rehearsal of song like a sleeping writer’s dream of story?
Well, here’s where my speculative comparison breaks down. I cannot imagine a bird disappointed in its song; this waking writer, on the other hand, often fumbles for her bedside pencil, only to find somnolent inspiration has vanished by daylight.
Real birds sing me awake, so there’s no need for a cellphone bird alarm. But I do turn on the phone and make a call every morning — to a magician.
Merlin (the Cornell Bird Lab’s free app) listens, identifies, and generates ticker-tape scores and sample songs for every voice in the feathered chorus outside my window. He joins us for breakfast on the porch, too. The table’s crowded with cups, plates, binoculars, bird guides, and two phones. But for the moment, we’re in the moment. Online headlines concerning this grim season in the nation and the world must wait. We first attend to the avian news of the day.
One morning, we heard a familiar clucking. We’d often heard this bird but never seen it, never known what it was.
Yellow-billed cuckoo, pronounced Merlin.
I played Merlin’s sample song back.
Another cuckoo, deeper in the woods, answered!
We brought our Bluetooth speaker out on the porch, connected it to the phone, and broadcast Merlin’s cuckoo songs into the forest.
Several real cuckoos responded to the techno-cuckoos!
Artificial intelligence, even a wizard’s, only takes you so far, however. So I again turned to my phone, this time to consult and confirm with my real teachers, my human mentors, Ted and Jewell.
Fifty years ago, these friends, expert birders, gifted our family a handmade ledger for documenting birds identified on visits to the farm: “Nelle’s Birds,” named for my mother. Handwritten entries form a running list from the final decades of the 20th century into the first years of the 21st. Ted will celebrate his 100th birthday next year; we’ve only made a few entries since he and Jewell last visited.
I spoke to Ted. He confirmed the cuckoo.
Now, I hear and recognize more distinct bird calls than ever before. Not because there are more birds. I suspect, as Rachel Carson predicted, there are fewer, both in number and species. For example, the woodcocks — who used to plummet in corkscrew descent out of the gloaming when Ted imitated their call — are gone. Habitat has changed as fields grow in and as pesticides are sprayed along highways, country roads, and verges.
Still, more sensitized to individual songs, I recognize distinct voices among the unseen birds in the woods and thickets. Carson might be interested rather than annoyed that a virtual wizard helps me better discern the remaining birdsong. And I believe she’d be pleased that, one morning this summer, I had the fleeting illusion of communicating with a yellow-billed cuckoo.
The exchange filled me with a sense of wonder.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s collection of love stories is Known By Heart. Her story collection Contents Under Pressure was nominated for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, won the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction. Her novel Frieda’s Song was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, Historical Fiction. Her column, “Girl Writing,” appears in the Independent bi-monthly. For many years, Campbell practiced psychotherapy. She lives in Washington, DC, and is at work on another novel.
