We relate to birds on a deeply instinctual level because, like us, birds communicate vocally and visually mostly during daylight hours, unless you are a nightingale.
Other mammals mainly communicate through their sense of smell, usually at night. Imagine leaving your calling card on a bush from one of your scent glands as a way to beguile a young female who has caught your fancy.
Even a college fraternity fellow might not want to imitate the male lion’s way of maintaining order in his pride. But who can resist the lonely plaintive call of a loon or the fluted trill of a thrush? Who is not stirred by the sight of the majestic white head of an eagle or does not root for the osprey plunging steeply down toward the ripple of a mackerel just beneath the surface in a cove?
We had a wonderfully birdy summer along the coast, as always. Each year, we wait for winter’s gray thrall to loosen its grip and lean into the raw news of spring when the eiders begin gathering in coves, gabbling with each other in small flocks of males and females. The males break out their carefully prepared tuxedos from winter closets, white shirts carefully tucked under their black dinner jackets to make themselves presentable for their prospective mates.
In early April we crane our necks skyward to catch the first excited notes of the fish hawk’s high-pitched kee-kee-kee that heralds their return. And if you happen to frequent a marsh or a tidal cove, you can still be startled the reedy crank of a great blue heron delivering its big oboe notes even if you have heard it many times before.
Our summer began with a voyage to the largest puffin colony offshore, where we later learned that the delicate balance between food abundance and water temperature has been knocked off kilter during the past two years.
Seabird biologists like Steve Kress of the Audubon Society, who has led Project Puffin for 40 years, believes that the exceptionally warm water in the Gulf of Maine of the past two years is the most likely explanation for hundreds of puffins washing ashore dead of starvation and the consequent steep declines in nesting success at most puffin colonies.
What nature seems to take away with one hand, however, she can give back with another. The number of bald eagles cruising overhead all across Maine is astounding to those who remember the national bird, not as the symbol of power, but of environmental degradation from pesticide residues in the food chain which destroyed the viability of their eggs.
When we landed on Brimstone Island and counted seven bald eagles on a log at the top of the beach, hunched like a sequestered jury, we were duly amazed. Never before had we seen such a concentration. Eagles are not gregarious unless around big concentrations of food, such as along the banks Alaska salmon rivers when the salmon are spawning. But when we found three apparently stranded seal pups on the other side of the beach, part of the nearly eight-fold increase in seal populations on Maine islands during the past 40 years, the convocation of eagles was less mysterious.
We participated in another (small) bird drama, when our snuffling retriever discovered a furry little ball of half-fledged feathers in the tall grass of Lanes Island. A little yellow-throated warbler had fallen out of its nest somewhere in the dense bayberry and rose scrub and my animal rescue wife was stirred into a maternal turmoil. She quickly procured a birdcage on the island via a Facebook post and dispatched the ecologist to procure the fledgling’s lunch and dinner.
Warblers are insectivores, he reasoned, and so began scouring the garden and grass edges for grubs. Although this humanitarian rescue effort ultimately failed, we did learn an important lesson in ecology: Facebook works better than the telephone as a rapid response mechanism—not really news, unless you happen to be, like us, in the post-30 set.
We learned of another touching ornithological story when a sister visited from New York. She is a diligent and caring psychotherapist. One of her patients with nearly incapacitating psychological burdens came to her office one day a bit less troubled. He had found a pigeon on the sidewalk and taken it back to his one-room apartment in the Bronx. He began feeding it.
Over the succeeding years, the psychotherapist learned, the pigeon had become his constant companion. He took it on walks with him in the neighborhood as it fluttered ahead of him. People on the street began to notice him—and talk to him. He became the Bird Man. He had an identity. He took in another pigeon with a broken wing and nursed it back to life.
One day, during his morning walk with his pigeon, their world changed in a flash. Their walk was interrupted by the sudden appearance from out of nowhere of a peregrine falcon—also known as a pigeon hawk—in which is invested ten thousand generations of hunting perfection. It was a blow, a mortal blow, to the pigeon and nearly so for the Bird Man.
In Disney’s world, all ends happily. We are served up linear narratives, which hold enormous appeal. But nature is more rounded than linear; it is the circle that is nature’s persistent feature. Everything cycles and recycles. Even us.
Philip Conkling is founder of the Island Institute. He now operates Conkling & Associates, a consulting firm.