Birds – Page 12 – Via Negativa

March 27, 2008March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Pressing on

Pressing On (Return of the Phoebe) from the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo.

Ah, to be as single-minded as a phoebe! To sing for the sheer joy of it, one’s message reduced to the bare fundamentals:
I am here.
Life is good.
Gimme some sugar.
Isn’t that really what we’re all trying to do, as artists and writers ?

Apparently not. “Whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification,” says Paul Boutin of the New York Times, “amassing a large audience is the goal.” Oh. Oops.

Funny thing, though. Remember my interview with an anonymous blogger? Anon. used a slightly different yardstick to measure success in blogging:

One of my blogs lasted only a few weeks and got mentioned on instapundit and metafilter, logged hundreds of readers daily, was cut and pasted and forwarded as emails, and led to several offers of publication in whole or in part. A year before that, I had written another blog that also lasted only a few weeks. This second blog drew few readers, was not widely linked, didn’t feature my best prose, and when it ended, wasn’t archived by me or anyone else. It, however, involved my wandering in snowy woods by myself several times a week. For that reason alone, I prefer it to its more celebrated cousin.

Now this same individual, writing under a pseudonymn and working with an agent, has gotten an offer from a major publisher to bring out his second novel, which also gestated in a (now discontinued) blog — one with a daily readership probably around 100, I’m guessing. (Which still sounds like a lot to those of us who have been writing poetry for a while, and are used to thinking of a large audience as anything in excess of ten people, including family members!) Nor is he the only friend or acquaintance for whom blogging has led to authorship.

But judging by the advice proffered by most of the blogging experts I’ve read, my friends are basket-cases. Not only do they fail to measure their success by Google PageRank or Technorati authority, but their blogs often lack a tight focus; their titles usually aren’t terribly descriptive; most of them probably don’t know how to use tags to increase their SEO; and their posts often ramble far from the point and include lengthy paragraphs that few casual visitors would be able to focus on (Anon. was famous for that). But like our friend in the video above, they are hardly lacking in dedication.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the American blogging cognoscenti have completely ignored what I consider the most significant blogging story of 2008 so far. Japan’s most prestigious literary award — the Akutagawa Prize, which recognizes up-and-coming fiction writers — just went to a blogger named Mieko Kawakami. She began blogging in 2003 as a way to try and stir up interest in her music, but soon the writing took over. The prize went to her third work of fiction; all three were originally written for her blog.

Kawakami’s award-winning novella, “The Breast and the Egg,” explores the ideas of divorce, the questioning of beauty standards and other themes of solitary womanhood that are still relatively new territory in Japanese literature. Kawakami’s stories in some ways are those of Japan’s Everywoman. […]

“It’s about living, our body, the changes of the heart that accompany the body, the urgency, the problems being born, moment by moment,” Kawakami said. “The fact that we are always doing our best at living.”

So it seems that some top-notch writers are finding their voice through blogging now, even if blogging as a medium for literary expression hasn’t really caught on here yet. As someone who has helped publish bloggers and other writers and artists in a blog-enabled online literary magazine for three years, this is obviously a topic of keen interest to me. In Japan, as the AP article goes on to point out, it’s not uncommon now for writers to produce novels in installments meant to be read on mobile phones. To say that Japan has a healthy blogging culture would be a bit of an understatement.

There are more blog posts in Japanese than any other language, according to Technorati Inc., which tracks nearly 113 million blogs globally. Last year, Technorati found 37 percent of all postings were in Japanese — about 1.5 million per day. Postings in English — from Americans, Britons, Australians and people in many other countries — accounted for 36 percent of the total.

It’s not just a matter of numbers, though. In Japan, the personal or diary blog is the dominant form, not only as a percentage of the whole (which may be true here, too) but in terms of public perception. This makes sense, because letters and diaries have held a central position in Japanese literature for over a thousand years, enjoying equal status with poetry and novels. (You may have noticed the quote at the bottom of my sidebar from Sei Shonagon, whose tenth-century Pillow Book was as much like a personal blog as anything one can imagine.) Moreover, novels based on lightly-fictionalized autobiography have been a staple of Japanese literature for close to fifty years now. So a Japanese blogger with literary aspirations would not have to look far for role models or an appreciative audience.

Here in the U.S., by contrast, the literary establishment seems reluctant even to concede the value of online literary magazines, let alone blogs. The proper curmugeonly thing to do is express distaste for something so obviously deleterious to the cause of true literature, as the British novelist Doris Lessing did in her Nobel acceptance speech this past December.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention — computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.

God forbid! Then again, if all the bloggers I know followed the advice of the blogging gurus, I think we would have to concede Lessing’s point.

March 20, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Pivot point

What made the ancestral timberdoodle decide to haunt the woods’ edge instead of the shore? My mother surprised one this morning up above the old dump and watched it for a while: the oddest walk she ever saw, she said. With every step, its chest throbbed visibly, as if with some uncontrollable emotion. I went to look for it after lunch, and it flew before I spotted it on the ground. I followed it up the old woods road, camera at the ready, my eyes riveted to the spot where it landed, but each time it flushed before I could distinguish the mottled brown of its feathers from the brown leaves, which were lifting and turning over in the wind. I’ve never had the sharpest eyesight.

I noticed as I walked back that there were still a few patches of snow on the powerline right-of-way, sheltered by the thick green laurel. Up on the ridge, the wind roared and died, roared and died, not quite as regular as ocean surf.

After Stravinsky, can anyone hear the phrase “rite of spring” and not feel a shiver of strangeness? Tonight at sunset, we will be almost equidistant from this morning’s sunrise and tomorrow’s. And at dusk, if the winds die down, the woodcock will position himself out in the field with his long sandpiper’s bill pointed at the sky and project his nasal longing into the heavens, again and again. Then he’ll launch his fat body several hundred feet straight up and fly in wide ascending circles, his wings twittering like a flock of sparrows, before plunging again to the earth. What if happiness were a pivot point you could occupy, even in the presence of unfulfilled desire? Would you try to make a fulcrum in your breast? Would you throw your voice as far as you could, and then go after it, secure in the knowledge that what goes up must come down? Would you haunt the brushy edges of the night?

March 1, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Nature in the Cracks

On the Outside

A half-hour before the first bell,
as the kids from the early buses
were milling around in the hall
waiting for the library to open,
a robin began to assault
the courtyard window.

A crowd quickly gathered.
He wants in!
Look at him.
What’s wrong with this fucking bird?
Hammering the glass
with its beak & wings
& ineffectual claws.

The jocks thought it was a riot.
Look out, Jim — he’s after you!
He’s gonna kick your ass.
Then the librarian unlocked the door
& everyone ran to get a seat
& a newspaper, except
for one girl with lank hair
& clothes from the Salvation Army.
He don’t want to come in, she murmured.
He wants that fat thing
that mocks his every move
to meet him outside.

Every time we post a new theme announcement at qarrtsiluni, I find myself writing poems in response to the theme without really intending to. As one of the two managing editors, I can’t submit my own work, but none of the rest of you are bound by any such restrictions, so go check out the Call For Submissions. The theme this time is “Nature in the Cracks,” with guest editors Brent Goodman and Ken Lamberton. They write,

We’re seeking prose, poetry, and artwork that celebrates the nature of the world revealed by time, weather, decay, cycle, and neglect. It’s the understated beauty of the stain inside a teacup, not the ornate pattern decorating the porcelain. It’s a sadness for old barns slouching in fog, the branch you accidentally break that turns the owl’s moon face your direction. It’s the liver spots on your grandmother’s forearm, the crooked curl of her fingers over the rocker arm. It’s the well-worn patch of wood stain faded smooth there. […]

It’s in the cracks where nature adjusts, changes, and teems, a marginal place that exists without borders, physical or theoretical, a place where something new might evolve out of the muck. “Nature in the Cracks” seeks writing about wildness found in strange places — from landfills to prisons, sidewalk cracks to salad crispers.

Read the rest here.

February 15, 2008September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Screech owl love

An extended version of this morning’s “Porch.”

At dawn, amid the creaking of trees in the wind, I hear the wavering cry of a screech owl down in the pines. Half a minute later, the male answers: a lower-pitched call from up in the woods. They duet for a couple of minutes, trill-calls intermixed with their trademark descending whinnies.

The temperature is just around freezing, and the air smells of rain. I catch a glimpse of movement off to the left — can they really be that close? — and then there they are, two small, winged silhouettes fluttering through the trees. They connect in mid-air for barely a second, then land in adjacent treetops opposite the porch. They sit ruffling their feathers for about a minute, silent now. Then one at a time they fly off toward the powerline, their wings soundless as always. A gray squirrel begins to scold — softly, as if still half-asleep, or else trying to duet with the nearest tree, creaking in the dawn wind.

I sit clutching my empty coffee mug, thinking that perhaps a one-second mating is the perfect observation for a 140-character Twitter tweet — and realizing at the same time that a bare-bones account just won’t satisfy.

There’s a lot to the courtship of eastern screech owls that I didn’t witness, judging from the description on the Owl Pages (a good site, aside from the incredibly annoying pop-up link-ads).

Breeding season for Eastern Screech Owls is generally around mid April, but may range from mid March to mid May. [Ha!] They have an elaborate courtship ritual. Males approach females, calling from different branches until they are close. The male then bobs and swivels his head, bobs his entire body, and even slowly winks one eye at the female. If she ignores him, bobbing and swivelling motions intensify. If she accepts him, she moves close and they touch bills and preen each other. Pairs mate for life but will accept a new mate if the previous mate disappears. Gray and red colour phases will mate together.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology gives a slightly more nuanced account of their mating practices:

Eastern Screech-Owl pairs usually are monogamous and remain together for life. Some males, however, will mate with two different females. The second female may evict the first female, lay her own eggs in the nest, and incubate both clutches.

As with most birds, the male lacks any penis whatsoever. Male and female openings are outwardly identical, and the consummation of all that mutual preening tends to be as brief, and seemingly about as passionate, as a peck on the cheek. Homosexual pair bonding has been observed among barn owls, and there’s no reason to doubt that it occurs among screech owls, too: nature loves infinite variety, even if some humans don’t. (See here for sad proof of the latter.)

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, y’all. Thanks for reading.

February 6, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Golden eagle with transmitter

golden eagle with transmitter
For background on this photo, see here.

After the unasked-for grooming
by that mob of wingless birds,
their strange soft claws reaching deep
under my feathers, they let me go.
The rock field dropped away
& I thought for a moment it was over.

But I still feel
that fleshy insinuation across my breast.
And something rides me, a small weight,
the same way I ride
this snake of wind.

What kind of clutching
doesn’t still the heart?
Its unshakeable presence makes me know myself
apart from beak & talons
as a thing that throbs,
a thing that chafes & pulses
here here here here,
the mountains circling below.

__________

For the Read Write Poem prompt on dressing up. Links to other responses are gathered here.

February 1, 2008February 19, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Out of place?

According to a helpful webpage on film sound clichés, “the Red-Tailed Hawk scree signifies outdoors and a big, lonely place.” Anytime a rocky mountainside appears in a movie, you can almost count on hearing that raspy scream, which most people probably assume belongs to an eagle. It’s also used as an all-purpose signifier of impending or just-concluded drama in the typical outdoors adventure flick. So you know that I must’ve photographed this immature redtail in some wild, lonely setting, right?

Wrong. It was hanging out in the heart of Penn State’s University Park campus yesterday, home to some 40,000 students. Which, I suppose, is positively bucolic compared to Manhattan, where Central Park’s famous Pale Male lives, along with a growing number of other redtails. As I watched, the hawk dove at squirrels on the sidewalk four different times without success: fat and pampered as they seem, Penn State’s squirrels are masters of defense, dodging and feinting. It finally dove into the groundcover next to Schwab Auditorium and came up with what appeared to be a meadow vole, whose presence on campus I found much more surprising than the hawk’s.

By this time, classes had let out and the sidewalks were jammed, but most of the students didn’t appear to notice the hawk ripping at its prey on a low limb less than ten feet above the sidewalk. Half a dozen students had been following the drama with interest, and a few more, seeing all of us, paused briefly to snap pictures with their cell phones, but the vast majority didn’t give it a second glance. In fact, when the hawk dove after the vole, it cleared the head of a passing student by less than three inches, but she never looked up.

It seems ironic that I have to go into town to get good views of wildlife that we have here on the mountain in abundance. I’m reasonably sure our resident redtails have never been shot at, but they are still far warier than this one was. Nor is it the first time I’ve seen a hawk on campus acting as if people were nothing but short, loud, ambulatory trees.

The students who took an active interest in the hawk’s activities were as puzzling to me as those who glanced at it and kept walking. I gathered from their conversation that at least a couple of them had been following it around for close to half an hour by the time I came on the scene. “It sure beats going to class,” I heard one of them say. But they weren’t disinterested wildlife watchers; I soon realized that they were actually trying to herd squirrels toward the hawk. Each time it dove at a squirrel, they hooted and cheered like football fans at Beaver Stadium.

They made an odd counterpoint to the half-dozen crows, who were watching and jeering from a somewhat safer distance in the tops of the elms. But within minutes after the hawk finally scored, both the fans and the opposing team drifted away. I stood alone on the auditorium steps, watching this strange and magnificent creature tear its brunch into bite-sized pieces while students streamed by below. A couple of times it paused to return my gaze with that challenging stare all raptors possess, and I felt a little odd — as if it were really I who was out of place. What was I doing, thinking that the human-nature dichotomy is an out-dated construct only adhered to by a few, misguided purists? The hawk might as well have been a visitor from another planet.
__________

Be sure to check out the short-but-diverse Festival of the Trees #20. And if you have any broader interest in plants, you may be interested to learn that there’s a brand-new blog carnival for plants called Berry Go Round. The first edition is up at Seeds Aside.

January 25, 2008September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

An instinct for beauty?

mourning doves mating
Photo by Joby Joseph (Creative Commons)

Do animals other than humans have the capacity to appreciate beauty? I’d be surprised if they didn’t. There are, after all, elephants who have learned to paint, which seems to be simply an extension of a natural impulse to draw: “Unprompted, an Asian elephant in captivity will often pick up a pebble or stick with the tip of her trunk and casually doodle on the floor of her enclosure.” It’s hard to imagine how improvisational singers such as mockingbirds or brown thrashers could produce compelling sequences without a strong instinct for what sounds good with what. But I’ve always considered mourning doves to be kind of brainless, for some reason, so I was a little surprised this morning to observe two pairs of them apparently watching the sunrise. One pair was already perched in the top of a tall locust tree at the edge of the woods when I came out onto the porch, and another flew up to a lower branch shortly afterwards. Neither pair stirred for the next twenty minutes, as the rising sun bathed the western ridge in red and orange light below the setting moon.

You have to understand that it was cold this morning — 10 degrees Fahrenheit, or -12C — and there were plenty of other places they could have perched which would’ve provided much more shelter. And they were facing into the wind.

Of course, that’s only four doves out of a flock of several dozen; most of the others were, I presume, already pigging out on cracked corn below the bird feeders up at the main house. Lord knows, they probably needed the calories. But maybe, as with humans, it’s only a small percentage of the flock who prioritize aesthetic experience over more basic urges.

Then again, the doves watching the sunrise were doing so as couples, so really, it might all be part of extended courtship or pair-bonding behavior. And who’s to say which urges are the most basic, really? Aesthetic response is, after all, pretty integral to the whole mate-selection process. If females didn’t use aesthetic cues when choosing a mate, sexual dimorphism wouldn’t be nearly as widespread as it is in the animal kingdom (though competition for mates apparently isn’t the whole reason why one sex — usually the male — is more colorful or larger than the other, and mourning doves themselves are not highly dimorphic). The hunger for beauty registers in the body as well as the mind, and is so much a part of the way we experience being in the world that it hardly seems possible to isolate an aesthetic impulse from among the whole range of animal instincts.

Incidentally, if you’ve been enjoying The Morning Porch, here are a few other blogs where brevity is key to the aesthetic effect:

a small stone, by British poet Fiona Robyn
Once around the park, Clare Grant’s 30-word descriptions of her daily walks in Tunbridge Wells, UK
Three Beautiful Things, by the same author
~~box elder~~ Out with Mol, where Lucy Kempton has also recently begun writing 30-word posts [updated 2/3/08 to link to Lucy’s new blog, spun off from box elder]
Now’s the time, Joe Hyam’s daily “three things” blog
tinywords, “the world’s smallest magazine, publishing one new haiku nearly every weekday since late 2000”
The Natural History of Selborne — not the text of the first-ever synoptic nature book, but the raw material from which it was made: Gilbert White’s journals. The entries are rarely longer than thirty words.

Tom Montag’s “Lines” series of poems from The Middlewesterner are also almost always very brief. I’ve been collecting my favorite posts from other Twitter-users here. And finally, qarrtsiluni‘s Short Shorts issue from July-August 2006, which featured prose and poetry of 100 words or less, is fun to revisit now and then.

December 15, 2007 by Dave Bonta

For the birds

Today was our local Audubon chapter’s Christmas Bird Count, and while Mom and Steve scoured the mountain, I hung out in my mother’s kitchen watching the feeders. I had bread to bake, as well as a casserole for the evening potluck. (Click on the photos to view at a larger size.)

To pass the time, I thought I’d try taking some pictures. For several days now I’ve been meaning to photograph the black raspberry canes below the back steps. They make really terrific patterns, especially against a white and brown bokeh. But the birds must’ve known it was their day — they kept landing right in the middle of my shot.

I mean, what did they take me for, some kind of wildlife photographer? I don’t even wear a floppy hat! I’m trying to be an artist here, you know?

They particularly seemed to like perching on the cross-stroke of a thorny “A.” Anarchists!

I tried shifting the camera to another part of the patch, but it was no use. The birds insisting on critterizing my every attempt at an artsy abstract composition.

My only unique contribution to the Plummer’s Hollow count, by the way, was a pine siskin (which I did take a photo of, purely for documentary purposes). Overall, it was a rather poor count for our property, but Juniata Valley Audubon’s preliminary tally was just short of our all-time record, owing to a large number of unusual waterfowl species elsewhere in the count circle.

For a related post from the archives, see Christmas bird count: the wild and the quiet.
(Update) See also Christmas Bird Count 2007 at the Plummer’s Hollow blog.

November 5, 2007 by Dave Bonta

A Canadian visitor

My friend and co-editor at qarrtsiluni, Beth Adams, has yet to visit Plummer’s Hollow. But other part-time residents of Quebec fly over twice a year, and sometimes they drop in for a quick bite. This one did, and got a bit more hospitality than she bargained for. See the complete story here.

It looks taller, now,
that little pine where the eagle
straightened her feathers.

September 29, 2007 by Dave Bonta

First blood

View the slideshow.

Autumn has come to Margaret’s Woods: to the sawhorse and the stump, the tangled beds of hayscented fern and Japanese stiltgrass. The blood-colored Japanese barberry bushes are festooned with rows of scarlet berries and a scattering of fallen maple leaves impaled on their thorns. Feathered migrants learn the way to the best fruit from the early colors: wild gravevines are turning yellow, and the Virginia creepers are red flames against the pale trunks of white oaks. Hercules’-club trees are bowing under the weight of their monstrous purple heads, and their three-foot-long, triply-compound leaves fall nearly intact in the rush to bare their goods.

It’s a cool morning. A cranefly sits motionless on a blackberry leaf, too cold to fly. A pair of pileated woodpeckers, year-round residents too young to remember when this 100-acre deer-ravaged savanna was a mature forest, sun themselves at the top of an oak snag already dead when the loggers came through, one dry, beautiful autumn just like this. Their red crests blaze as they groom themselves, finding insect nourishment under their own black bark. This morning, a new autumn color — hunter’s orange — has entered the woods, and with luck, the first arrows will find their targets and water the parched ground with fresh blood.