"More important than television" (or social media)

 In my life, I have seen few things more majestic and stirring than a skein of Canada geese in flight. Nor have I seen many things much more humorous than flocks of geese waddling through harvested (or recently planted) fields as they glean their way to a full stomach. This morning, on the way to get our weekly Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] share, we got to watch the latter.

Canada geese gleaning a field

Photo by J. Harrington

For reasons I won't even try to guess, a large flock of Canada geese had landed in a field right next to the county road. You can see the edge of the pavement in the lower left corner of the photo. Just East of the geese [behind the jeep] were a pair of sandhill cranes. Perhaps one of the morning's cloudbursts had forced all of them out of the sky. Perhaps the field looked like the equivalent of an avian truck stop. I don't know. I do know that watching 25 to 50 or so geese hustle away from road's edge as the jeep slowed to a stop was better than an Abbott and Costello routine. (The camera I had handy couldn't quite capture all the geese in the field through the rain-washed windshield.)

sandhill cranes (not this morning's)

Photo by J. Harrington

Yesterday, or the day before, a pair of sandhill cranes stopped to explore and feed in the field across from our property. We've yet to entice either geese or cranes to land in our fields which attract mostly pocket gophers, rabbits, wild turkeys and whitetail deer. Having grown up in the city or near the ocean back in New England, wildlife sightings were rare. One of the real pleasures of country living are the frequent, serendipitous, views of the other than humans with whom we share the area. Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi asks "Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone..." 

Aldo Leopold raises a similar cautionary view with an equally lyrical but more specific phrasing

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.” 

We have reached the time of year when geese goslings and sandhill crane colts are grown and feathered. Practice flights, in training for Autumns migration, have begun. A new season approaches. Summer will soon be gone.

 

The Season of Phantasmal Peace

By Derek Walcott

Then all the nations of birds lifted together

the huge net of the shadows of this earth

in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,

stitching and crossing it. They lifted up

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,

the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,

the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—

the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,

only this passage of phantasmal light

that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,

what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes

that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing

the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes

of a child fluttering to sleep;

                                                     it was the light

that you will see at evening on the side of a hill

in yellow October, and no one hearing knew

what change had brought into the raven's cawing,

the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough

such an immense, soundless, and high concern

for the fields and cities where the birds belong,

except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,

something brighter than pity for the wingless ones

below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,

and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices

above all change, betrayals of falling suns,

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

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