Bird Photography

Sound Analogies

I like each and every sound in a concert hall before and during a performance. The coughing, the rustling of cough drop wrappers being unwrapped, the dropping of programs, the gentle snoring of this weekend’s seat neighbor (a stranger,) the gasps when someone’s cellphone goes off despite house warnings, the whiny kid, the tapping feet of Rachmaninoff enthusiasts – I love them all. Music is a communal enterprise, not just between the musicians but in the shared experience, in time, with an audience, and the noise we produce makes it clear we exist and are all in this together. Community, if only for a few hours.

This weekend’s program at the Oregon Symphony added a third kind of sound to the music played and the muted noise of the listeners: the music itself contained references to things heard in the real world and then translated into notes, in this instance a ping-pong game.

Yup. Table tennis. Spin Flip by Korean composer Texu Kim was a romp of musical allusions, tightly and energetically conducted by Eun Sun Kim. (I am linking to an older performance by a different orchestra in Korea which unfortunately does not capture the richness that was heard here in Portland.)

And if this piece was about flying balls, the next one, Chopin’s Piano concerto Nr. 2, reminded me of dispersing, clattering and rolling marbles. A gorgeous performance by Benjamin Grosvenor. (My link is to Rubinstein, all I could find.) I will remain silent on the nostalgic molasses of the third part of the concert, Rachmaninoff’s 3rd, since I have no time for enraged comments about my ignorance about the true modernist core of the piece….

We are not unfamiliar with world sounds imported into musical notations, just think of all the bird songs making an appearance, prominently with Beethoven’s Pastorale (here are his bird calls) and extensively with Messiaen’s Catalog of Birds – I wrote about it some years back here:

Up with the Birds

Since then I have learned a lot more – particularly about the relationship between environmental sounds in music and social practices. Listen to some instances here. People either imitated the voices with instruments (or whistling – a fascinating topic for another day,) or they imported the real ones through recordings. Composers also started to have extensive notations about the kind of places they wanted you to imagine while listening.

“…identifies species or environmental things like “stream” or whatever he was going for. Something about that, too, also indicates (at a really basic level) the relationship between the score and the piece. There is this project at work, in addition to the music, supplementary to the music, or complementary to the music. I’m of the mind that it’s key to understanding the piece. These really descriptive, poetic presentations of where we are in the land, in addition to the detailed marking-up of the score, says to me that this piece had a multi- sensory, multi-modal way of being in the world that it desired…where you were not only a listener, but you were also a reader, you were also a body in a physical space to absorb the sounds in a particular way.”

A true attempt to invite us to share the glories of nature.

Eventually you end up with something altogether strange: music composed of themes entirely constructed with real birdcalls, Jim Fassett’s Symphony of the Birds. (Actual piece starts at 6:20.) Ornithologists reacted with dismay – they were the specialists in recording bird song and did not cherish intruders into their scientific domain. G-d forbid, art should dilute science…

Never mind the competition for marketing: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology with its amazing collection of recordings, and the associated Cornell University press, was often selling or licensing them to Walt Disney or other film companies for their projects, creating a market place for environmental sounds.

They should ALL hurry up with the recoding: new data show we’ve lost 3 billion birds over the last half century across North America, 29 % of the population.

Let’s hear the blackbird sing in creative ways…..

Staying Put

Having looked at multiple aspects of migration (at least within the animal kingdom) I want to close out the week with a contemplation of the value of staying home. Not for the reasons that immediately come to mind: “Hey, curb your carbon foot print, no longer fly or drive so much, built your own backyard farm so you are are independent from the vicissitudes of national ecological decisions, etc.

I believe that is the California Towhee, but below I am certain its our very own here in OR

No, I’d like to explore the philosophical approach embraced by the bioregional movements, these days prominently represented by regions like Cascadia (our very own backyard) and the Ozarks, to name just a few and early on developed by Peter Berg who died 9 years ago.

Here are a few key terms to understanding the concept: bioregionality concerns itself with both the way how a) nature differs in different areas (and thus different geographical regions need differential treatment) and b) how a mindful ecosocial movement would approach the nature in its region finding ways to maximize all that is good for region and people at once, even if it means intense adjustments to the way things used to be done.

Bioregions are defined by watersheds, natural communities, places that are associated with a particular climate, seasons, aspects of soil, and types of native plants and animals. The boundaries are often defined by the people who live in these regions, and their ways to live sustainable and harmoniously within these given environments. Nature and culture, then, are interlaced parts of a given bioregion. People do count as much as the rest of the biological and geological package. Details for the husbandry of such an entity – a bioregion – can be found here. Resource management, land planning, conservation biology, social and political structuring towards ethical approaches to nature are part and parcel of the bioregionalism movement.

Importantly, and this brings us back to where we started this week when arguing that we need to actually learn from and listen to nature herself, the bioregionalism movement urges us to familiarize ourselves with the region we live in: feel its time and place, and become if not intimate with then at least knowledgeable about the fauna and flora of your environs. This knowledge will be a good stepping stone to decide how you as an individual should live in this region and what communal, social, economical and political structures would be of the best interest of the region.

Here is a fabulous example of writer and activist, Jenny Odell, who teaches at Stanford, trying to get to know her particular region through listening, mindfully, to the typical birds she encounters. If you open the link below and click on each of the 5 bird names you get multiple sound recordings of their songs.

Sound: Birdsong

I have photographed some of the bird she mentioned, although they are likely the Oregon counterparts to her California species. Will throw some other in for good measure since I listen to them on a daily basis, except when the herons croak, then I cover my ears….

This kingfisher was a rare encounter 3 days ago – they never sit still to be photographed….

Here is music in honor of our own region’s little ruler. The 2 movements couldn’t be more different.

(PS There is also a unconvincing sonnet by this name (by Gerald Manley Hopkins) and an off- Broadway play that had good reviews about a Nazi, sentenced to life without parole in a Vatican prison, discussing free will, life and death with a priest before being smuggled to freedom. I’ll skip that…..)

Migration

There’s always Panama. If we get too overwhelmed by the insanity of the contemporary world we could migrate to some island near Panama joining a troupe of exceedingly happy, permanently stoned sloths. You read that right: the moss there, and the water infused by the moss, has an alkaloid- based chemical composition that is also found in Valium…. much appreciated by an already slow-moving species.

I picked up this comforting tidbit of information from a radio show that taught me a lot about migration, something I’ve been again wondering about last week when I found myself amongst hundreds of visiting white geese, Canada geese and sandhill cranes during my walks. Below is the condensed version of what I learned.

Questions like why does migration happen in general, and where do these birds come from or where do they go, how do they know the travel routes and/or final destinations, have been asked for 1000s of years. We have now answers for some of the questions, and are still surprisingly clueless about others.

Aristoteles – is there any subject he didn’t tackle, ever? – suggested three possibilities to explain the disappearance of birds during the Greek winter months. One was the speculation that they traveled to other places, one was the suggestion that they might hibernate (behavior that people had observed in bats around Athens) and the third was transmutation. Wish that were true – let’s just all transmute into happier forms when we are bored with our worm pecking, grub searching existence…. let’s become sloths!

The migration hypothesis was elevated in the 17th century with the (re)invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey in the early 1600s. (He applied for a patent (!) thus outsmarting a local competitor who claimed it was his design – but that is a mystery story for another day.) Peering into the sky and seeing all those lunar hills and craters suggested perfectly sensible travel plans of birds: they go to the moon! It took until 1822 to dislodge this human projection of our own dream, when some hunting Count von So and So returned with his kill from the heaths of Northern Germany: a stork. A stork with a spear embedded in his neck, that had not prevented him from traveling North. A weapon that was, according to the consulted German luminaries in the university ethnology departments, of African origins. (You can read more about the “Pfeilstorch” here.)

Care to try flying with that thing in you for 2000 miles? At least you’re not a tern – they have a round trip of 60 000 miles!

Across the next years about 25 individual birds were collected that had somehow managed to migrate from one continent to the other with a piece of ebony poking through their necks… Mystery solved – birds migrated South. Scientific insight gained beyond the migration destination: some form of marking allows us to identify the birds and tracking their routes. Banding was born. Nowadays it comes in more sophisticated forms of transmitters and receivers. And it does not just apply to the field of ornithology, but people research the migration patterns of everything, from wildebeests, caribous, whales, to turtles and butterflies, to name a few.

More on the specifics of these patterns tomorrow. They do matter, beyond feeding into the passions of your friendly bird photographer, for our understanding of nature as a system, as it turns out.

And here is a gem sent by a friend.

Merriam Webster to the Rescue

Post-pandrial torpor, I think it’s called. That state when your brain has taken a leave of absence because the masses of Thanksgiving food require all the available blood supply for digestion. I did not even have to look that up, mind you, such is the familiarity of the experience of eating too much…

I did, however, peek into the always open dictionary to find some words associated with birds given a) the absence of brain function and b) the fact that I had a magical afternoon last week photographing all kinds of avians.

Here goes, then, all words that originate with birds.

Carnard: a false or ungrounded report.

Canard refers to a duck in French (as in French dishes like confit de canard), via the Old French quanart, meaning “drake.” The connection to rumor and untruth follows a route of creative phrasing. A 16th-century French idiom was vendre des canards à moitié—literally, “to half-sell ducks,” but used as a colorful way of saying “to fool” or “to cheat.” No one really knows how one half-sells a duck, or where the idiom originated, but the expression was perpetuated enough for canard to carry the meaning of something commonly accepted as true that is actually unfounded.

It is a canard that I ate an entire cherry pie on Thursday. Not for lack of trying, however.

Auspicious: “promising success” or “favorable.”

In Latin, auspex means “bird seer,” formed from the noun avis (“bird”) and the verb specere (“to look”). In ancient Rome, these “bird seers” were priests, or augurs, who based their prophecies on the flight and feeding patterns of birds.

Well, your bird seer just hikes around Sauvie Island, camera in hand, with a prophecy that you’ll favor what she saw.

Volatile: “characterized by quick or unexpected changes.”

Four centuries ago, volatile was used as a noun, a general term referring to birds or other flying creatures (such as butterflies). Related to the Latin volare, to fly.

Fly they did – so many, in such compact flocks, the sky filled with the noise of wings flapping and birds shouting. My kind of music.

Musket: a muzzle-loading shoulder firearm used primarily in the era before rifles.

Less well known, however, is that the word musket can also refer to a male sparrow hawk. This is consistent with the word’s etymology: musket derives from the Old Italian moschetto (meaning either “small artillery piece” or “sparrow hawk”), which is a diminutive of the noun mosca, meaning “fly.

Here’s your hawk.

Halcyon: “calm or peaceful.” In ancient times, the word referred to a bird now identified with the kingfisher.

In Greek myth, Alkyone, the daughter of Aeolus, the god of the winds, became so distraught when she learned that her husband, Ceyx, had been killed in a shipwreck that she threw herself into the sea and was changed into a kingfisher, later named alkyon or halkyon.

Well, I did not capture a king fisher, this time around. But I always feel calm and peaceful when my patience is rewarded with capturing these little sparrows in the black berry brambles. They hop and flutter fast, but if I stand quietly enough for long enough, I’m able to connect with the camera.

And I got a good laugh out of the Merriam Webster example:

Remember the halcyon days of Facebook, when no one was concerned with who might peep their drunken pictures and angsty missives, and discussions of privacy settings were met with a mix of dismissiveness and apathy?
— Jessica Roy, BetaBeat, 3 May 2012

Let’s start the week with some Halycon Days by Purcell….

Shiny

On Sunday I walked in Tacoma, the second biggest city and urban area in the state of Washington. It has a large working port, created in 1918 on Commencement Bay, in South Puget Sound, known as the “Gateway to Alaska”.

It also has a beautiful museum dedicated to glass – Museum of Glass a.k.a. MOG – and the largest hot shop on the West Coast where you can sit and observe glassblowing in action.

I will report on the exhibit I had come to explore and write about later. Today I just want to share the photographs from the outside around the museum, and the bridge that connects it, across a highway, to downtown.

It was a moody day as far as the sky was concerned, which made for perfect light being reflected by the glass installation located outside in the museum’s courtyard. A bit of rain, a whisper of wind, and later the sun breaking through the clouds on this November morning.

The display was under renovation, which meant that the water that usually covers the steel columns holding up the glass had been drained from the basin.

The emerging peeling blue paint was the perfect foil for the glass. The few places where puddles covered the cement were terrific for reflection. The water was too low and shallow to be ruffled by the wind, so that it offered a still mirror surface.

I had not seen any of this before, it was my first visit to Tacoma. I assume there is a symmetry to the installation when the basins are filled that was absent on Sunday. But the sense of slight decay and roughness in the cement surface really enhanced the impression of pieces and shards and crumblings of glass, rather than the perfect flow perhaps intended.

It probably did not look like the vision of artist Martin Blank who conceived of this installation called Fluent Steps, but I was impressed – and I seemed to be the only one around on a Sunday morning at 11:30 (the museum opened at noon.) I could barely stop looking at all this shiny beauty, the rain softly glittering where it hit the surface. You can find a detailed description of the installation and the artistic process here.

The bridge of glass, free to walk for all, is located on the other side of the large architectural cone that airs the hot shop inside the museum and has a lattice pattern found in much of NW blown glass art. The bridge displays a large percentage of the Chihuly collection that it MOG’s hallmark, with a “Venetian Wall” that is an 80-foot-long installation housing 109 individual showcases. I am, truth be told, not a fan of his work, but walking along these many pieces, backlit by the light that was occasionally peeking through the rain clouds into the cubicles that housed them, was quite delightful.

What stopped me dead in my tracks, of course, was the gift of daily wildlife: a flock of starlings that fluttered about and made its home, on and off, telling by the masses of bird poop, on the top of the sculptural columns at the center of the bridge. The “Crystal Towers,” two 40-foot-tall structures on either edge look like gigantic pieces of turquoise rock candy. The towers are made from 63 pieces or “crystals” of Polyvitro, a polyurethane material known for its durability. The Polyvitro has a strange way with light, not quite reflective, not quite absorbing, altogether mysterious.

The starlings congregating on the various candy pieces, on the other hand, were as shiny as can be, their oily feathers insulating them against the Northwest rain and making them look like little dark pearls on the turquoise surfaces. Busy, chattering, fluttering pearls, I might add.

It was the perfect morning.

Music today, how can it not be: Glassworks by Philip Glass

If in doubt, take a walk

So ok, I was muttering. Venting, really. Blabbering. One of those days when everything that could irritate did irritate. R e a l l y irritate.

No, I was muttering: like unintelligible speech, multitudinous murmurs, mysterious tongues – a living, walking Longfellow oak in human form…. might as well go for a walk and join my brethren.

Eliot’s Oak

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud
With sounds of unintelligible speech,
Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach,
Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd;
With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed,
Thou speakest a different dialect to each;
To me a language that no man can teach,
Of a lost race, long vanished like a cloud.
For underneath thy shade, in days remote,
Seated like Abraham at eventide
Beneath the oaks of Mamre, the unknown
Apostle of the Indians, Eliot, wrote
His Bible in a language that hath died
And is forgotten, save by thee alone.

Photographs, then, of today’s oak trees in Tualatin, where I didn’t care that I have no clue who the Eliot is in this poem that I dimly remembered.

I stopped muttering, when the birds took over with their various honking, trilling, whistling, or whatever bird sounds come out of sparrows, flickers, waxwings, shrub jays, bald eagles and geese. Let’s just all agree on mysterious tongues….

Well, and then, of course, I went home and had to look it up. Who was this Eliot?

“Plant explorer Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930) also photographed many famous North American oaks, such as the Eliot Oak. The Eliot Oak stands “a few rods east of the Unitarian Church in S. Natick [Massachusetts].” It is a very old white oak that possibly dates to at least the 1650s, and according to one legend that gives rise to its name, the Reverend John Eliot (1603-1690) preached to Indians beneath its canopy. Professor Stowe, in an address on the 200th anniversary of the town of Natick, described Eliot as “a man of great versatility, and very superior intellectual power. Doubtless he had his equals, but never a superior in Christian zeal and goodness.”

The famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) personified and commemorated this oak in his “Sonnet on Eliot’s Oak” (1877). These verses emphasize the human traits of the oak, as its leaves murmur loudly with “sounds of unintelligible speech,” that nonetheless communicate the word of God and the wonders of his natural world just as the preacher Eliot presumably did. Also, the final lines acknowledge Eliot’s authorship of the Algonquin Bible, the first Bible printed in America and written in the Algonquin language.” (Source: arboretum/Harvard/edu)

Can I take off and go back to muttering now?

Or listen to some Wagnerian forest murmurs?

In Flight

I have few words of my own to offer today, so that there is more time to read the words in the attached link.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-redefine-racism

If the photographs of ospreys seem unconnected – well, they are mostly captured in flight and I will be flying too, reading Kendi en route to the East Coast. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC. His newest book just came out: How to Be an Antiracist. His previous book, STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA, won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

It will be the usual, then, the occasional Art on the Road report, but no regular posts until I return from my travels. And speaking of which: here is a proposal by the German Green Party to ban domestic flights by the year 2035. In a country the size of Germany that is conceivable, if trains pick up the slack. Not so much here, when you consider what it would take to visit anywhere in the country….

In any case – I’m off. Just think: you’re getting a break!

Music offers a couple of selections for Labor Day!

The chickens will come home to roost

On my way home in the car from a terrific but exhausting weekend at Maryhill Museum (more on that to come later this week) I heard an interview with Christine Lagarde, leader of the IMF until recently.

When asked about what had possibly confounded her in all her years in leadership positions, she answered, “A study that showed that 90% of the 189 membership countries of the International Monetary Fund had legal and/or constitutional restrictions, discriminating against women.”

Here is more on that. We are talking about issues concerning inheritance, or custody of children, or being allowed to own businesses. Some countries forbid women from doing specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws against sexual harassment in the workplace and there are 18 countries where women can be legally prevented from working. And this is only a partial list!

And here is the link to the interview.

Season 8, Episode 51

Time for change(s,) no clucking allowed.

Horticulturist Hummers

By now you might have noticed that this week’s blogging is dedicated to the beautiful things in my immediate vicinity – bugs, bees, bird, flowers, you name it. It was an attempt to remind myself that you do not have to travel far to find wonder – I had just declined an invitation to a wedding in an exotic location, my (now thwarted) lust for adventure severely at odds with my desire to reduce my carbon foot print, and to boycott a destination life-style, among other reasons.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with travel – it will always be one of my favorite things. I just want to be more conscious in what kind of travel I choose and for what reason.

Sunday’s chance encounter with the hummingbird (Kolibri) in these first two photographs, and the many more I found in my archives, was the best possible reassurance that I want for nothing in the beauty-and-awe department.

Hummingbirds are important pollinators; the fluttering of their wings moves loose pollen around until it finds its destination. Their bills are often covered with sticky pollen that gets transferred to the next flower when they move on to take another nectar sip somewhere else. And pollen even sticks to their heads when they move deep into a blossom, brushing again the anther. True friends of any garden.

Here is a clip that shows them drinking:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtUQ_pz5wlo

Below is a poem by Pablo Neruda that paints with words the colors and the joy you feel when near these oscillating creatures.

Ode to the Hummingbird

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged

Music is a sincere hommage to the poet:

Ospreys

The osprey, or more specifically the western osprey (Pandion haliaetus) has many names. It is also known as sea hawk, river hawk, and fish hawk — and is a diurnal, fish-eating bird of prey with a cosmopolitan range. I don’t remember all the details, but some early scientist screwed up his Greek mythology memory bits when naming the bird. Savigny, the ornithologists, remembered something about a Greek king named Pandion and a bird. Never mind that it was his daughters and their awful husband who were turned into birds…. here, I looked it up. You’re welcome.

At least I know the common name – in contrast to one of my favorite poets of all time, Billy Collins….but then again he makes a poem out of it that, just like yesterday’s, so very much values connectivity. Naming. Knowing. Taking in.

The poem I really wanted to think about today, though, is the next one – hey, it’s Friday, you have all weekend to read a double dose.

Here is the bio blip from the poet’s website:

HAI-DANG PHAN is the author of Reenactments: Poems and Translations (Sarabande, 2019). His writing has been recognized by fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the American Literary Translators Association, and has appeared in Lana Turner, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2016. Born in Vietnam, he grew up in Wisconsin and currently lives in Iowa City.

Osprey

The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey is of course an American multi-mission, tiltrotor military aircraft with both vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and short takeoff and landing. – Note, it is a military transport aircraft. I thought in this week where the saber rattling towards Iran was drowned out by the concerted din of the legal attacks on abortion, we might pause and think.

Two musical moments: Haydn’s description of an eagle soaring on his strong wings…

and, since my role this week was to catch the birds for you, a true war horse, or should it be war bird….Mozart and I wish you a delightful weekend!

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Sound Analogies

Staying Put

Migration

Merriam Webster to the Rescue

Shiny

If in doubt, take a walk

Eliot’s Oak

In Flight

The chickens will come home to roost

Horticulturist Hummers

Ospreys