Yes.
I’m one of those middle-aged people who loves birds.
Always drawn to the cardinals, mourning doves, and chickadees that provided the soundtrack of my childhood,
I’ve now gone all in.
I go on guided walks.
I own expensive binoculars.
I have a “Life List.”
A noisy annoyance to some, I can distinguish the different calls in each spring morning’s dawn chorus
like my own children’s voices.
The poet me especially loves the lore, the symbolism, the ages-old mythology
carried on the wings of birds.
A bird encounter in never mundane
– always synchronous –
if you’re available to receive the message.
Recently, it’s been catbirds.
From my river-adjacent home to my cross-county workplace on the sound,
The catbirds are calling, singing,
alighting atop fence posts and overhead wires in my line of sight
This morning I swear the one that hopped down the grassy slope
made direct eye contact
as I parked my car.
Grey catbirds are known for their vocal prowess;
Because of their super-charged syrinx (the already unique avian vocal organ)
catbird calls and sounds exceed the typical bird’s repertoire
including, yes, mimicry of their noted feline adversary…
a rather cheeky move for a tiny creature with hollow bones.
It seems most symbols have both a light and shadow side.
For the catbird, this dichotomy is the thing:
The courage, the audacity to mock one’s foe!
The deceit, the dishonest to misrepresent oneself!
In Greek mythology, the nymph Syrinx (for whom the bird’s vocal organ was named)
transformed herself into reeds at the river’s edge,
to escape pursuit by Pan
who then created his signature piped instrument from her very being.
Thus her body was spared, but her voice still captured
the male aggressor claiming it as his own.
We are all creatures of an indescribable intricate nature:
dawn and dusk more than light and dark.
The catbird loves to dwell in the shadowy, guarded thicket
along the edges of what we know,
singing our selves to life.
