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Birds inspire people.  Whether one is inspired to go out and buy a bag of bird seed to attract birds to one’s backyard or chase a reported rarity to increase one’s life list isn’t what matters.  No, what matters is that it is birds that drive one to such acts.  In Bright Wings: An Illustrated [...]

Gerald Manley Hopkins, Englishman, Catholic convert, priest, and poet, was born in 1844 and died of typhoid fever in 1889.  In between he wrote, taught, and suffered: it seems he was an unhappy man who wrote poems with titles like “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark”.  Most of his poetry was not published [...]

John Clare (1793 – 1864) of England was known in his day as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, both for his provincial turns of phrase and honest love of nature and agrarian life. Clare knew his birds well, celebrating the species of the English countryside in verse after verse. The title of this post was once [...]

Climate change, Cypriots with lime-sticks, urban sprawl, drought in Africa…it’s no wonder that Europe’s migratory bird populations are going through changes. One of the most peculiar though is this footage of a Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus, and when I say ‘common’ they’re becoming less and less common every year. In years gone by the call [...]

The grackle is the ultimate American bird, adaptable, intrepid, and obstreperous. Ten species of these iridescent ebon irritants, most in the genus Quiscalus, are distributed throughout the New World. The banner blackbird of most of Mesoamerica as well as much of the southwestern United States is the Great-tailed Grackle. In fact, this aggressive avian ambassador [...]

In many temperate zones, birds of the genus Regulus are among the first to arrive in spring and the last to pass through come fall. In North America, Ruby-crowned (Regulus calendula) and Golden-crowned (Regulus satrapa) Kinglets essentially herald both spring and winter. These “petty kings” are frenetic feeders that hop manically, often in mixed flocks, [...]

The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts is a new biannual publication dedicated to, quite simply, birds and creative writing. The title “LBJ” suits this work well - whether referencing a Literary Bird Journal or Little Brown Job, only insiders can appreciate the recondite charms of an LBJ, whose virtues are lost to the uninitiated. [...]

Do you feel it in the air? The last whispers of summer are slipping away. Many of us grow wistful this time of year, and dear Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was no exception. Fortunately, she could find words for the sense of loss that accompanies the passing of a cherished season. One of the greatest [...]

It’s hardly a secret that we love coots around here (the birds, not senile old men!) We love them in their magnificent diversity from their black, beknobbed heads to their fantastic fissipalmate feet. Our affection for them is so deep that we can get lost for hours in the tiny little details that separate Black [...]

William Blake, the 18th and 19th century English poet, painter and engraver, is most remembered for his two linked collections of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.  Of all of Blake’s poems, people are most familiar with the oft-anthologized “The Tyger” from the latter volume, though he wrote many other poems worth reading [...]

Yes, it is time once again for the bad rhymes and horrific meter of a birding adventure described in verse. To set the stage I will say that Charlie flew in last Friday night and had to be back to his hotel to get ready to fly back to England by mid-afternoon on Saturday. [...]

Emily Dickinson is one of the first poets I can remember admiring. I’m not sure whether it was her near rhymes, her life story, her often understated but amazing imagery, or the fact that she really wasn’t appreciated as a poetic genius until after her death: whatever it is that drew me to her [...]

Perhaps one of the best known bird poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle: A Fragment” packs a punch as powerful as a Golden Eagle’s in merely six lines. First published in 1851 in the seventh edition of Tennyson’s Poems, it became a favorite and is now frequently anthologized. The alliteration and assonance utilized [...]

“The White Birds,” a poem W.B. Yeats wrote early in his career as a poet and dramatist, is like his other early works in that, according to Wikipedia, it meditates “on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.” Not a well-known poem, it is overshadowed by another of his early poems, “The Lake [...]

Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a marvel of modernist poetry. It is only 246 words long, divided into thirteen sections, each labeled with the corresponding Roman numeral, and a surface reading will show that it is about, not surprisingly, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. Reading deeper, though, [...]

It’s been awhile since I last decided to write about a birding excursion in verse so I figured it was about time. The Gulper See, the destination versified here, is a large lake and nature preserve about an hour-and-a-half’s drive northwest of Berlin. I decided to visit the Gulper See on Jochen’s advice and I [...]

The quote “What Is So Rare As A Day In June?” may be familiar to most readers (the sentiment certainly is!) but its source is fairly obscure. This line is but a snippet from the most famous work of the poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a member of the gaggle of authors sometimes called the [...]

New York still languishes on the icier edge of the Ides of March, but flocks of eager American Robins have sprung up around the muddy fields of my neighborhood with an alacrity that even a crocus could envy. Though we tire of robins once less commonplace birds appear, these birds herald blessed spring. I was [...]

This month’s evocative avian verse comes from American author and poet, Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933). Her poem, Dusk in June is short and sweet:
Evening, and all the birds
In a chorus of shimmering sound
Are easing their hearts of joy
For miles around.
The air is blue and sweet,
The few first stars are white,
Oh let me like the [...]

I was thinking of writing a poem in honor of the Bobolink, to memorialize its place as #278 on our life list.  Fortunately for those of you who prefer good poetry, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1898) beat me to it. His work, Robert of Lincoln, is a worthy tribute to a spectacular bird.
Merrily swinging on briar [...]