Taking the Birds to Heart

By Liza Field

02/10/2009

On every bough I heard
the birds sing
with the voice of angels
in their melody....
For this was St. Valentine's Day,
When every bird of every kind
that men can imagine
comes to this place....

-Geoffrey Chaucer, 1380

Valentine's Day is for the birds.

I learned this cooped-up in a classroom with teenagers one February, reading Chaucer's "A Parliament of Fowls" and struggling with vocabulary.

It wasn't a problem of comprehending Middle English; we had a modern translation. And it wasn't that my students weren't fascinated by the topic-love!

We'd learned that Chaucer's old "bird poem" had possibly inspired the celebration of St. Valentine's as a day of romance. Previously, the obscure martyr Valentine had rarely been associated with courtship.

But in Chaucer's medieval poem, all bird species assemble each Valentine's Day in "the Garden of Love," to pair up for spring breeding and discuss the nature of love.

Now here was great timing, I thought. Each February, walking outdoors, I'd heard the early activity of wrens, titmice, even a few early migrants, already rustling in the bracken, seeking safe places to nest and rear the next generation. It was an easy sound to miss, as we in our time live mainly inside containers-cars and buildings-unable to hear any birdsong.

This was true of my students. In fact, as we sat reading this nature-filled poem, we encountered a language barrier.

The poem lists owls, hawks, falcons, larks, eagles, magpies, cranes, herons, lapwings, cuckoos, storks, thrushes, and nightingales-some unfamiliar to my class. They are singing "on every bough" of trees my students didn't know how to recognize-poplar, ash, oak, elm, holly, fir, cypress, yew, aspen and laurel.

As we wallowed into this biodiversity, it struck me that our language barrier was partly related to the classroom walls.

The walls between humankind and nature had grown substantial, since Chaucer's day. They not only stopped our ears to any birdsong, but left outside the wall landscapes-like our own school campus-inhospitable to birds, with few groves or thickets for any kind of wildlife.

We humans were living with shrinking vocabularies on one side of the wall; on the other, biodiversity was shrinking, as creatures we no longer heard, thought about or provided habitat for, vanished from view.

America's native bird population, we now know, is plummeting. Songbirds in particular struggle. Warblers, peewees, ovenbirds, grosbeaks, woodthrushes, redstarts, Baltimore orioles, buntings, waxwings and whippoorwills are showing declines of 50-80 percent, from a mere three decades past.

The reasons are many-pesticides, mercury and acid rain, stormier migration weather, collisions, habitat loss and suburban predators. As we go obliviously about our indoor lives, these collective threats have caused a decline in songbirds so steep it seems like a bizarre dream.

After all, we Americans love birds. An estimated 80 million of us hope to glimpse them from birding trails or at backyard feeders.

But "to love is an active verb," says conservationist Laura Erickson. "Birds are in trouble, and we who love them are obliged to do something about it."

Symbolically enough, our shut windows alone cause hundreds of millions of birds each year in the U.S. to collide fatally into plate glass. Many solutions to this problem exist. (See www.abcbirds.org).

But outside the window, larger problems loom. Far south, in Neotropical regions, much of the songbirds' winter forest habitat has been razed to grow our morning coffee and grain for beef cattle.

Individually, we may have little influence on the destruction of habitat thousands of miles away. Buying only shade-grown coffee helps minimally. But we have far more influence on our landscape here at home, where forest, wetlands and waysides are being converted to developments with few trees, no hedgerows or cover.

Many Eastern bird species need woodlands, underbrush and bracken to evade the nest-invading cowbird and predators (house-cats, blue jays and raccoons). They also need insects and grubs (one reason they are vital to healthy forests), and thus benefit from pesticide-free landscapes of bio-diverse plants, rotting logs and humus.

Such natural settings, of course, also benefit groundwater, pollinators, bats, soil health, climate, and native wildlife.

But since we tend to design our landscapes for humans only, forgetting the other creatures who must live somewhere on Earth, saving our birds will require nothing short of a conversion-a human change of heart. It will require the kind of love that can hear what other creatures are saying and, desiring them to flourish, respond.

Today, my students frequently go outdoors. We've planted a tree nursery and are converting the back half of campus to native habitat-with a birding trail.

We still read Chaucer, but equipped with a broader vocabulary, including some wildflowers, trees and birds, and maybe a bigger definition of "love."