Click on image above and spend a couple of minutes viewing a 68 image slide-show on YouTube. You’ll see male Red-winged Blackbirds displaying their skills – to establish territories and to win the attention of a female. Use your back arrow to return to read the post. The slide-show includes The Beatles instrumental “Flying.”
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Can it really be that when my eyes are closed I clearly see a tiny Red-winged Blackbird, like an image on a screen, on the back of my eyelids? I’m not talking about my mind’s eye. I’m talking about a phenomenon that occurred this week after hours of – over the course of two afternoons – shooting pictures of a pair of male Red-winged Blackbirds as they soared and stalled, tumbled and rolled, sped and spun, sparring their way to the approval of the female, who sat hidden in the pond’s reeds below them.
Each night as I closed my eyes to sleep, there was the bird, a tiny fleck of a thing, red marks in the crook of its wings, visually real in the darkness of my shut eyes. I wondered if I’d concentrated so hard on following the bird in my camera lens, that I’d burned the image into the retina of my eye. And from there, it reflected onto the back of my eyelids.
The picture taking was the most intense exercise I’d ever done with my camera. It is not a cliche to say that I communed with nature during those photo sessions. The best shots came when I’d remember to breathe, to relax, to follow the chi of the seconds and moments that played out before my eyes.
Since I was using a 200 lens, the frame area was small and the birds were often close to me – closer than fifteen feet in fact. And it’s not a tall tale to say that on the second day they came into my space, buzzing me a mere four feet from my head. I laughed at their bold play with me, and I think they laughed at me stumbling, literally, as I tried to keep them in focus in the camera’s lens. Impossible. And they knew it.
Humans like to think of themselves as separate from nature. We’re not. We are in the weave of earth’s life. And if we avail ourselves to the feathered ones, to the four-legged ones, if we prove to them that they can trust us again, they come to us. In fact, at the pond about which I write in this blog, I have seen time and again that they are waiting for us, watching us, looking for a sign that we want to know them.
When I was a child, a younger brother and I got a notion to feed birds from our hands. For several summer mornings, we rose early – with the birds – and climbed a tree and sat perfectly still and silent as we held out our bird food filled palms. In time, chickadees came within feet of us. And on the third day, a bird sat on my brother’s hand and ate from it.
Two years ago, at the end of a season and just before it left its summer habitat, a Heron, who had incrementally become less shy of me, stood on the path I walked around the pond and let me come within ten feet of it and take many photos of it. I had no bird food with me.
With 68 images, an instrumental by the most popular band ever, and a couple of hundred words in this blog, I don’t come close to what Wallace Stevens says in his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
SilverLining 