Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [23]
The other warblers woke up soon after the black-and-white: first she heard the syncopated phrase of the hooded warbler with its upbeat ending like a good joke, then the Kentucky with his more solemn, rolling trill. By now a faint gray light was seeping up the edge of the sky, or what she could see of the sky through the black-armed trees. This hollow was a mean divide, with mountains rising steeply on both sides and the trees towering higher still. The cabin was no place to be if you craved long days and sunlight, but there was no better dawn chorus anywhere on earth. In the high season of courtship and mating, this music was like the earth itself opening its mouth to sing. Its crescendo crept forward slowly as the daylight roused one bird and then another: the black-capped and Carolina chickadees came next, first cousins who whistled their notes on separate pitches, close together, distinguishable to any chickadee but to very few humans, especially among this choir of other voices. Deanna smiled to hear the first veery, whose song sounded like a thumb run down the tines of a comb. It had been the first birdcall to capture her fascination in childhood—not the calls of the meadowlarks and sparrows that sang outside her windows on the farm every morning, but the song of the veery, a high-elevation migrant that she encountered only up here, on fishing expeditions with her dad. Maybe she’d just never really listened before those trips, which yielded few trout and less conversation but so much silent waiting in the woods. “Now, ’at’s a comb bird,” her dad had improvised, smiling, when she asked, and she’d dutifully pictured the bird as a comb-shaped creature, bright pink. She was disappointed, years later, when she discovered its brown, ordinary birdness in the Peterson field guide.
The dawn chorus was a whistling roar by now, the sound of a thousand males calling out love to a thousand silent females ready to choose and make the world new. It was nothing but heady cacophony unless you paid attention to the individual entries: a rose-breasted grosbeak with his sweet, complicated little sonnet; a vireo with his repetitious bursts of eighth notes and triplets. And then came the wood thrush, with his tone poem of a birdsong. The wood thrush defined these woods for Deanna, providing background music for her thoughts and naming her place in the forest. The dawn chorus would subside in another hour, but the wood thrush would persist for a long time into the morning, then pick up again in early evening or even at midday if it was cloudy. Nannie had asked her once in a letter how she could live up here alone with all the quiet, and that was Deanna’s answer: when human conversation stopped, the world was anything but quiet. She lived with wood thrushes for company.
Deanna smiled a little to think of Nannie down there in the valley. Nannie lived for neighborly chat, staking out her independent old-lady life but still snatching conversation wherever possible, the way a dieter will keep after the cookies tucked in a cupboard. No wonder she worried for Deanna.
The sky had a solid white cast by now, mottled like an old porcelain plate, and the voices began to back off or drop out one by one. Soon she’d be left with only the thrush song and the rest of her day. A few titmice and chickadees were congregating at the spot underneath a chokecherry, a dozen yards from her cabin, where she always scattered birdseed on top of a flat boulder. She’d chosen a spot she could watch from her window and had put out seed there all winter—ordered birdseed by the fifty-pound bag, in fact, along with her monthly grocery requisition. The Forest