The Songs Of Birds
Posted on July 27, 2010 - Filed Under Environmental
There are many sounds in Nature that delight the ear. The songs of birds, without which the green countryside would be almost a dreary place; the shrill, whistling bugle note of the whitetail deer which uttered only at night and which is one of the rarest and wildest of all woods sounds; the guttural, mysterious voices of migrating herons dropping down through the blackness overhead; the music of the wind in one high, dim, shadowy forest of ancient, straight-trunked pines; the deep-toned thunder roll of the surf beating upon a lonely shoreall these sounds in their several ways bring pleasure to those whose joy lies in natural things and who will not always be pent in cities.
Better, perhaps, than any of these, more inspiring, more stimulating to the lover of wild creatures, is another sound, a sound which even the most fortunate of woods-lovers hears but seldomthe sound of wide-wild wings, the wings of a great company of big, beautiful, fantastic birds surging upward through the eddying air in some remote and lovely place. One day last June I heard that sound in a place so lovely that I think there can be no lovelier spot anywhere on earth.
We were paddling in a small, flat-bottomed punt along the winding water-lanes of a certain cypress lagoon where many tall white egrets and many herons of various kinds had their nests. We were bound for an egret city situated in the lagoon's upper reaches; and, as always when I visit that lagoon, the magic of the spot had laid its spell upon me so that for the time I was scarcely aware of details but was lost and submerged in the beauty of my surroundings. I was in another world, a flooded forest of some ancient epoch before man was known, a world of water and of trees.
On every side the smooth trunks of cypresses rose from the still surface of the lagoon, their vivid green feathery foliage forming a lofty roof above our heads, their branches festooned with long, graceful pendants of Spanish moss. In and out amid the cypress trunks wound the narrow water-lane which we were following in our punt; and in all that watery wilderness of trees, that beautiful hidden lake, which was not so much a lake as it was a forest whose floor was water instead of earth, there was no sound except the sounds of the wild creatures for whom this spot was a sanctuary and a stronghold.
They were, nearly all of them, sounds that were wild rather than musical. Gorgeous orange-gold warblers, which had their homes in holes in dead stumps rising from the water, sang to us now and then, their brilliant plumage flashing in the sun.
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