BONUS EPISODE: Words in Flight

Bird Note presents One of the first books, pieces of literature anyway, that I read as a child was this book by an author named Fred Bodsworth called The Last of the Curlews. And it was this beautiful story about the last of a bird that's now extinct, the Eskimo curlew. And I remember reading that book and then I saw an ABC after school special that like set me on fire. Right. Because I was like, oh, wow, this bird is gone. And in my mind, though, I was like, maybe it's not gone. Maybe it's there. But, you know, as the writer had written this story from the point of view of a bird, it's like he had become this bird in a way. And so I went on to read other writers that were writing about nature, sometimes writing specifically about birds. And that was sort of the genesis for me, that maybe while I was stealing the eggs somewhat, that was singing to me in a way that said, OK, when you hatch, you get to write about birds yourself. From Bird Note, this is Words in Flight, a celebration of contemporary poetry about birds. I'm Mark Bramhill. There's something about writers and birds. Take Emily Dickinson's Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, or John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, Shakespeare's works mention birds more than 600 times. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, it is not to come. This hour, we'll hear selections from episodes of Bird Note Daily and Bring Birds Back. They feature poets sharing what birds mean to them and what they teach us about ourselves and our world. Poetry has a reputation for being inaccessible or hard to understand. But just like with birds, you don't need to be an expert to find joy and delight. We started with ornithologist, naturalist, and writer, Dr. J. Drew Lanham. When you hatch, you get to write about birds yourself. Who did eventually get to write about birds himself. Although it took him a while to get there. I wasn't doing what I loved to do. I was doing what others thought I should do. And part of the way that I stayed alive during that period of time that I was living by expectation was to write little bits and pieces about birds, but really more thinking about the writing and reading it. And so then, when I finally hatched into my own in enough confidence to say, no, I'm not doing what you want me to do, I'm going to do what I love to do, I started writing about birds. Sometimes Drew was writing ornithology research papers, other times verses about connecting with the birds around him. Like in his poem, Sparrow Envy. I would slink between sedges, chip unseen from brambles, skulk deep within hedges, and desire the ditches grown wild. I would find great joy in the mist-sodden morning, sing humble pleas from the highest weeds, and plead for the gray days to stay. Sparrows are often written off as just little brown birds because of how common they are. But Drew is hardly the only poet to be inspired by them. In her poem, Sparrow, What Did You Say? Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon works through a major life decision while listening to a white-crowned sparrow from her porch. I wrote this poem when my husband and I were trying to have a child and maybe contemplating stopping fertility treatments. And so I was sort of in this moment in my life where I was like, well, maybe it's time to release this idea. And what would that feel like? And so this poem kind of deals with that duality of different possible futures. Sparrow, what did you say? A whole day without speaking. Rain, then sun, then rain again. A few plants in the ground, newbie leaves tucked in black soil. And I think, I'm good at this. This being alone in the world, the watching of things growing. This older me. The she in comfortable shoes and no time for dishes. The she who spent an hour trying to figure out that the bird with the three-note descending call is just a sparrow. What would I do with a kid here? Teach her to plant? Watch her like I do the lettuce leaves tenderly. Place her palms in the earth. part her black hair like planting a seed? Or would I selfishly demand this day back? A full, untethered day trying to figure out what bird was calling to me and why. Figuring out it was a sparrow was just hilarious to me because I kept being like, what is that beautiful sound? And it was just a sparrow. Not that a sparrow should be just a sparrow, but, you know. And it was that kind of, wow, I just probably spent an hour doing that. And that's not something you could do if you had a toddler. Perhaps if you had a child at all, I don't know. I'm happily child-free and it was the right decision for us but I do think that poem was me letting go in some ways of that idea of maybe having a kid in my life and also the idea of holding on to what it is to be a child-free person and to have a sort of freedom as an artist to play in the world. And I think it was an afternoon when, of course, I thought the work I was doing was trying to identify a bird. But the work I was doing was deeply deciding on whether or not I wanted to be a mother. Ada has loved birds all her life, and this was not the first time she'd turned to them for comfort. When she moved to Kentucky for her husband's work, she struggled to adjust to her new home. One of the ways that I get to know any place and get connected and to feel grounded and, you know, feel like I'm not just swimming out into the universe, not knowing where I am, is to name birds and plants and trees. And I was sort of doing that work and just sort of, you know, just naming what kind of tree is that, what, you know, that's this and this. And in her research on the local plants and animals, Ada looked up the state bird of Kentucky, it's the Northern Cardinal, and the idea of a state bird resonated with her and inspired this poem. State Bird Confession I did not want to live here Not among the golden rod, wild onions, or the drop seed Not waist high in the barrel-aged brown corn water not with the million-dollar racehorses, nor the tightly wound round hay bales, not even in the old tobacco waystation we live in, with its heavy metal safe doors that frame our bricked bedroom like the mouth of a strange beast yawning to suck us in each night like air. I denied it, this new land. But love, I'll concede this. Whatever state you are, I'll be that state's bird The loud, obvious blur of song people point to When they wonder where it is you've gone I'd kept thinking of me being the poet Of the state bird being the one who makes the song So I thought while he's working on his business My business will be to make music and to sing. So that's where that poem came from. Ada would go on to be named the first Latina U.S. Poet Laureate. Even if you don't know much about birds, you might be aware of how, for some species, when males are trying to attract a mate, they do these elaborate dances and songs. Their rituals can be beautiful and complex, and sometimes birds seem to understand courtship better than humans. Years ago, poet Danika Kelly was trying to figure out how to date when she saw a nature documentary about a bowerbird. When it comes to jewels, blue is undoubtedly his favorite. Male satin bowerbirds will gather all the blue items they can find, build a beautiful structure called a bower, and do a dance to try and woo the females. And this caught her attention. And so I turned to the birds because they're much smarter than I am. They have systems in place. And I thought there might be some comfort in having a system of my own. I just wish that there was like a dance I could do. And then like a woman could just be like, yes, no. And I would be like, OK, great. Just be clear. But that was, that's not really how that works. And this inspired a series of poems, reflecting on the Bowerbird and this idea of courtship. Bower. Consider the Bowerbird and his obsession of blue. And then the island light, the acacia, the grounded beasts. Hear the iron smell of blood, the sweet marrow, fields of grass and bone. And there, the bowerbird. Watch as he manicures his lawn, puts in all places a bit of blue, a turning leaf. And then how the female finds him, lacking all that blue for nothing. The second one shares the same title. The sequencing sort of allows the poem to build it in a different kind of way or resonate in a different kind of way. And it's driven a little bit more by sound, like the repetition of the O sounds, groomed ground, his wooing place. And I think that that movement into sound helps me sort of then figure out, oh, is this what I'm interested in? It provides that sort of bridge between the originary experience of watching the documentary and then why I feel compelled to spend time with this bird and with this image. Bower. The bower bird finds a bluer eye to line his nest, his groomed ground, his wooing place. The bluer eye does break and weep when the bower bird leaves or brings leaves or branches or bits of simple blue string. The bluer eye does look and look and flinch at the open beak, the narrow maw, the trauma of being dug deeper into the arched and closing bower. The bower bird has lost his sense of blue, his sense of eye, but the string tangles beautifully on his dark, clean grounds. And with the third and final part of this sequence, the speaker of the poem talks to us directly to address the idea of wooing a partner. and how it can feel foreign, as though she has a different species. I think one of the things that the speaker knows is that she is not a bowerbird. And there's this sense of resignation, like who will listen to the song of a nut-brown hen? Right? Like that's not who does the singing. That's not who does the wooing. Bower. A small hat, the fedora, gray, blue-banded tweed, sits atop an unkempt nest, my unpicked hair, a bromeliad in the canopy. This is a failure. This ill-fitted hat, these boy things, these men things, this hurried disrobing, my ashen body and untrimmed nails. But who will listen to the song of a nut-brown hen? In case you're worried, Danika did eventually untangle the mysteries of courtship. She married writer Melissa Phoebus in 2021 In most of the poems we shared so far the birds are relatively literal But often birds are used more abstractly as an image or metaphor. Like in this poem by Tracy Brimhall, about a nightjar, a kind of small bird that's most active at dusk and dawn. The bird is more allegorical, about the end of a relationship. Obad with a broken neck. The first night you don't come home, summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return. But I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices. The way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, Her body the arrow of longing aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash, not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. The poem is an obod, a lyric form of poetry that one lover would sing to another before they had to part in the morning. Traditionally, this type of poem was simple and romantic. So Romeo and Juliet fighting over whether it's a lark or a nightingale is really a debate over whether or not he's got to roll out of bed and climb out the window or if he can stay and snuggle for a few more minutes. But in this poem, the parting is very different. There's something else going wrong in the relationship, and that's why the relationship's going to be over. So instead of a sweet love poem where the parting is just the fault of the sun, there's something else darker happening with it. Many poets write about birds in a romantic style, exalting nature as this pristine thing, separate from people. But Brimhall's work has a level of intimacy, a more everyday and immediate view of nature. Fledgling I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries in the garden, ripened ovaries reddening their mouths. You take down the hanging basket and show it to our son. A nest, secret as a heart, throbbing between flowers. Look, but don't touch, you instruct our son, who has already begun to reach for the black globes of a new bird's eyes, wanting to touch the world, to know it. Disappointed, you say, common house finch, as if even banal miracles aren't still pink and blind and heaving with life. When the cat your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful. I'd never seen a man grieve like that for an animal. I held you like a victory, embarrassed and relieved that this was how you loved. To the bone of you. To the meat. And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy, so we risk it. We do. Every day we take down the basket and prove it to our son. Just look at its rawness, its tenderness. It's almost flying. In fledgling, there's a real celebration of the everyday, of banal miracles, as Tracy puts it. The problem with miracles is most of them are so common that we forget to notice. So something even like childbirth, everybody's like, oh, it's such a miracle. And it's like, are you kidding? That was bloody and painful and gross. But it is miraculous. I think we forget what a miracle is or that it can be all of these things at once. It can be so extraordinary and sublime and also common and also maybe messy. But I think we forget that miraculous has many qualities. After the break, we'll hear poets inspired by the incredible abilities and behaviors of birds. on Words in Flight from Bird Note. Welcome back to Words in Flight from Bird Note. I'm Mark Bramhill. Birds can so easily inspire wonder in us. Maybe it's learning about a surprising ability or behavior, a meaningful encounter with a bird, or just the sheer beauty of a species. And few people notice and hold on to this feeling of wonder better than poets. Ojibwe poet Hyde E. Erdrich has loved birds since she was a little girl. Her family loves to tell her first bird story. I was just a little toddler, and my mom let me go out wander in the yard, and I came running back in. She said, my eyes were just big, and I looked terrified. And she said, go outside and play. And I said, no, there are chickadees fighting with English sparrows out there. So I always knew, you know, the particular birds and their names because my family were people who loved birds and paid a lot of attention. My dad was the one who began keeping track of the birds, making lists, talking about birds that he'd hoped he'd encounter, coming home from supposedly deer hunting with a bird report instead. Erdridge grew especially fond of the little birds, the red poles, the kinglets, the indigo buntings, but not just the small ones. We all were really obsessed with the big woodpeckers because they're just so dramatic. And we were lucky enough to live where there have always been pileated woodpeckers. Like just now when I sat down and I heard a pileated out there, you know, normally I would have jumped up to go to a window to try and get a look at it. One of her poems is about another kind of dramatic woodpecker, the northern flicker. The birds have tan bodies with black dots emblazoned on their chests, and they have either red or yellow feathers on the underside of their wings and tail feathers. The yellow-shafted flicker lives in the eastern U.S., the red-shafted in the west. But in parts of the Great Plains, the ranges overlap, and both colors can be found. And that is where Erdrich grew up. I have friends from a tribe in California, and when I went to go visit them, I saw that they used the feathers for various artworks and so forth. And Ertrich remarked on how they only had red flicker feathers, and offered to send some yellow feathers back from the Midwest. So I went to go try to find some feathers for my friend, and I just had to go a little south of where I grew up, and my memory was correct. They were both colors there. Flickers. Abandoned town on the border, I wait in tedious drilling noise. Flickers, my sister birds, try a hole. Grub full and greedy, they ignore me. Fine, I say, just fine. What have those birds ever waited for me? What's in that hole for me? It is hot while I stalk flickers for feathers. Red and yellow shafts I mean to collect for prayer fans. Hen-bodied, they would plummet so easily. It's a pity they act so disappointed in love. They make their mates sob, sad, wet notes that move them to nest in dead wood I watch, my gaze still, hot Their wings burn right past me One eyes me, the sun in a crushing black rock She blots me bone dry, sends me dreaming Through a red and yellow thirst This prayer they will teach me I don't think people notice them that much. They just think it's a woodpecker. They don't notice. But I think they're fancy. They always look like they were wearing medals to me, like they'd been given an award. Many people don't notice birds. They're just something in the background until you purposefully tune in. For a lot of people, the lockdowns early in the COVID-19 pandemic became a moment of tuning in, sparking lots more interest in birds. And poet Susan Nguyen was one of those people. I was home all the time, as many of us were. And my neighbor gave me their extra hummingbird feeder and we kind of had a competition just to see like, oh, which one are they going to go to? Susan took to naming some of her regulars like Clementine and Jelly Belly. And watching these birds brought a kind of peace. It was a little bit of magic happening every day outside my window during a time I think that was pretty difficult. As Susan began researching her new feathered friends, she learned how much these birds defy our expectations. Like, for almost two centuries, scientists believed that hummingbirds' tongues worked through capillary action. But in 2015... They found out, like, they've been wrong this entire time. Their tongues do not work like a straw. It works differently. And I just thought that was incredible that we went that long, just assuming like, yeah, of course, that's how their tongues work, you know, and then someone actually observed them, like just set up a camera and we're like, this is not what I'm seeing, right? And it was so much more recent. Learning about these tiny, glittering marvels wound up inspiring a poem. In praise of a hummingbird's tongue, so long it coils around their small skulls, a forked miracle that traps nectar, collects it in the beak and forces it to the back of the throat. That's where the hum begins, flicks in and out and again. Something about surface tension, how a dead hummingbird's tongue and nectar will drink repeatedly. A flock of live hummingbirds is a bouquet of white bellies, humming. Something about how hard it is to stay still, be an absence of sound. I name each bird as they float at my feeder, a glittering of green, the way they fan their tail feathers, the way they dive-bomb each other through the notes of their body's hum, so small a marvel. But back to the tongue, back of the throat, anything but the absence of miracle. In her book, Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungy writes about themes of nature and becoming a mother. The title is an ecological term about how ecosystems go through far-reaching changes with the removal or introduction of a top trophy predator. In the titular poem of the book, Camille writes about this phenomenon with the reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park, how their presence had an incredible cascade of positive effects on the ecosystem. And she draws a parallel to her introduction to motherhood. In this book, there are many ways in which I'm thinking of that trophy creature, that top predator who's been introduced into my life is my daughter. There are other poems in this book that talk about the loss of elders as well. And I think that we experience this very frequently when people are introduced into our lives or removed from it. Everything in our landscape shifts and changes. Traffic Cascade. After the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone, and, as anticipated, their culling of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt of the mid-century. In their upreach, songbirds nested, who scattered seed for underbrush, and in that cover, warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and Watershrew returned Ossil, Vol And came soon Hawk and Falcon Bald Eagle, Kestrel And with them Hawk Shadow, Falcon Shadow Eagle Shade and Kestrel Shade haunted newly buried runnels Where mule deer no longer rummaged Cautious as they were now of being surprised by wolves Berries brought bear While undergrowth and willows Growing now right down to the river Brought beavers who dam Muskrats came to the dams And tadpoles Came to the night song Of the fathers of tadpoles With water striders The dark gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools of the river And fish stayed And the bear who fished also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps came vulture and coyote long gone in the region until now, and their scattered seed. And more trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river that had run straight and so flooded. but thus damned, compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don't you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this life, born from one hungry animal, this whole new landscape, the course of the river changed. I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself. This time, a mother, after which nothing was ever the same. Sometimes just looking at birds can be inspiring. Their shapes, colors, movement. Like for poet Joyce Clement. She writes haiku, a traditional Japanese form of poetry. Often thought of as having three lines with five, seven, five syllables, English haikus don't always follow this pattern. Joyce thinks of the form like this. It is a one-breath poem. Usually it consists of two parts, a fragment and a phrase. And those two parts are juxtaposed next to each other and form a type of relationship. Haiku have many common traits. They're often about nature, about a moment in time, or reference a season. In this sequence of haiku, Joyce juxtaposes punctuation marks with images of birds, drawing on their similar appearances as well as meaning and function. Listen for how these work together, and birds punctuate the days. Apostrophe. The nuthatch inserts itself between feeder and pole. Semicolon. Two mallards drifting, one dunks for a snail. Ellipsis. A morning dove lifts off. Asterisk. A red-eyed vireo catches the crane fly midair. Comma. A down feather bobs between waves. Exclamation point. Wren on the railing takes notice. Colon. Merganser's paddle toward warning trout swirl. M-dash At dusk, a wild goose heading east Question mark The length of silence after a loon's call Period One blue egg, all summer long Now gone In each haiku in the sequence, you can see the different kinds of relationships between bird and punctuation. Joyce was initially inspired by the down feather bobbing in the water. Its shape like a comma, moving in arcs with a repetitive, list-like quality to its motion. or in the haiku about the loon. It's all about asking questions. You've got a question mark, and then that silence that it talks about creates a question. You know, will there be a response? It fosters a sense of loneliness, which, you know, the loon's call often evokes, right? When we come back, we'll hear how poets write about traveling and migration on Words in Flight from Bird Note. Welcome back to Words in Flight from Bird Note. I'm Mark Bramhill. Maybe it's obvious by now that many of the metaphors we use in writing about birds involve moving from place to place. Migration is something all birders pay attention to. At certain times of the year, some birds will leave, others will arrive. But human migration isn't always as easy to understand. Poet Sean Hill has moved around many times in his life, between Georgia, California, Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, and now to Montana. While getting to know his new home in the treasure state, Sean went up to Mount Helena for a hike. When I saw the Western Tanager, I flew by. It was this beautiful flash. I was like, okay, that's a good omen, good auspice. I think I'm going to be okay in this place. Around the same time, Sean went to a reading for a book about Rose Gordon, a Black woman born in Montana in the late 19th century. There's a lot of Black folk who moved here more than you might think in the 19th century and raised families and stayed for generations. And this person in the audience was like, why Montana? Why did these people come here? So part of it is like, why do people move places? The Western Tanager, or why Montana? Are wanderings the same as migrations? I came to Montana for love, which sometimes is how we know our destinations. The western tanager flies here for procreation when the snow goes wet, puddles, runs, and takes to far wandering. Is this the same as migration? A life is the sum of grand and modest peregrinations. Communities bloom at the meeting of opportunity and ambition, and can be a way to know our destinations. A fire engine red head cooling to orange to a sunny yellow body with those charcoal wings. The male western tanager flashes conflagration or an eastern autumn in flight. One familiar greeted me after we both arrived, letting me know our wanderings weren't the same. His, a migration. In a stand of ponderosas where a blanket of snow lay for decades or longer, the dendrologist says, These trees moved up from what's Mexico as that quiet water pulled back. A different migration. Moving seed by seed north, generationally migrating to where they had been and where they could live. Never asking, how do we know our destination? Why Montana? One among my interrogations, both public and private, like, how big is a home? Are wanderings the same as migrations? And how do I know my destinations? If you noticed a lot of repetition in this poem, that's because it's what's known as a villanelle. It's a poetic form, like a sonnet or a limerick. But rather than simply having a rhyme scheme, a villanelle also has two lines alternately repeated throughout the poem. In Why Montana, you have... Our wanderings the same as migrations. And how we know our destinations. But journeys don't always go as planned. Sometimes we find ourselves where we didn't mean to be. Like the lost soul that poet Timothy Steele saw in an airport. I saw this little warbler that had found its way into the airport and didn't seem able to find its way out. You know, I thought things were a little upside down in the situation that I was able to fly off without the benefit of wings, and it was trying to migrate north. In the Memphis airport. Above the concourse, from a beam, a little warbler pours forth song. Beneath him hurried humans stream Some draw wheeled suitcases along Or from a beeping belt or purse Apply a cell phone to an ear Some pause at banks of monitors Where times and gates for flights appear Although by nature flight endowed He seems too gentle to reproach These souls who soon will climb through cloud in first class, business class, and coach. He may feel that it's his mistake he's here, but someone ought to bring a net to catch and help him make his own connections north to spring. He cheeps and trills on, swift and sweet, though no one outside hears his strains. There, telescopic tunnels greet the cheeks of their arriving planes. A ground crew welcomes and assists luggage that skycaps, treating bags like careful ornithologists banded with destination tags. Planes aren't the only way people get around. In the U.S., we're mostly traveling by road. Poet Claire Wamenholm's work focuses on nature and the environment. So when she was at the Ragdale Writers Residency north of Chicago, it's no surprise she spent a lot of time exploring the outdoors. It's just a beautiful residency. The buildings back up onto like 50 acres or so of prairie and wetlands. I think it adjoins to nature preserves. The Skokie River runs through it. And walking is like a big part of my poetic practice. And so every day I was taking these long kind of rambles through this like beautiful nature area. And as she walked around, Claire was listening for birds. But there was something else she was hearing as well. I was like, what is that noise? Is it like really windy? What is that sound? And I was like, oh, it's the highway. there's like this beautiful beautiful nature area and there's a highway right behind it highways are something i generally tune out because i like i live in an urban area industry is kind of my ambient soundtrack but when you're trying deliberately to hear something else you really notice it and i was like oh my gosh like it's always there Claire's experience inspired this poem. the blood in your ears. There are no real lulls. You could call the highway a zipper because of the way it buzzes above the ruby-crowned kinglet and the willow flycatcher. You could call it a drone or a moan. I have never heard a vesper sparrow or a dark-eyed junco. A chickadee is hatching crisply from its egg A gray catbird is ripping a millipede from the meadow but how would you know The highway sound is like a strong wind or like a heavy curtain being dragged along the ground It is louder than the alarm call of any bird, louder than the noise a barn swallow makes when it is being eaten. I may never hear a brown thrasher, a pine warbler, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a common yellowthroat. There are 160,955 miles of highway in America. Birds are facing so many threats and challenges. And yet, poets still continue to find hope in these creatures. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, Hope is the thing with feathers. Poets have always found joy and inspiration from birds, and that's still true today. Like in Camille T. Dungey's poem, Clearing, where a blue jay gives her a new perspective. Clearing. All night, the wind blows. And my mind? My mind is like the hawthorn that loses limbs. They litter the ground. Crush the black-eyed Susan. scatter buds over rows of lettuce. Bean sprouts whose greens are clusters of worry in race beds. Blown leaves and cracked limbs threaten our foundation. Water backs up in gutters, seeps into the house's walls. But my mind, my mind is not in the house. In the yard's far corner, The eye of my mind rests on a hawthorn branch, shaken, snapping, hectic, then still. The day dawns without anger. The blue jay I looked for pushes sky off his crest. How splendid his wings and tail. Well, it's not so much that before this he'd hidden himself. It's only he favored a roost I could not see until the storm bend the tree. For some poets, like Craig Santos Perez, writing about birds can be a source of hope. Growing up, his relationship with birds was somewhat abstract. Perez is Chamorro and grew up on the island of Guam. By the time of his childhood in the 80s and 90s, Most of our native birds had either gone extinct or were taken into captivity by zookeepers to keep them safe from the invasive brown tree snake, which had come to Guam a few decades earlier and colonized the entire island and taken over the ecology. And so sadly, growing up, when I would go into the jungle, into the forest, it was a very silent place. I didn't hear any of the native birds. So early memories of the birds, you know, it's basically learning about them in school, learn their Latin, English and Chamorro names, which is our native language. We would learn about their characteristics, their feather colors, their patterns. and we would even do some projects in school where we would build fake nests or color in pictures of the birds. And it was kind of, you know, memorial kind of way because they were either no longer wild or no longer even in existence. Later in his life, Craig moved to Hawaii and he saw so many parallels between Hawaii and Guam. Not only in terms of colonial and military history, but also, of course, the environmental history. Hawaii struggles with invasive species as well. Just like Guam, many of its native birds are either endangered or extinct. Hawaii has the unfortunate distinction of being the extinction capital of the world, where two-thirds of their native bird species have gone extinct. And beyond that being a heart-wrenching fact, it also was complicated for Craig as a dad. My eldest daughter really loves birds, and she was born and raised in Hawaii. So I wanted to write a poem, kind of bringing together my concerns as a father, as an environmentalist. For me, poetry has always been a space of catharsis and healing and a kind of site where I can reckon with a lot of the devastations of the world around us, whether it's related to colonialism and my home island or climate change and bird extinction. And so I tried to come to the page with an openness and vulnerability and a willingness to just feel all the feelings and find the words that will kind of help me to just articulate those emotions and express them in a way that gives me, you know, a feeling of hope, but also, of course, of memorial and kind of a way to honor and to eulogize what we've lost. Here is the poem that came from that. The Last Safe Habitat I don't want our daughter to know that Hawaii is the bird extinction capital of the world. I don't want her to walk around the island feeling haunted by tree roots buried under concrete. I don't want her to fear the invasive predators who slither, pounce, bite, swallow, disease, and multiply. I don't want her to see paintings and photographs of birds she'll never witness in the wild. I don't want her to imagine their bones in dark museum drawers. I don't want her to hear birdsong recordings on the internet. I don't want her to memorize and recite the names of 77 lost species and subspecies. I don't want her to draw a timeline with the years each was first collected and last cited. I don't want her to learn about the Kauai'o'o, who was observed atop a flowering ohia tree, calling for a mate, day after day, season after season. He didn't know he was the last of his kind. Or maybe he did, and that's why one day he disappeared forever into a nest of avian silence. I don't want our daughter to calculate how many miles of fencing is needed to protect the endangered birds that remain. I don't want her to realize the most serious causes of extinction can't be fenced out. I want to convince her that extinction is not the end. I want to convince her that extinction is just a migration to the last safe habitat on Earth. I want to convince her that our winged relatives have arrived safely to their destination. A wondrous island with a climate we can never change. And a rainforest fertile with seeds and song. I remember writing this poem, and you can probably hear my voice. I became very emotional while writing it, just thinking about the island and the future that my daughter will inherit. and of course most children, you know, they have a very beautiful and kind of wondrous sense of awe to the natural world and especially towards animals. And I wanted her to hold on to that before she has to kind of reckon with the facts of the world we live in today. And so for me, this is kind of a poem about a father who doesn't want his daughter to learn the truth about the world just yet. Craig's daughter is still young and hasn't heard the poem. But he hopes that, for her and for others, it might also bring a sense of hope and possibility. Having this kind of fantasy idea of this last safe habitat, using that wondrous magical space to inspire activism and conservation in the present, knowing that we can never create that magical space, but we can at least kind of return to the beauty of the ecology that once was. Maybe if she can imagine such a place, maybe her generation or future generations can actually create a planet that is safe for all species. Many species, like the Kauai'o-o, we can never bring back. But for others, there is a small chance. Since Craig's encounter with the kingfisher at the San Diego Zoo, Captive breeding programs have had some limited success with the kingfishers. There are about 150 alive today, enough to keep the species around, though not to release them into the wild. But the breeding program for Craig's elementary school mascot, the coco, or Guam Rail, has been much more successful. The coco is now the second bird in history to recover from being declared extinct in the wild. Many of them have been released onto neighboring islands. that are free of the brown tree snakes. There are several hundred of those now released back into the wild. And so that's, you know, very hopeful news. Still an endangered bird. Obviously the population is still very vulnerable. But most zookeepers consider them to be self-sustaining at this point, so that's really exciting. We've spent the hour exploring why poets are so inspired by birds. but there's still so much more out there to read, to witness, to experience. We'll end this program the way we started, with Dr. J. Drew Lanham reading an excerpt from the title poem of his book, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves. Joy is the sunrise breaking through night's remains, bright shone new on a shell-wracked shore, A fresh-tide-scrubbed world redeemed what was to is. Joy is on Wimbrell's wings, the wedge in fast flight, wandering curlews, curved beaks' cries stitching top of the world to bottom. Joy is the soul stirred underneath the journey, gaze snagged on wonder not knowing final destination blessed as a witness moored to ground worshipful tears dripping into grateful smile joy is the silent spring unquiet rachel's world not come to pass the season dripping ripe full of wood thrush song joy is all the black birds flock together, too many to count, too many to name, everyone different from the next, swirling in singularity across amber-purple sky. Joy is being loved up close for who we are. Joy is the last song drifting in as dark curtains fall, the sparrow's vesper offering, whistling down in pine-templed woods. Joy is the justice we give ourselves. Words in Flight is a production of BirdMillet. This program was written and produced by me, Mark Bramhill, along with Jonies Franklin and Laura Ellis. Fact-checking by Ariana Remmel. Special thanks to Jazzy Johnson, Connor Geeran, Sam Johnson, Billy Allman, Josh Fisher, and Kentucky Shakespeare. Bird Note is an independent nonprofit that relies on the generosity of listeners like you. Learn more about our work and listen to our other programs about birds at birdnote.org. Thank you. you