`Stirred for a Bird'

I’m a desultory bird watcher though birds often figure in my memory. I avoid the competitiveness of organized birders, their obsessive keeping of life lists that turn birding into a species of sport. Watching birds, at its most satisfactory, is solitary. Of my three most vivid memories of close encounters with birds, only one occurred in the company of another person.

First, in the woods along a railroad track south of Albany, N.Y., watching a pileated woodpecker, 10 yards away, systematically de-bark a dead elm in search of insects. Second, sitting at my kitchen table in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., looking out the glass doors to the deck, when an indigo bunting lands in a wild cherry tree in the back yard. Third, in the company of a wildlife photographer I was writing about, lying on the ground behind a fallen tree near Schenectady, N.Y., when a scarlet tanager lands among the reeds a few feet in front of us.

The latter two events happened abruptly and lasted only seconds. In both cases, the shocking colors of the birds, so rare at that latitude, lend the memories a dream-like quality. In contrast, I watched the woodpecker work for 20 minutes. What stays with me is his purposefulness. He worked with the furious focus of an intelligent child.

None of these events is exotic but all carry the charged aura of heightened experience. I couldn’t force their repetition. Their randomness and my powerlessness make them memorable. Only one poem suggests what I’m trying to describe, and it’s overtly religious, dedicated “To Christ our Lord,” unlike my secular memories. Hopkins wrote “The Windover” in 1877, the year of his ordination:

“I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

The line that moves me now is rather plain compared to the pyrotechnics that surround it: “My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird.” On the naturalistic level, “heart in hiding” is the windover’s prey – a mouse or rabbit. It also suggests a timid, perhaps humble, soul, seized by the wonder of the bird – or Christ. The windover, or windhover, is a kestrel, the smallest of falcons. Hopkins chose his species well. With the aid of a head wind, the bird hovers over a field and swoops on its prey. In the wild, they move like artillery shells. I once saw a kestrel, during a demonstration inside a nature center, get loose and dive bomb screaming children and adults. The frightened bird made a piteous sound and injured a wing before one of the naturalists recaptured it.

The Oxford English Dictionary takes its first citation of windover from the English naturalist John Ray. He wrote in 1674: “The Kestrell or Stannel, in some places the Windover.” In 1789, Gilbert White published one of my favorite books by a naturalist, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne: “The kestrel, or windhover, has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the while being briskly agitated.” And in 1864, in “Aylmer’s Field,” Tennyson wrote: “For about as long/As the wind-hover hangs in balance.” It’s notable that both White and Tennyson focus on the same characteristic windover behavior as Hopkins, “his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him.”