'A Sound Like a Rusty Pump Beneath Our Window'

Among humans, complaining is always annoying. Short of murder, rape, theft and treason, it may be our most detestable quality. A complainer assumes he or she is important, and everyone ought to know all about it. When such people don’t get their way, they announce it to the world, loudly, often whiningly and at great length. 

And yet, my favorite bird is probably the king of avian complainers, the blue jay. When I hear one griping, I assume a neighbor’s cat is on the prowl. It’s a sound I enjoy for its boldness and total indifference to any other species. It can go on for hours and I fancy I hear the bird getting hoarse, like a marathon human kvetcher or a filibustering Congressman. The late Paul Lake published “Blue Jay” in the Autumn 1986 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in Another Kind of Travel (1988):

 

“A sound like a rusty pump beneath our window

Woke us at dawn. Drawing the curtains back,

We saw - through the milky light, above the doghouse—

A blue jay lecturing a neighbor's cat

So fiercely that, at first, it seemed to wonder

When birds forgot the diplomacy of flight

And met, instead, each charge with a wild swoop,

Metallic cry, and angry thrust of beak.

 

“Later, we found the reason. Near the fence

Among the flowerless stalks of daffodils,

 A weak piping of feathers. Too late now to go back

To nest again among the sheltering leaves.

And so, harrying the dog, routing the cat,

And taking sole possession of the yard,

The mother swooped all morning.

 

                                                “I found her there

Still fluttering round my head, still scattering

The troops of blackbirds, head cocked toward my car

As if it were some lurid animal,

When I returned from work. Still keeping faith.

As if what I had found by afternoon

Silent and still and hidden in tall grass,

Might rise again above the fallen world;

As if the dead were not past mothering.”

 

I always think of the ability to identify a bird’s song or a wildflower or a mammal’s scat as forms of reading. I feel at home when, like Adam, I can name things. I stopped complaining about the blue jay’s squawk when, some years ago, I found an explosion of black, white, gray and predominantly blue feathers on the grass behind the garage. A cat, or possibly a hawk or owl, had grabbed a blue jay, took it away and left the incriminating evidence.