Black Bird Ballet by Sara Wright

In September I was patient. My beloved birds were having a good year seeking food in natural places like my field I reminded myself over and over as they remained absent from my feeders until I fell and was hospitalized for weeks.

After November’s first snow storm the grouse arrived and I had high hopes that she would stay. I occasionally flushed her in thickets but did not see grouse’s plump brown body feasting on the remainder of the berries from the crabapple or see her hieroglyphs in the snow.

The turkeys remained absent. When I walked through my young pine forest where chickadees chirp even on windy days, the musical whirring wings of mourning doves tore into the grief I felt and didn’t want to own. Sometimes I called out “I love you” to those birds who chose to converse with me because I know they know.

 In late November when the snow piled up bowing trees to the ground it also brought in the first winter cold; this time the brook almost froze solid. A few birds did visit the feeder for a day or so: titmice, chickadees, one female cardinal, a few juncos, goldfinches, but the absence of abundance was overwhelming. Two days later nothing.

On the first of December someone emailed me a video of the most beautiful Italian Starling Murmuration set to one of Puccini’s arias. Entranced, enchanted, I replayed that video repeatedly that morning and kept doing it every morning for about two weeks while putting out fresh seed for birds that didn’t come.

The worst flood of the year tore up the banks of the brook uprooting trees dropping 6 inches of rain in 5 plus hours and then a couple more inches during the third week in December. Once more my cellar flooded. No birds at all.

I watched the sky dancers every dawning, wondering if this was the wave of the future coming to pass – gazing into a computer screen to see birds instead of seeing them in the flesh. Some days the vision of clouds of starlings orchestrating such an exquisitely choreographed aerial ballet in the Sardinian sky still brought me to tears.  

I decided to research starlings and discovered they are in steep decline, yet still being targeted by pesticides “that kill starlings in one to three days but are less lethal to other birds and pets” (Starlicide). Starlings interfere with agribusiness, so humans murder them without mercy. Even conservation groups are involved in bird killings but that’s another story.

I also did some research on Maine birds.  After checking bird groups, I learned that our regular winter birds are absent throughout the state. It’s not just me. It’s not just local, and it’s not that I don’t know that most birds are in decline with a number facing imminent extinction on a global level. This change has surely been coming but as a friend of mine ruefully remarked, “did it have to happen so fast”?

Well of course it didn’t. It has been happening all along. We ignored the signs. We need more research, better technology the scientists tell us. “We don’t know why these birds are disappearing.” This from Cornell Ornithology Bird Capital of the Bird World.

We don’t? Besides cats, pesticides, herbicides, loss of whole forests from logging, human development, poor air, water, and soil quality and continued hunting of migrating flocks and game birds, climate change, we really do know some of the reasons we have lost more than three billion birds.

But no one speaks to soul loss, bodies bowed over in grief.

My bones ache.

Strangely, towards the end of December I received two more equally moving videos of starling murmurations, one just two days before the end of the month. After the third one arrived, I had to ask myself why. Three videos in one month with black birds dancing through the sky.

I do not believe in coincidences. In myth and story birds are Messengers from the Beyond and they certainly have brought me to my knees again and again throughout my life with messages I did or/didn’t want to hear.

In mythology many winter goddesses that control the weather (personifications of Nature made manifest) are depicted as having black birds as their familiars. Ravens or crows. Much to my astonishment I also read in FAR about one myth where the winter goddess was accompanied by a starling!

Finally, illumination struck. These Black Birds were speaking to me in the language of loss. Yet the starling sky dances continued to sooth an aching heart, helping me to mediate intensifying grief. Such abundance. I think the sky dancers were also reminding me that what’s important now is to be present for Nature’s miracles wherever I can find them.

 On January 1^st I scattered a little seed for the three doves and what I hoped would be more than a few chickadees before dawn…  When the woodpecker chirped, I not only thought of holes but sensed that the whole tapestry of Life as we know it is unraveling. But there was more…

   The most painful memories of my broken relationship with my mother had been haunting me for the last month. And my mother once fed crows as her mother, my grandmother, did before her. To re-live the worst primal grief of all, to acknowledge that I would have given anything to have had a loving relationship with my mother who I loved so deeply, to seek peace with the long dead woman who birthed me keeps me anchored to a present that is overshadowed by our past.

On January 2^nd I had the first dream of the year. In it I see a manilla envelope and hear the words “these records must be read thoroughly”. I wondered if the previous month of painful mother memories might have been about beginning to go through that manilla envelope. Those records are written into my body, and they surface as memories no matter what I do.

 I made a firm commitment to go through this process with as much awareness as I could generate, with the hope that some peace might one day follow.

The next morning I felt lighter. Four doves were feeding in the pre-dawn when I peeked out the window. When I opened my computer the fourth starling murmuration appeared on my screen.

The Starlings were still guiding me.

 They were my Black Birds.