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Running With Birds by Rebecca Pugh
If you are running through the Doyon playground at the edge of Willowdale State Park, watch for a flash of blue on the backs of five to 12 robin-sized birds.
Bluebirds are feeding in the playground, and their colors are unmistakable.
Part of their pattern is to fly diagonally to display their colors, so if you are watching, you are not likely to miss it.
And this: the blue in the bluebird feather has depth beyond human sight. Pigment in this thrush’s feathers bends the light past the edges of what the human eye can observe.
We can only see the middle of the blue. The birds can see a lot more than we can.
Bluebirds, once they settle in and find a safe space, will display their blue all year in the same region.
They sing in harmony with themselves: one bluebird’s syrinx can sing two notes at a time. The richness in their song comes from this layering of pitches.
You might hear harmony in the key of D minor: listen for the minor third in the triplet at the beginning of each phrase, on D and F.
“Cheer, cheerful, cheer” is how I like to think their song goes. If you pay attention, you might also hear them sing while they fly.
All the thrushes sing in harmony: the veery, the catbird, the hermit thrush, the wood thrush, the robin.
Once you get used to listening for it, you hear it in the veery song in the forest, in the catbird song in the thicket, in the hermit thrush at twilight.
Bluebirds have had a tough 100 years of it, but they are doing better today than they were 50 years ago, when the combination of depletion of habitat and spreading of DDT had a significant impact on their nesting success. Their numbers dwindled.
Legislation to control pesticides, following Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, helped to give them a resurgence.
Construction of bluebird boxes has also helped them have enough nesting sites, though now they are choosing their own hollow trees as well as enjoying the boxes.
Adaptations also helped them survive. Juvenile bluebirds took on the habit of helping their parents feed a second nest of bluebird babies when their parents had multiple broods within a summer.
For these and other reasons, bluebird voices are rising again in the playgrounds and forests.
So if you are making your way to the forest behind the Doyon School, or the graveyard at Cowles, or the trail past the Great Pasture at Appleton, listen for the harmony of the bluebird and give a little thanksgiving for their company with you there.
You are running with bluebirds.
Rebecca Pugh, author of “Running With Birds,” is a storyteller, musician, science writer, clergy member, and runner. Her training comes from Harriet Tubman and Harriet Hemenway, Jim Berry, and “All About Birds” at the Cornell Ornithological Labs.
