The Birds at Dawn

     Every morning I wake up at 4:30 and listen. Within a minute or two the first bird begins to sing. Then another joins, then another until there is a swell of loud and joyous choral rapture. The birds sing their melodious and varied tunes; they whistle and chirp and tweet and fill the woods with happiness. After an hour, the songs diminish, and the birds, well satisfied with their morning hymns, go about their day.    

   It is said, of course, that birds sing to woo mates and to defend, or maybe announce, their territory. These songs bring such happiness to me I can't imagine they aren't born of the happiness of the birds. Birdsong can't be just mechanical, no-emotions-attached. honey-look-at-me stuff. It is beauty! It is music! It is joy! 

    Scientists don't like to talk about happiness. They call such attitudes anthropomorphism. Literary critics call them the pathetic fallacy: just because we feel in sympathy with a bird's song doesn't mean the bird is expressing what we would feel if we were singing like that.  

    But if even fruit flies can feel depression (fruit flies?), then it seems reasonable that birds feel joy when they sing. (And, yes, scientists have determined that fruit flies can die of depression, or something like it. Check it out on jpr.org or in the Guardian.) 

    It would also be reasonable to speculate that if fruit flies can be depressed, so can birds. 

    Birds learn singing from their parents, so one could postulate a scenario.:

    "You must sing, little one." 

    "Mommy, I don't feel like singing. I hear chain saws in the woods."     

    How long will the birds fill our woods and fields with the happiness I hear every morning when I wake up?

Hike to Grayback Meadows

    What a hike it was!

    I and four other hikers started up the O'Brien Creek trail, which is very steep, but I was hiking well enough even with a 25-pound pack. (I am training for a backpacking trip in August.) After about a mile and a quarter we took a side trail to a cabin erected in 1944 for emergency use for hikers and, more probably, hunters. We rested there a while, then followed a sort-of path up the hill through the beautiful Grayback Meadows to some rocks overlooking the snowy peak of Mt. McLoughlin, where we had lunch and looked at flowers and admired the view.

Just before leaving the lunch spot. Note the snow.

When it was time to go, Cheryl suggested it would be easier to continue up the slope to meet the Boundary Trail and return to the trailhead that way than to slip-slide down the meadow the way we had come. So we started up.

    7000-foot Grayback Mountain, where we were hiking, still had thick banks of snow above us. That much snow in June is a gladsome sight, but, of course, the snow is melting fast, and the slope we were climbing had turned into a steep marsh with rivulets of snowmelt gushing down in sheets. So it was both a steep and a slippery climb. Oh, my God, it was hard to get up that hill! And me with a 25-pound pack. Thank goodness I was hiking with poles. They pulled me up the mountain.

    When we finally got to the Boundary Trail, we took a moment to congratulate ourselves,

then turned right to go back to the O'Brien Creek trail.

    I thought the hard part was over.

    Not true! The storms of last sinter had hurled winds down the mountain, toppling trees in a long, wide swath. We clambered over big logs, trying not to scratch bare legs on broken knobs. We walked down logs like walking tightropes, then had to jump off at the end. Maybe the hardest thing was climbing through tangled branches of two or three trees that had fallen together. What a mess it was! We would get through one net of tangled tree trunks and branches and find, just ahead, another mess. It didn't end until we were almost to the side trail to the cabin.

    The only treacherous thing after that was a steep section where the trail was covered with slippery pine needles. I went down once, as my right foot slipped, but I half-stood again before I hit the ground, only to have the weight of the pack push me down again, and my left foot slipped. Once again I righted myself before I hit the ground and this time managed to stand. The hiker behind me said it looked like I had done telemark turns on a ski slope.

    It was a hard day's hike and a barrel of fun. And the wet meadows and gushing streams—more full than I had ever seen them—seemed to refute drought and filled my heart with gratitude.

Approaching O'Brien Creek

    As we drove together back to my car, I asked my fellow hikers, who hike together weekly, if their hikes were always like this. They laughed. "Yes," they said. "There's always an adventure."

   

In Search of Cosmo the Crow

    Samantha Swindler, a features writer with the Oregonian, visited me last week. She thought I could provide some background about the Applegate in connection with a podcast she's producing.

    The story concerns Cosmo, a pet crow of a woman in a small Applegate neighborhood. Cosmo slept in the house, asked to be let out in the morning, came when called, and was as beloved a pet as any dog.

    But one neighbor (we'll call him Neighbor B, to distinguish him from Cosmo's "owner," Neighbor A) said the bird terrified his children—swooped down on them, attacked them, even drew blood. He said Cosmo terrified and chased his dog. This man grew so irate he called the cops, who told him that he could, legally, kill an annoyance animal. Neighbor B threatened Neighbor A to do just that.

    Instead, he and Neighbor C, who also considered Cosmo a menace, managed to capture the bird and take him to Wildlife Images, an organization that takes in injured wildlife. As soon as the folks there determined that Cosmo was neither sick nor injured, they released him, whereupon Cosmo flew to an elementary school and terrorized the children on the playground.

    Somehow Cosmo got back home (I'm fuzzy on the details here), where he slept in the house of Neighbor A and terrorized the neighbors' children, as before. Not much later, Neighbor D, who liked Cosmo, saw him at her house at about 4:30pm. At 6:30 Neighbor A started calling Cosmo to come home. No Cosmo. 

    No one has seen Cosmo again.

    Neither Neighbor B nor anyone else will admit to having killed Cosmo. 

    There is no body. 

    It is an unsolved murder (seemingly) of a pet bird, as there is no evidence of foul play by a dog or another wild creature or of collision with a moving vehicle.

    At first I thought the story was petty—fun for an amateur sleuth like Samantha, but not important. The more we talked, however, the more I changed my mind. 

    In the first place, it's a good parable for why we shouldn't make pets of wildlife. No matter how friendly they become, wild animals are still wild animals.

    In the second place, it's a parable for human relations. The four-household neighborhood is now rife with suspicions and accusations. For instance, when Neighbor D's dog went missing, then came back wounded, she accused Neighbor B of having shot him. (The vet said it was not a bullet wound.) 

    It's also a classic example of the importance of empathy. Cosmo's "owner" couldn't see that her pet was a horror for someone else. ("Not my sweet-tempered Cosmo!") Neighbor B couldn't empathize with Neighbor A's love for her pet. ("It's just a damn bird!") No one apologizes to anyone because no one tries to step into someone else's shoes, and anger and suspicion fester.

    Samantha is willing to arrange a mediated meeting among the neighbors, but that doesn't look likely. Neighbor B won't talk to "that lady from the press" any more. At this point, Samantha doesn't have an answer to her murder mystery, and in the neighborhood hatred and distrust live on. 

    How are we ever going to make this a better world?