Common Birds V - Common Goldeneye
The first day of Spring, and blue jays still scream. Winter is one of my favorite seasons, but I still feel a visceral thrill that today will have more day than night. Though the parking lot has yet to notice the cosmic shift from Winter to Spring. One the way to the stream, I walk through a flock of juncos, which are quintessentially winter birds. They are fundamentally elegant, dressed with charcoal tops and starched white beneath as if for refined dining. When they fly, they flash their dark tails which have two white feathers. They call to mind English gentlemen who toss their tails behind themselves as they sit to table. Sadly, I’ve never been able to convince anyone of their fanciness. Juncos are a type of sparrow, and like most sparrows they’re short and fairly puffy. This general pom-pomness apparently overshadows their distinguished dress. But walking through the flock, I feel, as I always do, that my base and slovenly appearance has created an unseemly stir at this gentlemen's gathering
At the stream, a lone cardinal sings. Two robins search the ground for insects. One stops to peer at the ground, seemingly able to hear worms pushing their way through the soil. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a robin to live in the center of an immense sphere of awareness which includes both earth and air, while I am confined to looking into a half-sphere of air. The heron is still missing, or I am missing him. Two ducks, looking like mallards, are flushed by the giant W.B. Mason truck rumbling past.
The pond is almost frozen over as is last week’s mud. Spring is still missing. Two more robins forage in last autumn’s leaves and a downy woodpecker drums against a branch, his red cap flashing. I want to see something that marks the change in season, some bird which acknowledges that this indeed is Spring. But the coming of Spring is not known in the moment. It is in memory: memories of past years, human culture’s memory of millennia. It is in the memories of tree species who watch the change in the duration of light. Now, Spring is in absences. I haven’t seen a common goldeneye in two weeks. In the Winter, I’d watch the diving ducks with their pointed heads and golden irises from the footbridge. Unlike mallards and mergansers, the goldeneyes brave the river, but they spook easily. The only way to get close is to wait for them to dive and freeze when they reemerge, like red-light, green-light. But for a few weeks they’ve been absent.
We are in the fourth week of Lent, a time of absence before Easter’s blossoming of new life. Spring will come, but for now we hear the almost imperceptible whisper of absences. The still, silent voice says that Spring is already here. The goldeneyes can see it. And I will wait and watch and learn.
