LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM

IN PRAISE OF BOBOLINKS

By Barbara Tatham Johnson

Maine in March—warmth and bluebirds one day, a blizzard from Churchill, Manitoba, the next. Cycles of thaw and freeze, greening and ice place me in a seasonal limbo. I hover between levels of Dante’s Inferno, sensing the delights of spring but never actually experiencing them as March and April proceed. What seems eternity, I know, will open in early May into spring, and the land will suddenly waken with rapturous renewal, vitality and song replenishing my deprived senses.

Where northern winter is prolonged, true spring lasts barely two months—the time it takes for the bobolinks to return from their wintering in the grasslands of Argentina and Paraguay, then mate, nest, and raise young in the hay meadows and fields of the North.

From my journal: May 9th, 7:00 A.M. I see the first bobolink of the season. His white, black, and buff body launches from a driveway maple and skips in undulating flight across the field, his notes a fountain of liquid song. The morning fills with the zesty joy that will sound well into June. Welcome! Welcome!

My excitement with the sighting results not so much from a naturalist’s five-month deprivation of sensual delight as from a shared exhilaration of life awakened with a surge.

Henry David Thoreau describes the bobolinks’ song as well as human sensibilities can in this journal entry for June 1, 1857: “I hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me...He is just touching the strings of his therobo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. Me thinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever heard...It is a foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all we possess and are.”

Through May and June, bobolinks’ yodeling notes ring across the meadow. In the first light of day the bobolinks’ song cascades over the robins’ chorus, and I wake to a bubbling babble of music—bobolink piano with robin flute.

The bobolink courts then encourages his mate with melody full of rapturous innuendo, notes tumbling sensuously in the early morning air. I hear a message of love in the bird’s song. He is courting me, too, spreading the joy of being alive, proposing I share it with him, and I accept.

The meadow waves as yet uncut, a crazy quilt of ripe grass heads, clover blooms, buttercups, and daisies. The bobolinks rise above it all, level out, and twirl back to the field. From a distance their overlapping melodies synthesize the heat of the day into musical sizzle, part jazz, part gypsy tambourine.

In the middle of a spell of torrential downpours interspersed with steady rain, a bobolink sits on the driveway utility lines and sings as liquidly as the atmosphere. He boosts his mate in the soggy meadow with his gushing music. “This too will pass, “ he yodels. “The sun is just out of view. See! The sky brightens overhead!” I watch the pelting raindrops pucker the pond’s surface and smile to myself, cheered by the undiminished spirit of the bird.

The growth, ripening, and maturity of life in the meadow pulses to the bobolinks’ presence. At times my attention focuses on the garden, wildflowers, and butterflies, but always in the background I hear the bobolinks’ note. By late June the continuous melody stops as bobolink males molt their flashy plumage for a drabber look.

Thoreau, so expressive of the beauty of the bobolink’s song, remarks in a Journal entry of July 5, 1852: “Some birds are poets and sing all summer...We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not their mates: who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early.”

Late in July a bobolink, with patches of ochre, brown, and black “tweed” replacing the black feathering on his sides and breast, repeats a soft three-note yodel along with soft “chicks” as three young bobolinks feed on grass heads and asparagus seed nearby. In late August, I cross the uncut meadow and scatter gold brown birds from deep within the grass. They rise and flock with a tinkling of “chicks” and “clinks.” The bobolinks are preparing to move south. The passage of time, as fluid as the bobolinks’ spring song, sweeps the music away toward the next spring.

For me the evanescent presence of bobolinks remains long into winter, and just when I must listen deep within my memory to recall their melody, on an early May morning, a vivacious bobolink voice announces spring is here. Expectation fulfilled is a genuine reward.  

Editor's Note: Barbara Tatham Johnson submitted this essay shortly before her death in April.

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