LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
COUNTRY MUSIC
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
"My idea is that there is music in the air; the world is full of it, and
you simply take as much as you require."
—Sir Edward Elgar
A pair of American bitterns romance in the cover provided by the fast
growing meadow grasses. To some ears, the male bird’s watery gurgling noise
sounds like a water pump at work. In a June 20, 1852, journal entry, Thoreau
notes, “Minot says: ‘I call them belcher-squelchers, they go slug-toot,
slug-toot, slug-toot.’” The bittern’s call reminds me of the sound a
plumber’s helper makes unclogging the drain of a deep tub. I hear a definite
slosh as I pass close by the hidden birds on my early morning walk up the
Ridge Road. I stop to look for the birds, but I stand too close to a
red-winged blackbird nest where fledglings with downy wisps on their heads
bounce in raspberry canes, groping for a perch. The parent birds scold my
trespass and, not satisfied when I move quickly several feet down the road,
sit on the power line above my head and rag me continuously.
I see a bittern’s head, long upturned beak and neck. His coloration and
striated feather pattern of brown, buff, and black blend perfectly with
stems and seed heads that surround him. A black streak along the side of his
neck curves to match the bends of dark grass stalks beside him. The bittern
turns his head slightly and slowly with ball bearing smoothness, watching me
with incredibly focused eyes. I want to see the action that a book about
water birds describes as “violent contortions that make the bittern appear
to retch, gulp air and distend his crop and throat to belch a guttural
croak: “oong-KA-chunk!” But the bittern wants privacy when he calls, and
stands motionless, willing to remain so until I move on. The complaints of
the red-winged blackbirds send me on my way.
The gray morning brightens with a variety of birdsong, and I walk toward the
yodeling of a bobolink which, sounds to me more soft and pensive than the
robust love-filled melody I heard him sing in the sunny clear start of
yesterday. The low cloud cover muffles my hearing, perhaps. Bobolink song,
with more refined liquidity than the bittern’s glunking, is exuberant in all
weather conditions. Henry David Thoreau wrote a journal entry for June 1,
1857, that describes bobolink melody in this way: “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.
Methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds I ever
heard. They are refreshing to my ear as the first distant tinkling and
gurgling of a rill to a thirsty man.”
A song sparrow, as full of himself as he was in early April, spills his song
from a perch on a pin cherry sapling at the side of the road. Nearby a
common-yellowthroat song, less melodic but musical nonetheless, rings “witchy-witchy-witchy-witch.”
From the woods I pass, the downward spiral of a veery's melody carries across
the still air. Then the loud whistled “wheep” of a great crested flycatcher
in a tree nearby overtops the thrush song. I stop to locate the
rose-breasted grosbeak whose robinlike song is described by Roger Tory
Peterson as resembling “robin’s song, but mellower, given with more feeling
(as if a robin has taken voice lessons). ” I want to see the grosbeak’s deep
pink chest patch. Following the sound of his notes, I find the singer and
watch through binoculars as his throat and breast swell and quiver with
song. Perhaps I will see the bittern’s performance when I return, for, from
the hay meadow down hill, the bittern’s voice sounds. Over the distance his
voice has lost its sloshing, and the loud “Ka” sound, imitating the sound of
a sledgehammer striking a post, is all that travels to my ears. The American
bittern is sometimes called “the stake driver.”
A yellow-bellied sapsucker raps on a resonant hollow tree, and robins in the
orchard sing loudly, “cheerilee, cheerilee.” The infectious excitement of
birdsong sends me along my way with rising spirits.
When I turn at the top of the ridge to start for home, I am held to the spot
by wood thrush melody drifting uphill from the woods beyond the orchard. The
song, “ee-oh-lee, ee-oh-lay,” the last ending in a luscious trill, takes me
back to a May morning when I walked in the woods admiring the tender
greenery of wild lily-of-the-valley carpeting the forest floor. Then, the
duel harmonics created by two membranes in a wood thrush’s voice box, the
syrinx, vibrating simultaneously and independently, seemed to come from a
magical woodwind instrument. I cup my hands to my ears to catch every note
as the song repeats. I am willing to stay as long as the bird sings to hear
every sweet phrase, but clouds are lowering, and I hurry downhill. At the
meadow, I stop to look and listen for the bittern. The red-wings notice my
return and resume their noisy positions overhead. Mist turns to droplets,
and soon I stand in a heavy shower. The female red-wing leaves to tend her
youngsters. The male hunches silently on the wires. I race for shelter and,
as I reach the door, hear a muffled but recognizable gurgling from the
meadow.
