We Meet Again, My Feathered Friends

These are the days when birds come back,
A very few, a bird or two

These lines of poetry, by Emily Dickinson, have accompanied me on my city strolls this past week. Mornings are greeted by light chirping; afternoons are swelled with twitterpated wrens and sparrows and thrushes. They are brave little birds, facing the nor'easters of March with long songs and rapid calls that hearken the coming of spring. The snow and incessant cold will not muddle their voices. While their chirpity chirps and sweet sweet sweets and tweeps demand one to look forward to the new seasons of warmth with anticipation, they also arouse a certain nostalgia, for the warm days and beautiful birds of the past.


The fall semester of my sophomore year of college, I took one class entirely about birds and another class entirely about Emily Dickinson. I hadn't realized when I arranged my course load the previous spring how much those two classes would inform each other, and - this I say with no exaggeration - change my life. I registered for Biology of Birds because it was an easy science course, and since high school biology was my least favorite class in the history of schooling ever, I was not looking to push myself for the sake of a general education requirement. I registered for Reading Emily Dickinson because she and I had a rocky relationship. As a middle schooler, I despised her, having been exposed to nothing beyond "I'm Nobody, Who Are You." As a junior in high school, I adored her, transformed by "The Brain is Wider Than the Sky." As a college student, I needed to reconcile this past; I needed to understand her.

By the end of the semester, I was completely absorbed by the material of both classes. As it would happen, birds are the cynosure of a very significant portion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, thus I found myself often sharing bird facts with my Dickinson cohorts, and conversely writing lines of poetry in my required birding journal. My goal was to see a bobolink and figure out just why Emily Dickinson liked them so much. I found myself always looking up when I walked around campus or looked out a window. I listened harder and more attentively than ever before, trying to discern a Carolina Wren from a Northern Cardinal. I saw birds; I saw them everywhere. I was aware of them not just outside, but in books, in songs, in films. I identified the White-throated Sparrow's call in the movie Anne of Green Gables; I journaled on the Wild Turkey at Thanksgiving. (Skinning helped me prepare a turkey, by the way.) Through birds, I was suddenly aware of and part of the world in a whole new way. I was no longer simply and stupidly passing through; rather, I was identifying and acknowledging.

Birds were so enthralling to me that I decided to volunteer at the Acopian Center, a hidden gem on campus. I skinned and stuffed birds with my bare hands on Tuesday mornings, and then I would go to lunch. There were so many lessons to be learned from their little bodies, so many poems bound up in their wings and tails. These birds taught me the great lesson of a liberal arts education: dissect the world and put it back together again, always a little different than it was before. Emily Dickinson understood this in her poetry; scientists understood this in their research; and I, I understood this somewhere at an intersection of the two. People laughed at my Tuesday activity, questioned when I would ever use such a skill again. As it happens, now, as a history educator, I interpret a two-hundred-year-old taxidermied Mallard at a historic home in great detail which the students adore. Knowledge, you see, is never in vain.

Unfortunately, that duck is the most I talk about birds lately, distracted by the skyscrapers and sidewalks of the city. Now, I often forget to look at the sky for fleeting colors, to listen for trilling songs, to identify notched or square-tipped tails. I rarely sit in a hidden garden reading poetry to myself, with only the company of a catbird. Yet, this time of year, when the birds come back, when spring begins to stretch out its arms, I remember to look and to listen. As it would happen, this year, I am returning to the Acopian Center, to the building where both Dickinson and dissection dwelt. Six and a half years later, I find myself beginning a new job at an arboretum with a professional development trip to the place that nurtured my love of birding, of learning, of living an integrated life. Six and a half years later, I come back to the birds, and they come back to me. I hope this new job brings renewed attention to my flying friends; and since "hope is a thing with feathers," I do believe it will.