I parked in the usual spot…
…and no, I don’t have any idea how many articles I’ve started with this opening…
…grabbed the binoculars that live under the seat, my bug shirt and, after a moment’s thought left the flashlight in its compartment in the car door.
It was already growing light. Whip-poor-wills and Chucks were just winding up. An Eastern Kingbird was just tuning up.
I locked the car. Started walking toward Turkey Point and, after about three hundred yards it hit me.
The silence. A week ago, mere days, I would have been greeted by a cavalcade of sound. But it wasn’t June now. It was July. The birds that had greeted every morning with song since mornings in April were silent.
One season had slipped into another. It was no longer the season of beginning. It was the season of been.
You’re shocked. Doesn’t matter. You have no standing. The breeding season was drawing to a close.
“Can’t be,” you think. “It’s hardly summer. Birds are here until fall. Why silent, now? Why silent at all? Isn’t that what birds do? Sing?”
I was shocked too, once, by the world’s sudden plunge into silence. I remember the season I came to awareness…
It was my mentor’s doing, of course. The year was 1976. It was June. We were driving his spunky ol’ red Jeep on some of the less traveled goat tracks that bracket the north side of the Kittatinny Ridge–the kind of road that has signs that say: “Unmaintained Road. Travel at your own risk.”
We were enjoying all the birds of a Kitattiny Spring. Golden-winged Warblers. Blackburnian Warblers. Worm-eating Warblers. Scarlet Tanagers. Winter Wrens.
He said: “Enjoy ‘em while you can. They’ll stop singing in a couple of weeks.”
I didn’t believe him. Couldn’t believe that mornings so filled with song didn’t last forever.
(Or at least till August.)
I was certain that I’d heard birds singing well into the summer–and I had.
Red-eyed Vireo here; pewee there. But ol’ Floyd was right. I went back again the first week in July and the chorus had dwindled to the level of a conversation. Young birds were fledging or had fledged. Any need for adult males to sing rings around their territory was gone.
By the end of July the woodlands were all but silent. It might have been shocking but it was also the way the world is.
What is it about spring that makes us think it will last forever? What is it about summer’s retreat into autumn that we try to ignore?
Don’t know. Can’t say. All I can tell you is that it came as quite a shock to me, back in the spring of my life, that spring ends so abruptly and so early. Even now, expecting it as I do, it still comes as a surprise.
The morning that is not greeting in song. And my mind snaps to recall the date. And I remember and affirm the sound of a season turning.
Like it or not, accept it or not, day by day, from here on in, the world retreats into winter. Buck up. Live with it.
The alternative is worse.