5:11 a.m. 53 degrees, wind NNW 7 mph. Sky: overcast and rumpled like an unmade bed; mostly blue-gray and white; some cloud bumps edged in dusky pink. Wind in the treetops considerably noisier than water in the brooks, which were barely invigorated by yesterday's thunderstorms. The world is green, green arrayed in a dozen hues; green eclipses brown in the wetland conceals big turtle and bittern; green hides the ledges; green pushes up walls and fields; clogs channels with mats and canes. Green shade. Green light. Green ceiling. Green floor. Tiny green caterpillars and dazzling green moths as big as my hand. A family of ravens plays on the wind, rolling and diving . . . black above the green.
A deer bolts across the road. Dogs alert in a way they seldom are for Nashville warblers. A hen mallard rises from the reeds, circles, quacks. Vanishes. Maybe two duck families live in the wetlands, one diving, the other dabbling. A red-winged blackbird perched on an island of sweet gale screeches; a flash of red epaulets emphatically disabusing other blackbirds of any notion of title. One March afternoon, many years ago, when we were both still in college, my friend Stephan, an observant sort, reported that a noisy and nameless flock of birds had just passed through our backyard. They were black birds, he told me, with a red patch on each wing. Oh, red-winged blackbirds. Duh. Stephan thought my suggestion apocryphal and began to laugh . . . deeply. Now, fifty years later, we're still laughing.
Of course, the origin of many bird names is not so obvious. Take the name goose. With the domestication of the horse, people moved east and west across the steppes of Eurasia, and bird names moved with them. Goose—the oldest, most tenacious of all bird names still in use—dates back more than five thousand years to an ancient Paleo-Indo-European language. A concept euphemistically known as caveman taxonomy implies that anything fat and edible, abundant and highly migratory, like geese, would be quickly named. And that one stuck.
A black-throated blue warbler and an alder flycatcher sing . . . the origins of their names as obvious as their songs. The etymology of the name bittern, still booming in the far northern corner of the wetlands, however, is not at all obvious. The name goes back two thousand years to Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, who thought the bird sounded like a bellowing bull. Bittern first appeared in English in 1530, from the Middle English bitoure, from Anglo-French butor, from Vulgar Latin butitarus, a combination of Latin for hawk (buteo) and bull (taurus).
The north-end bittern, foraged in a furnace of intense competition, is more concerned with maintaining property rights and raising a family than the derivation of his name. Erect and motionless, he salutes the sun, calling repeatedly . . . an otherworldly sound, hollow and resonant, that sets the morning on end. A voice like a lifeline, mooring me to the valley.
I like it a lot, Ted. Thank you. But no baseball w/grass stain on the seams.
Thanks, Matt. I refuel outside, burn fuel inside.