Field Notes #5: Saw-whet Flying
You are reading the weekly poetry newsletter, "Entangled Worlds: A Field Guide to Hope in a World Unraveling." Read more about it here.
Come here, wanderers. Sit by the fire for a time. Let’s trade a story or two. It is the season for such things. The veil lifts between this world and another. Saturn rises high, rings shining. And the mountains call us away home.
It is easy to feel lost in such times. Society crumbles away beneath us. Protections that were centuries in the making are wiped away with nary a sigh. But everywhere I see those building the world we want to live in. Feeding the hungry. Housing the homeless. Protecting creatures no one else even notices. Fighting fiercely for lands others would trade for pennies.
We don’t need to find a better world. It is already here. We know the way. Or, rather, each of us knows some small part of it. So take this feathered call with you. Let it guide you away home.
Come Away Home
Golden leaves tumble down.
The flame of the day sputters low.
Shhh listen.
Listen for the call in the dark.
Listen to the beaver’s moon smile.
Come away, come away,
wisp in the dark.
Come away, come away,
Child of the night.
Come away,
little white-crowned one.
The mountains call you
in mist and darting shadows.
Saturn rises beacon-bright.
Feather-light you must away.
Come away, come away,
Jewel-eyed one.
Come away home.
This poem was inspired by a saw-whet owl banding trip I recently took in western Maryland. Northern saw-whet owls are tiny owls that call the northern boreal forests of Turtle Island their home. As the nights get colder, the owls migrate hundreds of miles across the continent, fanning out to find coniferous sky islands in the Rocky Mountains in the West and the Appalachian Mountains in the East. We wouldn't know much about their journey (and hardly anyone had even seen one) until a grassroots banding project called Project Owlnet began 23 years ago. Now 125 partner stations and thousands of volunteers stay up all night October through November to band these tiny owls so that we can track their journeys to and from their homes.
Permitted bird bander and former NWF Chief Scientist Doug Inkley oversees a group of trained volunteers at a northern saw-whet banding station in western Maryland. The birds are lured into mist nets with the sound of a mating male. They are then banded, weighed, measured, and aged (this last part using UV light to see young red feather growth). They are released back into the forest to continue on their journey. | © N.A. Chapman
Interested in finding a birding club trip to a local station or volunteering beside experienced banders? Read more about the Owlnet Project or find a banding station near you. Will you have dark chocolate s'mores courtesy of the former National Wildlife Federation Chief Scientist Doug Inkley like I did? Probably not. But you could meet some elusive feathered friends, and that's all the treat in the world.
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