A MOUNTAIN VIEW

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

This is my Father's world, The birds their carols raise....

In the rustling grass, I hear him pass, He speaks to me everywhere.

                                                        Maltbie Babcock

The serene, ethereal beauty of the hermit (thrush's) song, rising and falling through the still evening under the archways of hoary mountain forests that have endured from time everlasting; the golden, leisurely chiming of the wood thrush....through sun-flecked groves of tall hickories, oaks and chestnuts....

                                                        Teddy Roosevelt

We began our walk, and when a song was heard....he knew the kind of bird it was, its habits and appearance....He had one of the most perfectly trained ears for bird songs that I have ever known.

        —Viscount Grey of Falloden, Britain's Foreign Minister, speaking to Harvard students in 1919, about his late friend, Teddy Roosevelt.

The human being's five senses are our windows to the cosmos, Aristotle said. He didn't mean just the physical, visible universe, but even the unseen divine “mover” and meaning of all.

Using our five senses and our intellect, humans could “see” the big picture and make decisions that aligned us with its divine laws, he figured. He called this waker-upper alertness “the good and happy life.”

I thought about this as the robins began migrating through our region—a thrilling vision and sound to behold.

They fly in humble, brave flocks, pumping their tiny heroic way over hundreds of cold miles, through whatever weather and land conditions they encounter.

They travel like pilgrims—carrying no provision or money—only faith in providence, relying on whatever holly berries, dehydrated wild grapes and grubs, protective bracken or woodlands they might locate for food and shelter, in the land along the way.

In my town, a few residents and churches have made an effort to help these pilgrims by growing hollies —and this is where the grateful, hungry robins congregate, devouring the red berries and singing jubilantly.

If there is sufficient habitat (trees, hedgerows, thickets) in those landscapes, other migratories on their brave journeys will stop by this spring and some will remain.

These include the increasingly-rare warblers, orioles, tanagers, flycatchers, ovenbirds, wood thrushes and whippoorwills, looking for safe thickets and woodlands in which to rear the next generations, protected from prowling neighborhood cats and egg-nabbing coons. Each year, this habitat is harder to find.

Even now, at the brink of February, overwintering birds are swooping their scallop-shaped pathways across the roads and yards, carrying dry weeds to weave into ingenious baskets for their young. It is thrilling and humbling to observe.

But who does? Few humans even go outdoors, now, ear unplugged by an iPod or cell phone, to see and hear any news from the migrating wildlife, the spring peepers, the sap-rising maple buds, the night-sky stars.

When miracles like this occur unnoticed, all around the airless, shut-window bubbles of our sound-proof schools, cars, daycares, homes, offices, heads and hearts, I feel a deep, low-frequency sense of loss.

It is not just that vital habitat is being rapidly lost, as we go about our cut-off, indoor days in oblivion.

This would be grievous enough. For it is the number one cause of our steep drop in songbird (and other native wildlife) numbers—the increasing loss of trees, shrubs, hedgerows, bracken, forest, wetlands, woodland fringes and riparian creek buffers.

In general, people don't wish to plant wildlife food and shelter like hollies or tree groves or thickets, because they don't look domesticated and smooth enough, and particularly “get in the way of the mower.”

Living indoors as we do, ears filled with our own piped-in, mass-produced human noise, we learn our deadening, monoculture landscape design from TV commercials promoting equipment and chemical industries, not from any living reality “out there,” ingeniously developed by God to accommodate many creatures.

Thus the American landscape, once so blessed with rich biodiversity, has been denuded into barren, flat lawn-scapes with no shelter for any creature but ourselves—inside our oblivious boxes.

This brings me back to the sadder decline that allows this disaster to continue: the loss of our five senses.

We don't see the outer world. And looking at our machine-droned, lifeless landscapes, it's clear we have lost our taste.

We can't feel or smell the vivid airs of cedar trees and scrub-pines, of clammy fresh forest-floors and their ancient, oak-steeped updrafts, or the exhilarating, sharp bite of sunlight on sand and mountain rocks.

And we can't hear the mysterious owl-calls, whippoorwill cries, toads chiming or songbirds or autumn katydids or anything calling the spirit into the great mystery of our universe.

Re-opening the five human senses could revive our whole planet—the outer world that needs our attention, the inner spirit that yearns for truth, beauty and joy.

Liza Field can be reached at wcfiell@wcc.vccs.edu.