Sanctuary Movements, part 2

Songbird Migrations

Add to this the swirl of compromises, persuasions and guesswork — usually pertaining in some direct or indirect way to economic indicators — and it becomes quickly apparent that we are caught in a maze. Call it an ethical, financial, ecological, or political labyrinth. There is no light at the end of such tunnels other than that vague clamor in our hearts called hope, what poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) referred to as “the thing with feathers . . . “¹

That feather, and the hope it has always connoted, contrasts with “a Funeral in My Brain,” another one of her poems, drawing attention to her ineluctable solitude, and to the state of affairs that would see the last 22 years of her brief 56 years of life swamped by illness (eye and kidney problems) and the deaths of her father, her mother, several friends, and her nephew. The three existing Dickinson collections, a total of 1800 poems, many written in pencil, without titles, were gathered after her death by her sister Lavinia. During her lifetime, Dickinson published only seven such poems. Moreover, it was not until 1955 that the first complete set of the original poems were published together following the rediscovery of the original works by Thomas Johnson.²

Perhaps what stands out most poignantly in her three stanza poem about a bird are the last two lines, “Yet, never, in extremity/It asked a crumb of me.” It is this “crumb” that strikes at the heart, both as metaphor and reality. Crumb is one of the stranger words in etymological history, with roots dating back to Attic (ancient Greek) and becoming common before 1200 A.D., and encompassing German, English, French, Latin, Slovenian, Greek, Danish and Russian. In fact, the word seems to track with the migration of birds from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, which raises a host of contemporary provocations.

For example, the island of Cyprus is mid-way along the annual migratory route for millions of birds from Europe to North Africa, 90% of whom are endangered to various degrees. Yet, in the year 2008, poachers on Cyprus killed “over one million songbirds” that had stopped to rest, seek food and water, during their migration. The poachers killed them most likely for “culinary delicacies.”³

Such leaps — from a secluded poet buried at the West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts — to the Mediterranean, are not rare exceptions. Songbirds have migrated from North America to Brazil for millions of years. In fact, in the 1850s, Henry David Thoreau was the first to make notes of the arriving songbirds to Concord, Massachusetts. Two later ornithologists chimed in with data extending well into the 20th century, William Brewster and Ludlow Griscom. Then, in 2008, the same year BirdLife Cyprus reported its statistics on poaching of songbirds, a study came out from Boston University that showed at least 24 species of songbirds arriving earlier in Concord than during Thoreau’s time.⁴

Part 1: Jaguar Sanctuaries
Part 3: Endangered Species: Birds Around the World

Footnotes
1. See “Emily Dickinson — Biography and Works”, www.online-literature.com/dickinson/
2. ibid. See also Poems. Edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd & T. W. Higginson, Maggs Bros. Ltd. .. See The Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Including Variant Readings Critically Compared With All Known Manuscripts, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 3 volumes, First Edition, 1955.
3. See “Animal Migrations May Be Moving Towards Extinction,” AWI Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp.17-18, n.a.
4. See “Are songbirds arriving earlier in Thoreau’s Concord as the climate warms?” by Libby Bacon and Richard B. Primack, Boston University, “OOS 20-2 — Shake-up in Timing in Ecological Communities: Understanding the Complexity and the Role of Citizen Science,” — See “Protection is delayed for greater sage grouse,” by Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2010, p.A12. See also www.doi.gov/