Warbler Delight
by Amy Leach
Posted: December 19, 2006
The water is wide;
I can cross o’er.
I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred
to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope
is, of course, that I arrive in period dress, but that I not resemble
a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more
probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable
face, which will lead to expectations of competence, I will have
to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain
my age, The Present, also known as “The Future” in the
past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances,
to be ready for questions.
First of all, it seems imperative to understand modern bird migration,
for birds used to fly to the moon in September and then fly back
in the springtime. Now why birds wintered on the moon is a good
question, but this is what people realized what was happening when
they saw swallows flying toward the silv’ry globe. Birds nowadays
usually just go to Brazil or Morocco for the winter. Thus I hope
to be useful to the exhausted birds of the past by explaining how
their posterity succeeds with much-abbreviated trips.
One little bird, however, the blackpoll warbler, performs a migratory
feat reminiscent of birds’ wintering-on-the-moon days: starting
out from Alaska, the blackpoll warbler flies 2,000 miles east to
Nova Scotia. There he gorges himself on webworms and sawflies and
gets fat while waiting for a strong northwest wind to blow him off
his twig and up over the Atlantic Ocean. Once he is wind-lifted,
he begins his 2,000-mile transoceanic flight to Venezuela.
But fat is a gross word for a trifle-sized bird—a
four-inch-long sprite knit of feathers, hollow bones, and heart.
Warblers are not beefy like geese; a goose on your head gets irksome,
compressing your neck; but a warbler could spend the week there
undetected, like a cherry or a shilling. Even with their enormous
hearts, warblers weigh one-third of an ounce, which means
forty-eight warblers to the pound! Their song, too, is
small and sheer—tsi tsi tsi tsi tsi tsi—not
like that of Disney songbirds, who employ feverish vibrato when
filmed singing with castle-banished maidens. Blackpolls sing more
for each other than for the camera.
After a rather provincial upbringing—blackpoll warblers spend
their first three months eating insects in spruce-fir forests of
northern Alaska and Newfoundland, staying within an acre of where
they hatched in June—the tiny spirits are gripped with a restlessness
to pitch themselves into a 5,500-mile trip over unknown terrain,
to arrive in an unknown land. Comfort does not fascinate warblers:
even if you put them in a warm, well-wormed cage in Ohio, come September
they’re still facing impatiently toward Brazil, hopping and
scratching and frantic. “Only Brazil worms, only Brazil worms,
only Brazil worms!”
Terns and shearwaters also fly astonishing distances over
water, but as they are flying and swimming birds, the whole ocean
is for them a stopover. They can plop down on the water when they
get tired and have some Fish Delight. Blackpoll warblers cannot
swim, for they have tiny grippy bone-toes that do not serve in the
water (try swimming across the pool with a fork in each hand). If
they touch the ocean water they become Warbler Delight. They are
not waterproof and they do not float; no, they get soggy, then sink.
And so they must keep flying from the coast of Nova Scotia to the
coast of Venezuela—flying for eighty or ninety hours straight!
No rest, no food, no water. They do not glide tranquilly either,
like albatrosses; they fly like this:
If they are not flapping, they are dropping. With short wings,
perfect for chasing those wickedly nimble Alaskan flies through
thick mazy jumbles of spruce and brush and thicket, warblers are
vigorous and sparkling little flyers, but they do not soar over
the ocean. Daedalus did not build Icarus warbler wings. On long
flights they sprint forward—then fold their wings back and
drop—many times a minute.
They find their way by the stars, they find their way by the sun,
they find their way by little crystals in their heads that guide
them magnetically. And they navigate by landmarks, too, landmarks
they remember every year. This is why sometimes young-polls who
have nothing to remember will find that they have traveled not to
Venezuela but to Ireland, wintry.
If they do arrive in Venezuela, the warblers are just feathers
and bones, all the worm-fat spent. They land on the beach and for
an hour or so just lie there dazed, after their four-day transcendence.
People can walk right up to them and they don’t care, they’ve
just crossed the ocean.
But then they shake off the sand and the lassitude, and they fluff
up and eat some spiders and carry on for 1,500 more miles to Brazil
for the winter, also known as “the summer” in Brazil.
The blackpoll warbler flies oceanbreadths, transcending seas to
transcend time. Although we walkers on the ground like to plan for
sudden, drastic shifts in time, mostly we seem time-locked. We winter,
we summer, we winter, we summer; while the warbler flies from summer
to summer to summer to summer!
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