Birds in Literature

[Sarah Winnicki]

Over the years, birds have been an important part of literature. From the years of the Bible, when doves symbolized the holy spirit and sparrows stood in parables to show that God loves the lowest creatures, to modern literature birds have been the centerfold of many the good story. One of the only things that keep me sane during English class is finding neat literature in my English book that talks about birds. I love these stories so much that I decided to post some of the short ones for you to read here. None of the stories I like show birds in a realistic sense, but they are still cute.

What Happened During the Ice Storm
by Jim Heynen
One winter there was a freezing rain. “How beautiful!” people said when things outside started to shine with ice. But the freezing rain kept coming. Tree branches glistened like glass. Ice thickened on the windows until everything outside was blurred. Farmers moved their livestock into the barns, and most animals were safe. But not the pheasants. Their eyes froze shut.
Some farmers were ice-skating down the gravel roads with clubs to harvest pheasants that sat helplessly in the roadside ditches. The boys went out into the freezing rain to find pheasants too. They saw dark spots along the fence. Pheasants, all right. Five or six of them. The boys slid their feet along slowly, trying not to break the ice that covered the snow. They slid up close to the pheasants. The pheasants pulled their heads down between their wings. They couldn’t tell how easy it was to see them huddled there.
The boys stood in the icy rain. Their breath came out in slow puffs of steam. The pheasants’ breath came out in quick little white puffs. Some of them lifted their heads and turned them from side to side, but they were blindfolded by the ice and didn’t flush. They boys hadn’t brought clubs, or sacks, or anything but themselves. They stood over the pheasants, turning their own heads, looking at each other, each expecting the other to do something. To pounce on the pheasants, or yell “Bang!” Things around them were shining and dripping with icy rain. The barbed wire fence. The fence posts. The broken stems of the grass. Even the grass seeds. The grass seeds looked like little yokes inside gelatin egg whites. And the pheasants looked like the unborn birds glazed in egg white.
Ice was hardening on the boys’ caps and coats. Soon they would be covered in snow too. Then one of the boys said “Shh.” He was taking off his coat, the thin layer of ice splintering in flakes as he pulled his arms from the sleeves. But the inside of the coat was dry and warm. He covered two of the crouching pheasants with his coat, rounding the back of it over them like a shell. The other boys did the same. They covered all the helpless pheasants. The small gray hens and the larger brown cocks. Now the boys felt the rain soaking through their shirts and freezing. They ran across the slippery fields, unsure of their footing, the ice clinging to their skin as they made their way back toward the blurry lights of the house.

I loved this story, despite the fragmentation of every other sentence.
Here are a couple poems I liked…

Gracious Goodness
by Marge Piercy

On the beach were we had been idly
telling the shell coins
cat’s paw, crossbarred Venus, china cockle
we both saw at once
the sea bird fall to the sand
and flap grotesquely.
He had taken a great barbed hook
out through the cheek and fixed
in the big wing.
He was pinned to himself to die,
a royal tern with a black crest brown back
as if he flew in his own private wind.
He felt good in my hands, not fragile
but muscular and glossy and strong,
the beak that could have split my hand
opened only to cry
as we yanked on the barbs.
We borrowed a clippers, cut and drew
out the hook.
Then the royal tern took off, wavering,
lurched twice,
then acrobat returned to his element,
dipped,
zoomed, and sailed out to dive for a fish.
Virtue: What a sunrise in the belly.
Why is there nothing
I have ever done with anybody
that seems to me so obviously right?

That kind of reminds me of the dead gull we found three years ago at the Gull Walk.
And here, for its antithesis, is another poem (my favorite by far)…

Forgive My Guilt
By Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Not always sure what things called sins may be,
I am sure of one sin I have done.
It was years ago, and I was a boy,
I lay in the frostflowers with a gun,
The air ran blue as the flowers, I held my breath,
Two birds on golden legs slim as dream things
Ran like quicksilver on the golden sand,
My gun went off, they ran with broken wings
Into the sea, I ran to fetch them in,
But they swam with their heads held high out to sea,
They cried like two sorrowful high flutes,
With jagged ivory bones where wings should be.

For days I heard them when I walked that headland
Crying out to their kind in the blue,
The other plovers were going over south
On silver wings leaving these broken two.
Their cries went out one day; but I can still hear them
Over all the cries of sorrow in war or peace
I ever have heard, time cannot drown them,
Those slender flutes of sorrow never cease.
Two airy things forever denied the air!
I never knew how their lives at last were split,
But I have hoped for years all that is wild,
Airy, and beautiful will forgive my guilt.

(By the way, do plovers swim? I thought that only phalaropes did, but I dunno.)

I also really enjoyed the original short story “The Birds”, but that is way too long for me to type here. It is very descriptive and creepy (the old Hitchcock movie is okay, but it has nothing on the book) I mean, all the species are accurately and dramatically described to create an amazing bird-horror story. You’ll never look at a Northern Gannet pin-dive the same again!

So, I just wanted to share some of my favorite bird literature that helps me brighten up a Grammar lesson!

[Sarah Winnicki]

Here is a poem I wrote as an assignment in eighth grade. It is in the same formy-thing as Shakespeare. Like every other line rhymes until the last two and there are ten syllables in each line. Its called iamic pentameter (pardon my spelling) It's about birds (imagine that).

Ode to Birds
Oh have you ever in your whole life heard,
Or ever had the luck, oh friend, to see,
The sweet, little form of the wild, free bird,
Singing cherubically in the oak tree?
Or have you ev'r seen the tiny junco,
Bouncing around in their dark coats mody tweed,
Pecking around under the back porch low,
Eating pounds and pounds of the rich black seed?
Do you ever see the large, proud eagle,
flying by with its talons full of fish?
Even the garbage-eating large seagull,
To see it fly by is all that I wish.
Oh, nothing will make my day feel better,
Then seeing a bird in any weather.


By any weather I do not include Gull Walk weather, but you still convince me.

[Lukas Padegimas]

She Sours along the cliffs of white and gray,
As time goes on; what do her eyes foresee?
What is that thing that makes her fly away?
That far away out to the dark blue sea

While sun begins his rise into the sky,
From sight the view of mainland vanishes,
For she flies further out ahead; but why?
As if she feels the island banishes

The tern had made her faithful journey done,
Why did she fly so far away from home?
And why from such a paradise be gone?
From fish filled seas; to jungles of foam

For she had known too short is life to wait,
To see the world before it is too late!

[Lukas Padegimas]

This is the poem that took me 4 hours to make in iambic pentameter for english. It turns out to follow the pattern perfectly and everyone thought it was like the best poem made of those we were comparing lol.

[Sarah Winnicki]

Nice. You kicked my butt!! It's amazing!

[Phil Chaon]

"By the way, do plovers swim? I thought that only phalaropes did, but I dunno."

I believe most shorebirds are capable of swimming if forced to do so, though Phalaropes are the only ones that do so with regularity. I have seen Short-billed Dowitchers, Marbled Godwits and Pectoral Sandpipers swim in the past personally. Great post by the way, I personally love reading Thoreau's descriptions of the common woodland birds of Massachusetts though it is a little sad when you realize the pigeons he is exulting are not of the Rock variety.

[John Sawvel]

The July/August 2008 issue of the ABA's Birding magazine contains an article titled "Searching for the Muse: A Survey of American Bird Poetry, 1659-2008."