Following the farm visit (which was preceded and succeeded by raucous nights in New York City) I left my love for the West coast. I started this trip out west with a week-long ‘intensive’ in Pescadero. The class was put on by Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness, a progressive group based out of Santa Cruz and Bolinas. They put on this bird language thingy in Pescadero which I managed to work-trade cooking in their kitchen in exchange for some class time. The whole thing was actually pretty cool and started me off on a ritual I’d like to continue.
Basically, birds know what’s going on. Their sensory abilities surpass most of ours and thus they have a keen eye on what’s happeneing around them. They need this because 90% of song birds die before maturity. That means that little guys who live are the absolute best at survival and that’s because they pay really good attention to the forest. Everybody eats these poor little things, snakes, cats, bobcats, hawks and even jays and ravens will bludgeon one to death now and then. But, they can pretty much speak and there are a ton of them out there to look out. There is much to learn from these little birdies.
The course got me into the practice of doing a ‘bird-sit’. I went out every morning at 5:30 am (caffeinated, definitely) to a large meadow with a group of about 60. This can be done in smaller groups of 2-3 also. Everyone sits in an area and pays attention to the birds. The dawn chorus starts up and we scribble down everything we can about songs, alarm calls, flights, and suspiciously quiet areas. Forty minutes, cut into ten-minute periods passes by quickly and afterwards we compare notes, compile an enormous map of the area and begin to unravel their little social lives. Following this with some tracking one can get a pretty accurate image of the daily routine of all the animals in the area.
Once you bird-sit, you’ll start hearing all the birds in your neighborhood. There are a lot an they talk a lot and when you tune in, it’s hard to tune out again. Try a bird-sit on your porch or in your yard or in the park nearby. If you’re lucky enough to live in a more rural area, you’ll get more drama. Life, death, survival, family and society are all playing out in those trees and we pass by unknowingly almost every day. Getting fluent in bird language will be an asset for hunting and further incorporates you into the outer world. Far out, perhaps.
