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Préface
Auteur
Jack Gedney is also the author of The Private Lives of Public Birds: Learning to Listen to the Birds Where We Live and a compact field guide to the trees of the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2018, he has written a column on local birds, "On the Wing," for the Marin Independent Journal. Jack currently co-owns a wild bird feeding and nature shop in Novato, California.
Angelina Gedney is an artist based in Davis, CA.
Échantillon de lecture
EXCEPT FROM CHAPTER 1: THE SOUL OF THE OAKS Oak Titmouse, Baeolophus inornatus "Titmice always see to it you are not lonely as you walk through the woods."—Neltje Blanchan, Bird Neighbors, 1897 What is the antidote to loneliness? Conversation. Birds alleviate emptiness, and fill the air with sound. This is true of all birds to some degree. Few places are entirely without the speech of beaks and feathers. But it is not mere sound that transforms solitude into companionship. We can hear the birds’ most public pronouncements—the songs of spring or the chatter of flocks—and fail to find our isolation mended. But there are a few birds who make me constantly aware of their individual existences, who paint themselves with every word as beings connected and at home. Nothing joins what has been severed like the speech of one to one. Oak titmice are the birds among the oaks who never cease from speaking, whose constant back-and-forth continues in every month of the year. This is because the titmice of the oaks are the most monogamous of their kind, partnering in their first autumn and not parting until their last. Their conversation does not end, because there is always someone to listen and reply. Their songs are the first to start, because together they have fixed their borders long before the spring arrives. In the sandpaper of their calls there is a friction you can hold onto. And in the clear ringing of their songs I hear spring burst forth like flowers from winter’s silent soil. The Titmouse Song Spring begins when the titmice sing. A few outliers begin their nesting music even earlier—hummingbirds and great-horned owls are heard regularly in December, when titmice are only tentatively experimenting with song. But by the end of January, I hear these gray and crested birds singing every morning, inaugurating spring in coastal California, no matter what the calendar may say. The woods are leafing out and newly strewn with flowers, but most of the dawn chorus is still uncertain and unconvincing. The titmouse song convinces, declares the dawning of the nesting season without doubt or hesitation. I ride out on my oak-lined street on a still-wintry morning and hear that new-year reveille. I step out at the day’s beginning when even California’s grasses crunch with frost and feel the warmth of this music pour into me like strong, dark coffee, insistently repeating: life is no longer sleeping. This song stands out, not for subtlety or sophistication, but for clearness and forthrightness. The classical form involves three to- eight repetitions of a two-note couplet: a higher and a lower pitch rapidly alternate in a pattern sometimes rendered peto peto peto. (Titmice, especially the tufted titmouse of the East, have been known as "peto," "Peter," or "Pete bird" for this song.) Sometimes the two pitches are both distinct and fairly well balanced, but often the lower tone is reduced to a brief grace note or sliding entrance into the main pitch. And while couplets are typical, they are not the only possibility: oak titmice often repeat a single pitch in a slowish trill, or less frequently opt for three-pitched, triplet motifs. In other words, titmice songs are not identical. Become familiar with the most familiar version, two-pitched and unhurried, and then embed the tone quality in your mind. Even in their least distinctive, single-pitched rendition, their voice rings in a uniquely rich middle register. Their song is not high, dry, and thin like the junco’s gentle trilling; it is not preceded by a buzzy pickup like that of Bewick’s wrens; and it is patient rather than propulsive like the rubber-band twanging of the spotted towhee. Each male titmouse has a repertoire of ten or so unique songs. Titmice learn and repeat the songs of others around them, with neighboring males often counter-singing back and forth. Although we can’t as a rule distinguish a bird’s full repertoire without analysis of recordings, we can hear this: one titmouse sings, and another responds identically, giving his answer more force and focused challenge than would a more generic statement to the world. In one study on oak titmice, Keith Dixon fittingly rechristens these vocalizations with a more pungent epithet than our excessively harmonious word “song”: “fighting notes.” I think of this vocal exchange as comparable to human face-offs in which two tough guys escalate tension with challenging restatements of each other's phrases—an "Oh, yeah?" "Yeah!" dynamic. Effective repartee relies on repetition. As my childhood hero, the Horace-quoting pirate doctor Captain Blood, once demonstrated: if a rapacious buccaneer shouts out, "You will not take her while I live!" the most piercing riposte is clearly, "Then I'll take her when you're dead!" I like to imagine counter-singing titmice vigorously shouting those words back and forth between the trees. It’s good practice to avoid ambiguity when challenging someone to a duel.
Contenu
The Heart of the Oak Woodland
The Birds Beneath the Oaks
Visitors from the Pines and Firs
Between Oak and Sky
Acknowledgements Notes About the Author