Poems by Marcelo Sosa

Bird Calls

by Marcelo Sosa

From Canary Spring 2022

Marcelo lives in the Colorado Rockies above 8000’, where chickadees whistle, woodpeckers thrum, swallows chatter and juncos trill in the relative security of aspen trees, Douglas fir, and ponderosa, spruce and lodgepole pine.

When I hear birdcalls out of place (warblers chipping in a store, flycatchers whistling on a street), I crane my neck to pick up patterns in the shifting seasons—clues in the trees, on the ground, in the sky, in water. I recall crosswalk signs from youth: Stop. Look. Listen. Amid the prevailing COVID haze it’s easy to get distracted by the illness of my species, ignore the intuition of the “more-than-human” peoples and places of this world (to quote Robin Wall Kimmerer).

Early in September, 2020, months into stay-at-home, my partner Shelly and I finally felt the need to “fly” away. Resident birdlings had fledged, and many fellow travelers would soon begin their long migrations—cranes, geese, hummingbirds—puzzling over fluctuating continental pathways in the face of intensifying climate transformation; flying farther every year to arrive at their seasonal destinations.

Habituated to masks, social distance, and the changing colors on the COVID dial dashboard, we snuck away from the refuge of our cabin in the mountains west of Denver. Braving our customary autumn migration to camp among the aspens, we added a visit to the town of Leadville to help memorialize the April death (unrelated to, but still affected by the virus) of Shelly’s longtime friend, Char.

We added, too, a couple of Forest Service cabins to explore a bit of FS history as we went, but in 2020 everything was different; everything felt wounded, urgent and absolute at every turn. September still beckoned in crisp days, starry nights, and eruptions of Autumnal forest glory, but Colorado could go into lockdown at any moment, forests could catch fire, the Leadville memorial cancel due to risk and sudden cold.

So much of that year had been surreal, like a story told of another time, even while we lived it. The west coast burned in September: massive smoke-plumes blanketed the Rockies in weeks of eclipse-like afternoons. Soon enough those plumes would be rising here from our own back yard, a blanket in reverse.

We traveled like a pair of wayward flyers on wings of heartache, relief, worry and release:

…One-room cabin first, north of Salida. Perfect beneath a smoke so thick I wore an old N-95 while chopping two nights’ worth of wood, sweating a sunless heat ahead of tomorrow’s forecasted cold and snow showers. The transistor-radio warned of a brewing snowstorm: a few short inches could become a foot or more within another afternoon.

…And the snow next morning proved that it would overload our shovel. Too far out on unplowed Forest roads and not quite ready for such a drastic shift, we headed for the highway, floundering toward the second cabin in Lake Isabel, a hundred and thirty miles distant. We plodded for an hour before the weather stopped us in Salida for replacement wiper blades.

A Wilson’s warbler flitted in the rafters of the bigbox. Seeking warmth in the confusion of the storm, he’d found refuge, but without food and water in a forest of car parts, he’d eventually need an opening for escape. He looked so out of place, a flash of yellow-green sheltered from the whiteout. We took heed of the warbler’s instinct, risked viral exposure in the otherwise security of a motel while the blizzard raged outside.

…Morning saw us east, then south along a two-lane. The weather a turnabout: sunny and clear, the pavement steaming from a melt as sudden as the storm that froze it (temps had dropped as much as 50°F by last evening and through the night).

…And birds. Hundreds, dropping or landing from the sky, dead, dying, huddled on the rising asphalt heat against the threat of oncoming human traffic.

A day before we’d crept along in a blur of ice and snow. Here we crawled an obstacle course of migrant finches, warblers, sparrows, flycatchers; shocked as cars and trucks that didn’t join this braided weave of navigation barreled through, flattening and tossing whatever life remained in waning heartbeats. We dodged a groggy feathered friend, devastated to see her roll in the current of our passage as we swerved around the body of another, freshly fallen. Locals like robins, flickers and jays—rested and fed and oriented to seasonal fluctuations—warmed themselves along gravel shoulders in makeshift safety.

We wouldn’t learn for another week (after tent camping in the San Juan Mountains and upon returning home to news and wifi) that we’d traveled through the sliver of a massive die-off where in places like Colorado and New Mexico thousands of birds had fallen from the sky, many beyond the desperation of drawing warmth from deadly streets; most likely hungry and exhausted from a journey without proper food and rest. The questions abound as to why this happened. The answers thus far are limited, though a couple of significant—and related—theories occupy the running.

Wildfire, for one: We know the effects of wildfire disrupt migration patterns, sometimes causing birds to leave an area early before they’ve built up the necessary fat reserves for travel. Coincidental to this die-off, some 7.8 million acres of land had burned in hotter-than-normal western fires, releasing heavy smoke, bearing toxic compounds harmful to the health of any lung-breathing creature, especially those in the midst of long migrations.

Sudden weather turns, for the other: Under the best of conditions, a bird’s migration, like an ultra-runner’s footrace, requires adequate preparation, food, water, and reliable rest stops along a reasonably predictable “track” or pathway. Severe temperature swings, high winds and out of season snowstorms (not to mention smoke from wildfires) can force unanticipated redirection and restrict access to food and shelter. In this die-off, hundreds of the birds examined showed signs of muscle atrophy, kidney failure, and a complete lack of fat reserves, indicating starvation and dehydration. Coupled with the fact (discovered later) that other, smaller die-offs had happened before the cold snap, it also implied that a longer-term process of starvation was already in effect—longer than that which might be associated with a single, sudden change in atmospheric conditions. Whether forced into the skies prematurely because of fire or because of drastic variations in the shifting skies, these birds likely started out in poor condition—due to drought, pollution, lack of food and water, and a general, faster-than-natural altering of the planet’s seasonal fluctuations.

As yet there’s no unified consensus regarding an exact, direct cause for the die-off, but all reports and observations do agree that human-influenced climate crisis presented a major contribution to what Shelly and I witnessed that September morning, on the road, after our night of motel shelter in Salida…

… Our next stop at Lake Isabel found us obscured in fog, the water and surrounding mountain peaks hidden in another cloudbank. More roadside casualties—a local flicker even, who maybe didn’t see the headlights coming. Aspens yet in leaf stood hunched beneath the weight of unexpected snowfall.

… The west on fire. Birds dropping. People lost and losing breath…

I felt creepy in my human skin just then—a beneficiary of headlights, of the plastic and the steel and all the ways we spread and overtake and consummately transform the world around us—safely tromping over drifts and broken branches, examining my moral compass. It felt good, in later days, to move further westward to the sunny San Juan Mountains, to abandon roads, cabins and the cold detachment of our motorized transport. For just a little bit. A pocket of crisp mountain air to help unburden a strangled conscience.

In November COVID surged again, another die-off all too close to home, born of the same momentum pushing out the birds and burning up the trees, uprooting millennia of reliable direction. Late Fall fires in Colorado swallowed up the moisture dropped from all those early snows.

In December came a cold, dry wind. A Christmas Bird count close to home too blustery at altitude to really tell who was around. But a gang of ravens, like charcoal streaks penciling the sky, seemed to revel in the crosswinds. And chickadees held their own, deeper in the forests, tiny tumbleweeds bouncing from twig to twig, the multiformity of the calls and songs emanating from their puffed up chests an anthem to survival. Still here, the ravens and the chickadees: still fiercely present, offering comfort against the uncertainty of chaos.

I recall the signs: Stop, look, listen…to the kinfolk who are birds telling us something’s wrong…listen to the trees, persistent in the smoke and fire…listen to the contours of the blustering skyward currents...listen close… clear the mantle of our manufactured haze…find our way to better.