Poems by Lisa Novick

Elderberry Music

by Lisa Novick

From Canary Summer 2022

Currently living on a clay floodplain near an oak and hornbeam forest above the Yvette River in the Paris Basin, Lisa usually lives on a granitic alluvial fan near chaparral above the Arroyo Seco, a tributary of the channelized Los Angeles River.

Summer mornings at home in Southern California, I like to lie in bed and listen to the birds feasting in the elderberry tree in my backyard. Despite the hum of the nearby freeway, I can hear wings flapping and branches rustling as the birds hop from one cluster of dark blue berries to another, gobbling away. I hear no chirping, chattering, or squawking, only bursts of wings to maintain balance on swaying branches. High notes from sparrows and wrentits, low notes from scrub jays and band-tailed pigeons, and middle-range notes from towhees and mockingbirds combine to create the unsteady, ever-changing music of the feast. One summer morning, I wake to so much feasting that the music isn’t music at all, just a blur of sound, one burst of flapping indistinguishable from another, so many birds in the elderberry’s canopy that the sound is at once monolithic, textured, and tremulous.

The deepest, richest sound comes from the band-tailed pigeons, skittish steel-gray birds that, despite being the size of crows, are extremely shy. They are as wary as their ubiquitous smaller relatives, the rock pigeons, are confident. In the morning, when the elderberry is in fruit, the band-tailed pigeons are the first to arrive… and the first to leave, comfortable in my yard when there’s little or no activity and daylight is only a suggestion on the horizon. Traveling in small groups, these mauve-breasted, yellow-footed pigeons clamber through the canopy, throwing out their wings again and again, each burst of flapping like the rumble of muted timpani.

Even when the band-tailed pigeons are high in the tree, their sudden departure doesn’t take much: an unfamiliar sound, a chattering squirrel, a dog door banging. I can’t help but think the pigeons are right to be wary. In the American Southwest, they are “harvested” in the tens of thousands each year, even though, in North America, their number has more than halved since 1966. Their close relatives, the passenger pigeons, were hunted into extinction for pies, feathers for women’s hats, and fun. My friend Phil, now more than eighty, told me a story of what passed for fun when his grandfather was a child in Arkansas in the 1890’s: At night, men went out with lanterns and shotguns and blasted away at the passenger pigeons roosting in the forest. There were so many pigeons in the trees that, when their shot-gunned bodies fell, they made thigh-high piles on the ground, where they were left to rot.

And so, early mornings when the elderberry is in fruit, I keep my dogs quiet beside me on the bed, taking pleasure in the sound of the band-tailed pigeons feasting to live and nest another year.

The elderberry’s bounty begins in spring, when the bare canopy greens with stems of soft, finely toothed leaves. The tree looks like an enormous bouquet, its dozen or so trunks crowded together like stalks of flowers that arch apart above an encircling hand. As the trunks curve toward the sky, they divide into smaller and smaller branches that produce umbels of tiny white flowers. As soon as the elderflowers open, every pollinator in the vicinity seems to know. Butterflies, moths, bumble bees, solitary bees, flies, honey bees and, of course, elderberry longhorn beetles alight on the flowery landing pads for nectar and pollen. For months each spring, the canopy swarms with insects. If the canopy has formed during a winter of plentiful rain, many of the branches trail all the way to the ground. When my daughters were young, they liked to lie inside this cave of leaves and flowers and look up, the sunlit cave walls glowing green like stained glass. And if there was a lull in the freeway noise and no helicopters flew overhead, my daughters could hear the buzzing pulse of the bees.

The insects’ handiwork appears over the course of several months as successive clusters of tiny green berries develop. Birds and squirrels monitor the berries’ progress, visiting the tree more and more frequently the riper the berries become. And then, one much-anticipated summer morning, some berries are finally ripe, and the feast begins: On a chorus of wings, the band-tailed pigeons swoop in. As they forage through the canopy, their bursts of flapping almost sound like applause. Then, a short time later, there’s the sudden shack shack shack of a scrub jay, and I hear the pigeons scatter. The jay stays on the tree for a while and eats alone—jays are assertive birds. Solitary low-pitched bursts distinguish the jay’s tenure on the tree. But then the jay relinquishes the canopy to towhees, wrentits, and sparrows, who flit through the canopy with shy bursts of middle- and high-pitched flapping. The birds feast long enough for my dogs to become restive beside me, demanding to be let outside. And once the dogs are in the backyard, squirrels scamper along the electrical wires and leap into the elderberry, seeming to enjoy its fruit the most when they can feast just beyond the dogs’ reach.

Such mornings continue almost into autumn. Despite the winter rains having ended sometimes five or six months earlier, the tree produces ripe berries every day for months. Each day has its own distinct elderberry music, and it lasts until that day’s ripe berries are consumed. Indigenous peoples of California call the elderberry the “tree of music” because of the whistles and clapper sticks the tribes make from its limbs. Tree of music. A perfect name in so many ways.

Then, all too soon, the music ends. Lying in bed in the morning, I hear only silence from the tree, the canopy now composed of withering leaves and lacey clusters of nothing more than stems once pendulous with berries. The freeway is the loudest thing around. The hum sounds like radio static, and it’s punctuated by the whine of sirens, roar of leaf-blowers, and screech of car alarms. These are what my morning sounds would be if not for the ones I’ve planted for in my yard: sounds of co-evolutionary relationships that have developed over millennia between Southern California’s native animals and plants—relationships typified by those of the elderberry and its wild visitors.

If each of my neighbors also planted an elderberry tree in their yards, our summer mornings could be symphonies of wings. But most of my neighbors eschew such music for the virtual silence of ornamental gardens. Some neighbors dismiss my landscaping efforts on behalf of wildlife, saying that we live in a post-wild world.

It’s true, we do: No place on Earth is unaffected by human activity. But co-evolutionary relationships between native plants and animals still exist. They are real. Our post-wild world has not erased or suspended these relationships, and we can plant our gardens to support them. The evolution of new relationships never stops, but it’s a slow process. Between the destruction of wildlands and the dominance of ornamental horticulture, I fear we are starving time-honored relationships faster than new ones can evolve. I fear that, for the next several millennia, we will have a world largely bereft of nature’s music.

But then, with the winter rains, the bare canopy of the elderberry leafs out. Seemingly overnight, the tree’s brittle tangle of branches transforms into a soft cloud of green. Umbels of blossoms open and shine in the sunlight. And the music begins again, giving me some hope for the immediate short term, countering some of the worry I feel about the world we are bequeathing to our children.

Generations from now, what sounds will people hear?