Notes on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, renamed the Marginalian, posted an essay on Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring. I had no idea that that Carson was a poet who became a biologist. Makes perfect sense. She was channeling the music of the hemispheres. 

When I was a child, I noticed the disappearance of bluebirds. I was confused, thinking they were a kind of robin because of their red breasts. But the robins abided. How was that so? Were the blue ones boy robins? That idea was a conundrum.

As a child, I was always making similes and mixing metaphors, but I sorrowed for the loss of the bluebirds from the ecosystem. And for a long time, the spring was silent as avian populations plummeted because of the long-term cumulative effects of DDT in the ecosystem. Hardest hit were the apex avian predators. I’m not sure why bluebirds were on that list, but they were.

I had to wait until I was nearly 30 before I saw another bluebird again. One time we were trespassing in a rancher’s field near Goat Rock in Sonoma County, when suddenly bluebirds burst into a cloud around us. I was transfixed. This was about the same time when I took up the mantle of poetry. (I was a late bloomer—as dyslexia dictated what I could do.) 

I remember puzzling over an article on Carson in the Sunday paper supplement explaining the effects of Silent Spring—which also already had profoundly affected me, though I was a child. A convergence of time and place, as it were, though I wasn’t yet ten.

And, of course it wasn’t just the bluebirds that were disappearing, but also the peregrine falcons, the hawks and the eagles too. A classmate’s father, Mr. McBride, had captive peregrine falcons, and sometimes he brought them to the marshy wetlands below Lagunitas School in San Geronimo. 

I remember him unhooding the peregrine, whose little hood bells tinkled like distant water, and I love the way they soared into the blueness of sky and then dived down faster than the eye could see, to strike down a pigeon mid-flight. I was transfixed.

At a summer party in Point Reyes, I met Brian Kervin’s father, Monte, who single-handedly saved the peregrines from extinction. Monty was a biologist who was an expert on the plight of the peregrine falcons. While he was doing a bird count, he noticed that when the birds sat on their nests, their thin eggs collapsed because of the cumulative effects of DDT in their systems.

Monte set out to save the peregrines from extinction. He scaled treacherous cliffs, stealing peregrine eggs from their eyries, and replacing them with marble eggs, invoking their wrath, as they dive-bombed him as he rappelled down the cliffs. He hatched peregrine chicks in incubators, and returned them to the wild—thus saving the species from the brink of extinction.

When I met Monte, I had come full circle. Of course, I had read Carson’s work in the 1970s, but I didn’t pick up the poetry connection, and I’m delighted to know that poetry is the foundation of her beginnings her underpinnings—because my love of science and the natural world is what led me to writing poetry. 

And of course, poetry is what saved me, giving me access to my poor locked brain, my intellect, hobbled by the chains dyslexia. And all the bluebirds, how they soared!

See THE MAN WHO LOVED FALCONS

• TWO BLUEBIRD MORNING
• baby bluebird (photos)

• BLUE COYOTE, 2/4/04

• Journal entry, 4/21/92 housesitting

Murmuration

When I was a child during the late 1950s, on winter evenings, murmurations of starlings would congregate overhead. Fom the distance, it sounded like a bevy of Victorian ladies in taffeta gowns madly rushing up and down a narrow hall, or spinning angels in a tight corner, punctuated by the squeaking of weak floorboards or the mutterings of mice. And the tingling of tiny tinny bells. Add the rushing tide. Myriad summer crickets. A small stream speaking over the rocks.

At dusk, the starlings would pulse and weave in an incredible aerial dance formation before settling down for the night to roost in the trees. It's about pecking order and safety in numbers. Who's on first? Or who's gonna land first. Not me. Not me. Not meeeeeee. And so on. Darkfall usually settled the squabble.

When a curtain of starlings got close you could really hear their wings—like a quail bursting from the bush, but longer and louder, pulsing with each twist and turn. An incredible din. Each bird following the bird directly in front of him—like winter geese in a vee. Only with no one bird in the lead. Weave and pulse like shoals of skybound herring, or pond cells contracting in a petri dish. A dance orgy in flight.

A murmuration of starlings. Wikipedia Commons.

However beautiful they are, passerine starlings, like pigeons and house sparrows, are not native to the Americas. European pests, invasive species of the highest arcana.

One mad March afternoon in 1890, an eccentric Bronx pharmacist, Eugene Schieffelin who was feloniously in love with Shakespeare's works, let loose in Central Park some 60 starlings, then 60 more the following year—of which 16 pairs survived harsh winter.

But Schieffelin, who was not only an eccentric seventh son, but an avid Shakespeare buff, and chairman of the American Acclimatization Society. A deadly combination. He wanted to introduce all 600 of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's works, to the Americas. All of them.

Instead, Schieffelin introduced a bio-hazardous plague of feathered locusts upon the entire North American continent. Not only starlings but also house sparrows. Luckily, most of his lunatic schemes never came to fruition.

Ironically, starlings are only mentioned once in Shakespeare's works. So ultimately, we have Hotspur, or The Bard of Avon—who compared sparrows to angels that could awaken dreamers from their feathery beds—to blame for Eugene Schieffelin's madcap folly.

Hotspur: Nay, I will; that's flat:
He said he would not ransom Mortimer;
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,
To keep his anger still in motion.” 
                 —Shakespeare, Hotspur: Act i, Scene iii. Henry IV, Part I.

By the time Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the seminal book that launched the environmental movement, was published in 1962, many species of birds had died off in dramatic numbers, and some to the brink of extinction—including condors, pelicans, and bluebirds. It tool a decade before cumulative pesticides such as DDT were banned in the US.

But it seems Shakespeare's starlings weren't dying fast enough for some. The birds got a little extra goulish help from the government and Ralston as the feathered rats were ravaging agricultural crops and gobbling up thousands of dollars of feed (per day) at livestock pens—the pests were fast becoming a nuisance of starlings. Euphonic avicide poisons like Avitrol and Starlicide were developed.

But starlings proved the more resilient. From those original surviving 16 Adam & Evil pairs, 120 years later, they are now some 200 million strong in the United States alone—causing $125 billion in damage every year. That's not including the aeronautical aviation damage. Airplane engines and vast flocks of starling and blackbirds don't mix well. No-fly the friendly skies.

Like ravens and crows, gregarious starlings have a startling ability to mimic human speech—especially names. Sci-Fi-Dada artist Brian Collier is teaching wild starlings to say the name of their liberator, Schieffelin—like Nazi infiltrators trying to say Scheveningen—in the hopes that the learned behavior will spread throughout the Americas. Shades of sinister ornithology!

Starlings warble, chatter and whistle with the best of songbirds. Like parrots and magpies, these omnivorous polyglots (aka poor man's myna-bird) have impressive vocal chops. They can also mimic at least 20 different species of bird songs—including keening hawks, scolding jays and barking crows, as well as impressive renditions of metallic noises, cell phones, car alarms, yappity-yapdogs and wolf-whistles.

A few of these wandering minstrel birds made it to California in 1942, and by the 1950s, they had aggressively displaced the woodpeckers, flickers and bluebirds. Soon, there were vast colonies of starlings darkening the skies—only Hitchcock's The Birds hadn't yet been made. It was a battle of the birds versus farmers and ranchers in epic proportions.

But back to those murmurations of starlings. Enter me, as a child.

I remember one starling dropped out of the sky and landed with an abrupt thump at my feet. Dead, but beautiful vermin. An aurora of turquoise, peacock blue, indigo and purple night painted into its feathers spangled with iridescent and bronzed stars. I stared transfixed at all that dead beauty still warm in my hand.

I didn't want to bury that bird. It was far too beautiful. I gazed upon it’s still beauty for days. But I knew that death belonged to the ground, not to the sky, or buried in my treasure box.

Adult starling Sternus vulgaris. Wikipedia commons.