Wednesday Dec. 3rd Bird Sit

In my last post I wrote, “On Wednesday morning we had an awesome and enlightening bird sit, which I’ll detail later on.”

Here are the details.

Native Eyes decided to get up extra early in order to settle into our sit before the RDNA-ers got to the meadow. We woke up slowly and ambled down to the meadow, fox-walking past feeding sparrows and curious hummingbirds, and were seated by 7 AM to anticipate RDNA’s scheduled gather-at-meadow’s-edge by 7.

I climbed over a few fences and sat near the Southwestern edge of the meadow, partway up the West ridge. The morning was densely fogged, the air saturated with floating wet droplets that clung to clothes, hair and eyelashes like frost. The fog obscured the East ridge and most of the meadow, hiding all of my classmates’ sit spots from view. The nearby sparrows and wrentits shuffled and hopped in the brush, active but hidden, keeping to the shadows in the challengingly obscured environment. Song interspersed with “Seeet!” and “Chip!” peppered the valley.

Then a high chitter began North of the meadow and swept South toward my sit spot, sweeping past in a rustle of leaves and chip-chip-chip of songbirds. Some of the birds popped out of their hiding places and stood sentinel for a second, twittering, before retreating into the bushes again. The feeling was one of of passing the news, and the thought popped into my head that this chorus must herald the movement of people out of tents and down the hill toward the meadow. That idea didn’t fit with the timing I was expecting for RDNA’s bird sit, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the birds spoke of the stirring of the RDNA folks.

The birds returned quickly to baseline behavior, and I wondered if there was anything to that wave of bird chatter, or if it was a coincidence of talkative birds. A garbage truck rumbled past, causing little concern in the hidden birds. My mind quieted down as I spread my senses out over the hillside and for an infinite moment the hillside was peaceful again – until a series of “chip! chip!” calls rang around the valley. A downy woodpecker began calling in the Ukes across the meadow, overlaying a background of junco chips, wren buzzes, and flicker “clear!” calls. I thought, “that’s probably the RDNA folks getting settled in the field,” though the fog was still thick enough to obscure my view.

After a few more minutes the fog thinned a bit and I could make out ghosts of Eucalyptus trees across the meadow, with a white-hatted human being seated at their base.

After the sit, I kept thinking about that wave of bird chatter. I remembered hearing something similar once before, when Native Eyes sat in anticipation of RDNA arriving at Cloverdale Ranch. I wondered if this was indeed a pattern.

When we debriefed the bird sit with Jon later in the evening, I mentioned the wave of bird chatter, and that I’d seen something like that before at Cloverdale. And it turned out that I wasn’t the only one who perceived this wave. Apparently, Jon has duplicated this effect for others by getting them to baseline with meditation, sitting them down in the woods, and asking another person to approach from further away with rushed or unaware body language. All members of the group then report seeing a wave of bird language pass through at far in front of, and at a much faster clip than the approaching person.

In debriefing the sit, and correlating events like the garbage truck and downy woodpecker calls with others, I found that the first wave of bird chatter did indeed coincide with the RDNA-ers waking up and moving toward the field. And the second wave of alarm also correlated with RDNA walking into the field and settling into the sit.

I've read about bird language in Jon's books, and I've listened to lessons on it on the "Seeing Through Native Eyes" and "Advanced Bird Language" CDs. But seeing and hearing this wave move through, generated by human movement far outside of my sensory range, was absolutely epic. It was not something that I ever expected given the information in books and CDs, and experiencing it firsthand in order to discover it for myself was a very important part of my bird language learning journey. It leaves me with more questions than answers, and will serve as a draw to go deeper into naturalist studies.

Do all humans push a wave in front of them, or can one learn to reduce and eliminate this effect? Do other animals produce their own waves? What does this wave say about those who create it around them? What does it mean about the human species, or about our culture, that we all default to pushing a wave of bird language in front of us?