Learning about (and from) the birds of Carmel
While I was putting the finishing touches on my new book of poems, Mindfucking Roundabouts of Carmel, Indiana on Sunday morning, after I had dedicated my book to Mayor Jim Brainard, who — for better or for worse — brought more roundabouts to Carmel than any other city in the US, I had a crisis moment. What the fuck was I doing, spending all this time writing this book? I might as well have titled it 100 Trigger Warnings for all its provocative, in-your-face material, including an archangel Gabriel sex poem, a poem about an encounter with the ghost of Van Gogh at THE LUME, and a poem about Elon Musk, er, seeding the galaxy. Not to mention the title poem. Why bother in the first place? I thought. Poetry has so little practical value and is, you know, for the birds.
(I entertained the thought for a nanosecond that I might be better off writing a young adult novel like my niece Sophie Kim did—a novel titled The Last of the Talons that you’ll soon be hearing about if you haven’t already, and that I look forward to reading.)
Then I recalled a conversation that I had with artist Carla Knopp at the Circle City Industrial Complex on Friday evening about Merlin Bird ID, a free app designed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It occurred to me I should download this app and use it on some birds that often congregated on some trees across the street from my address, near Carmel Midtown Plaza. For the past several years I’ve noticed, from time to time, the birds flocking together on two purple-leaved copper beech trees at the corner of Lexington and W. Elm Streets.
When I walked out to the trees later that morning, the trees were empty of birds. But when I came back in the early evening, after jogging, there were many hundreds of birds in those two trees and in some other beech trees about 30 feet to the south, birds generating a babble of birdsong. I opened up the Merlin app and recorded the birdsong and the app generated its answer: House Sparrow. It had no answer, however, as to why the sparrows had decided to congregate in Midtown Carmel, where no Indy hipster would ever want to be seen. I was sure that the sparrows had their reasons, and that they didn’t waste time questioning what they were doing. I suppose there’s a lesson there.
