The Mortal Immortality of Birds

I'm reading a lovely, elegiac collection of poems by Derek Walcott, White Egrets, and the descriptions of birds recall for me the 1919 poem by W.B. Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole":

Unwearied still, lover by lover
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

For these aging poets, as for their romantic predecessor Keats, birds in their continuing songs and flight evoke ever intense youth. Their poetic symbolism accords in a way with views of wildlife biologists: it is the bird as type, the survival of the species, that matters. The flock returns year after year to Capistrano, not the individual.
But Americans are still upset about the New Year's deaths of masses of individual blackbirds in Arkansas. So far, no conspiracy theory about why the birds dropped from the sky has been validated. A follow-up in The New York Times does explain the vast number of birds that die because birds die: "That means that on average, 13.7 million birds die in this country every day. This number, while large, needs to be put into context. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a minimum of 10 billion birds breed in the United States every year and that as many as 20 billion may be in the country during the fall migratory season." This article by Leslie Kaufman still finds mortal danger in the threats posed by humans and their developmental sprall. Increased human presence also leads to increased feline presence, as I noted in the past blog about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.  This newspaper piece lacks the cat character assassination of the novel, but the numbers remain scary: "Nationally, domestic and feral cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year, according to the government. One study done in Wisconsin found that domestic rural cats alone (thus excluding a large number of suburban and urban cats) killed roughly 39 million birds a year."
   Yet in Arkansas, birds fell from the sky and no one knows why.
    I spend most of the winter is sub-arctic Minnesota, warm only to the eagles who migrate down from Canada to find open water, water freed by fast currents, or by a lock-and dam system, or warmed by powerplant runoff. But I have escaped for a brief time to Southern California, disoriented by hearing in January song sparrows, the common yellowthroat, and finches. Hummingbirds fly straight up into the blue ether, as if they were immortal, as if the scene delighted them.